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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29463 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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Spousal Hiring in Academia

I'm curious what people here think about spousal hiring in academia. It's a topic that I have thought a lot about without reaching any firm conclusions so I thought it might be interesting to discuss it here. Since the practice might not be well known to people outside of academia, I'll explain how it works before sharing some of my own thoughts.

Spousal hiring is meant to address a common problem in academia: academics are often in romantic relationships with other academics and it can be hard for them to both find a job in the same city. The reason this is hard is that academic jobs are unusually spread out. Even the biggest cities have no more than about 10 major research universities—for mid-sized cities there's often only one—and even a large department at a major university may only hire a couple faculty members per year. Some people call this the "two-body problem" but I kind of hate that name. Regardless, this can be a major source of frustration for people in academia and some couples spend years living far apart from each other because of it.

To deal with this problem, it has become increasingly common for universities to offer spousal hires. When a university wants to hire a researcher whose romantic partner is also in academia, they will sometimes also make a job offer to the partner (note that I said partner not spouse; in spite of the name, there is almost never a marriage requirement). Sometimes, the partner is hired as a tenure-track professor. Other times, they are given some kind of less prestigious position, like lecturer (a teaching-only role with lower salary and no tenure). Often, they would not have considered hiring the partner if not for spousal hiring. There is a related situation that is sometimes also referred to as spousal hiring where a researcher at a university starts a new romantic relationship with a researcher at another university and asks their current university to offer a job to their new partner. See here for a much more detailed account of how spousal hiring works on a practical level.

You might wonder what's in it for the university. The answer is basically that this is a way for lower-ranked universities (or even just not-literally-Harvard universities) to recruit better researchers than they would be able to otherwise. So usually spousal hires are only made on behalf of researchers somewhat better than the typical researcher hired by that university. Some universities also view it as a way to guarantee that professors will stick around for longer. Not all universities are big on spousal hiring, and even when they are it makes the whole process more complicated. So if you are an academic couple who managed to get jobs at the same university due to a spousal hire, you might be less inclined to go through the whole job search process again just to move to a slightly more prestigious university.

My impression is that in the past, spousal hiring was frowned upon or even outright forbidden due to concerns aobut nepotism (see here for a reference to this). Nowadays, however, it is common, at least in the US and Canada. I personally know of several examples and have heard anecdotes about at least a dozen more.

I have mixed feelings about spousal hiring. On the one hand, it can be very frustrating to not be able to find a job in the same city as your romantic partner. On the other hand, there are some obvious negative aspects:

  • The most obvious is that spousal hiring leads to worse researchers being hired than would be otherwise. Of course, universities usually deny this, but it seems implausible that it's not true at least in some cases. Even when the partner is hired as a low-salary lecturer it still means that a lecturer is being selected not because they are the best teacher but because of other factors.
  • It seems that in the US at least, it is no longer common to see spousal hiring as nepotism and claiming it is can sometimes even get you accused of sexism (or of being a dinosaur). But... it seems like spousal hiring matches the plain reading of the definition of nepotism pretty well. Now I can imagine responding to this by saying that not all nepotism is especially bad and this is one example, but I'm not sure I've ever actually seen someone make that argument.
  • Relatedly, spousal hiring just feels unfair. When you fail to get hired for a job you want, there is rarely a single cause. But it is probably natural for some people to feel resentful if they don't get a job, but someone seemingly less talented does because of spousal hiring.
  • Spousal hires have the potential to cause a lot of drama. There are obvious problems like: what if there is a nasty breakup and you're left with two people who hate each other stuck in the same department. But that's not all. For example, departments usually only hire a few faculty members per year and current faculty often compete to have their preferred candidate hired. If that preferred candidate is pushed out in favor of a spousal hire, that can create hurt feelings.
  • It's also not clear that spousal hiring is even good for the partner who is hired, at least in terms of job satisfaction and research productivity. I suspect it doesn't feel good to think that you were hired not because of your own abilities and talent but just because of who you are in a relationship with. Also, even if unintentionally, other faculty members may treat spousal hires differently. In this essay, a spousal hire thoughtfully discusses some negative psychological and social consequences of being a spousal hire.

I think spousal hiring mostly continues (and remains reasonably popular) because it's so convenient for many of the people involved. Universities get to hire researchers who would normally be out of their league. Superstar researchers get to work in the same city as their romantic partner. Grad students, postdocs and other young academics who have partners in academia (which is extremely common) get to imagine that they too will not have to choose between a career in academia and living in the same city as their partner. I also think this very convenience is one of the strongest arguments in favor of spousal hiring. The thing that sucks the most about the academic career path is not having much control over where you live, which makes it harder to maintain relationships, start a family and so on. Is doing something that makes that a little better really so bad?

However, I think that because spousal hiring is so convenient for so many people, it is often a bit controversial to question it (also since traditionally spousal hiring was seen as benefiting women, questioning it can be seen as vaguely sexist). To gain better intuition for the topic, I think it is interesting to consider some thought experiments.

  1. In the future, polyamory has become normalized. A superstar researcher is being recruited by a university and he asks for spousal hires for his two partners. Is this okay? If not, why not? If so, is there any number of partners for which it would not be okay? Or does it just depend on how much of a superstar he is?
  2. A superstar researcher is happily single. While being recruited by a university, she asks that, instead of being offered a spousal hire, she is simply given a salary increase commensurate with what the spousal hire would have cost (and agrees to do the extra teaching and committee work that the spousal hire would have done). Is this okay?
  3. A superstar researcher is single (his wife died) but is very devoted to his daughter, who is also an academic. The superstar researcher is being recruited by a university and asks that his daughter be hired as well. Is this okay? Is it nepotism?
  4. A superstar researcher is single (her husband died) but is extremely close friends with another, less accomplished, researcher. The superstar is being recruited by a university and asks the university to also hire her friend. Is this okay? If they refuse and she then reveals she is in a relationship with the other researcher, does that make it okay? Why is a sexual relationship better than an extremely close friendship? What if after she reveals that she is in a relationship with her friend, they hire the friend but then find out that she just lied about the relationship to get her friend hired?
  5. A superstar researcher is hired and his wife is hired with him as part of a spousal hire. Later, they get divorced and he starts a relationship with another researcher at a different institution. He asks his current university to hire his new partner. Is this okay?
  6. A superstar researcher is married to a stay-at-home husband but is also having an affair with another researcher. The superstar researcher is being recruited by a university and asks that her boyfriend be hired as well. Is this an acceptable spousal hire?
  7. A superstar researcher wants his friend to be hired but his university refuses. So he starts a romantic relationship with his friend and then asks for a spousal hire. Has he done something wrong?

As I said, I really don't have a firm opinion about whether spousal hiring is good or not (or under what circumstances) and I'm curious what all of you think.

I actually think this is economically distinct from nepotism. With standard nepotism you have a principal agent problem. The hiring manager is supposed to be acting on behalf of the institution when he awards the position but he instead acts to benefit himself by hiring an underqualified family member. This is in essence the hiring manager stealing value from the institution that employs him and if that's a publicly funded instead he is in essence stealing from the tax payers.

But spousal hiring is different. The spousal hire is awarded as part of a negotiation in order to attract the superior researcher and thus it serves the interest of the institution by allowing them to attract better talent.

The principal-agent problem here is that hiring manager as well as the candidate are both employees. You already have conflict of interest where hiring manager may have interest in having this new non-standard perk available for his spouse as well. Also your definition of principal as "institution" is very strange, principal should be some person be it taxpayer or donor etc. You just dodge the question - there was some other agent in HR department who created benefit of "spousal hire", so this other agent (the hiring manager) is supposedly representing the best interest of "institution" in form of official benefits policy created by this other agent (HR benefit specialist)? What is next - that department of education as another agent in chain from taxpayer agrees with this policy as well? I am sure government bureaucrats would love to have the same policy for themselves. This just obfuscates what is going on here.

Maybe the confusion lies in the naming? Because it is official benefit and not some underhanded secret thing then it stops being nepotism and becomes "spousal hiring" instead? So if a new management of some University that governs endowment of tens of billons of dollars creates a new transparent policy that select superstar researchers and top university leadership will have free and unlimited access to room full of booze and hookers on campus, then this does not mean drinking and whoring on the job, it is just "award negotiated during hiring process"? I think it is in fact much worse if you take some morally shady practice and make it legal and official, it means you are trying to remove stigma from it.

That's a reasonable point. However, there are some cases of spousal hiring where the "leading" partner has already been at the university for a long time and wants a spousal hire because they started a new relationship with someone from another institution. In this case, it's less clear that there's no principle agent problem (for example, the "leading" partner might have personal ties to people involved with hiring at the university that induce them to make a spousal hire they wouldn't have otherwise).

This would be a case of a retention policy rather than a hiring policy. I think a lot probably comes down to how "officially" that retention policy is embraced as opposed to whether it's just a secret back room deal made between the "leading" partner and the specific person/people in charge of the hiring.

I'm thinking of an example, a clear, official policy that I've seen in a large organization concerning remote work and retention. It unambiguously said that a factor in deciding whether or not to allow an existing employee to transition to remote work may be retention on the basis of their spouse needing to relocate for their own job. One might complain that this is treating such a person "unfairly" compared to a similar employee who has no such spouse. Nevertheless, it's stated upfront and embraced by the organization's official processes as a mechanism by which they can increase retention of valuable employees. For a university that can't have their star prof working remotely (presumably located at a "lesser" campus of wherever spouse got a job), they'd prefer that their retention policy explicitly allow for a tradeoff of "we can possibly find a way to hire a new spouse as a way to increase retention of high-performing profs".

Of course, it's unlikely that any such retention policy is going to have every detail of how to judge a particular situation completely laid out. It might say that this sort of deal is generally plausible and could be in the interest of the institution, but needs approval up to some level to ensure that it's not an exceedingly flawed deal (e.g., you're not hiring the spouse into some position that they're completely unqualified for or paying them some rate that is just totally unreasonable for the job they're being hired into). I can at least imagine explicit policies/procedures like this which try to get rid of the principle agent problem, specifically by trying to put some distance between the "leading" partner who is benefiting and the authorizing authority. Of course, if the "leading" partner has close personal ties to whoever it is that is named as the approving authority, then one would go back toward considering whether that creates concerns. It's a bit of a delicate balance, but could at least plausibly be done.

Yeah that version sounds much more like standard nepotism. I was thinking specifically about the version where a spousal hire is offered as an incentive to a new recruit.

You'll be shocked to hear then when two students meet and marry in med school (another common practice), they will try to keep them together or compatitble when assigning their internships and rotations.

I can't imagine a more sympathetic to human realities to this concept, and am really baffled by the person who would put 'liberal fairness' on such a pedestal that they would get remotely worked up at the idea of supporting marriages / families, the fundamental social unit of society.

I can't imagine a more sympathetic to human realities to this concept, and am really baffled by the person who would put 'liberal fairness' on such a pedestal that they would get remotely worked up at the idea of supporting marriages / families, the fundamental social unit of society.

The notion that we ought to support marriages/families as the fundamental social unit of society in favor over liberal fairness didn't really occur to me when I read this top post, but after reading this post and georgioz's below, I wonder if it'd be quite possible to hit both targets just by offering a spousal stipend. Instead of spending money filling a role with a compromise candidate who got bonus points due to nepotism, give the money to the spouse to just do whatever with. This would leave the spouse free to pursue homemaking or other marriage/family-related endeavors.

Of course, then the university still needs to find and pay someone (presumably more qualified) to fill the role the spouse would have filled. So the stipend could be less than what the salary would have been; in exchange, the spouse has no work obligations to the university, and so is free to get a part-time job if they need to make up for the difference compared to what a salary would've given them, while still giving them more time to spend on marriage/family-related endeavors. In terms of supporting marriage and family, having one spouse with substantial time not committed to full-time work so they can pursue this stuff seems quite a lot better than just having the couple working at the same place.

This would leave the spouse free to pursue homemaking or other marriage/family-related endeavors

Do most PhD holding women married to professors want to be homemakers? While there’s surely professors with homemaker wives, it seems like part of the homemaker bargain is ‘not getting a PhD’, and that women with preexisting PhD’s are mostly not women who want to become homemakers.

I'd guess the vast majority of PhD holding women and men wouldn't want to be homemakers. But this kind of norm would nudge the marginal couple into having one of them being homemakers. This seems like it'd be beneficial if our goal is to support marriages and families, since shifting a couple from both full-time working to one full-time working and one homemaking helps that.

There's no way to tell, but I'd also wager that this is a stronger effect than the benefits to marriages and families that come from universities giving spouses nepotism jobs, because the effect on a couple's competence in raising kids seems far more impacted by whether one of the parents is devoting time to it than by whether both parents are working jobs at the same place that matches their passion and competence and whatever. There would be negative impacts to parents who are demoralized due to their personal disappointment in their own careers, as well as those who go the long-distance-marriage route with both partners pursuing academic jobs that match their competence in different places, but I'm skeptical that these would happen often enough and with enough severity to be greater than the marriage and family-supporting effect of nudging some marginal spouses to homemaking. There's certainly the possibility that these marginal spouses are so few that these downsides do outweigh them, of course.

Again, I don't see any way of knowing or finding out. At the least, we could also hit something closer to liberal fairness while doing this.

The kind of person involved here would not be satisfied with being "free to pursue homemaking".

Most of them, almost definitely. But on the margins, this could nudge people in this situation who are just on the border into pursuing homemaking instead of taking on a nepotism reward job. And if the idea is that we want to support marriages and families as much as we do liberal fairness, this kind of nudge seems like it would be helpful.

I can't imagine a more sympathetic to human realities to this concept, and am really baffled by the person who would put 'liberal fairness' on such a pedestal that they would get remotely worked up at the idea of supporting marriages / families, the fundamental social unit of society.

Oh, so then let's make it a society wide practice - if you get a job in local Amazon warehouse you are entitled to have your spouse or close family member employed as well. Let's make it a law. Yeah, I don't think so.

Far from merely entitled, if you work at any local warehouse to me they offer incentives for you to bring in additional workers from your friends and family. Stopping just shy of letting you recruit your own regiment civil war style.

You're entirely within your rights to demand that and if your market value is sufficient to command it then they will acquiesce. What's stopping you?

What is stopping me is overall morality and being judged by peers, sometimes even written ethical rules. But what amazes me is that simple renaming of a thing gets so far: it is not bad nepotism what we are doing, we are only doing "spousal hiring". Renaming things seems like a really powerful social technology of how to render written rules moot, and judging by reactions here it also works on people. Awesome.

Yeah that's right. The only two options are to legally mandate or disallow it. quite.

And that kind of nepotism is shockingly common in jobs that aren’t as strongly competed with as in academia.

University professors married to each other are unlike warehouse workers. The warehouse worker's wife can presumably find a job in town. A professor's wife who is also a professor will work at the same university or leave academia.

So there's one norm for warehouse workers and a different one for professors.

A good state of affairs can be that "everyone kinda knows, nobody makes a big fuss about it, it isn't officially condoned or supported or acknowledged, but people slightly judge the people involved in the deal and don't see it exactly aligned with the principles of a university." Plausible deniability is maintained, disbelief is suspended and a "quantum tunneling" has taken place. It's not necessarily good to separate everything into the black-and-white categories of legal (and therefore supported, and documented, and regulated and defined and socially accepted and considered moral) vs illegal (and beyond the pale and morally corrupt and unacceptable and you're an unperson for it).

Yes, this is called good old fashioned nepotism. When this manager in the team fucked his subordinate and then promoted her, everybody knew about it and many thought it was kind of piece of shit move. It also did not endear the newly promoted person in eyes of many of her colleagues. It was tolerated as lesser evil for many reasons by his superiors unfortunately. Little did I know that what he should have done was telling it transparently by saying that he was not promoting somebody for fucking his brains out, it was just normal HR benefit of "sex partner hiring" he was awarded during standard salary increase negotiations, no big deal. You see, he is really working hard and he works harder with hard-on that he needs to be motivated, his situation is special because he has no time to look for partners as he is working so much. Reading apologetics here in this thread I'd guess he would probably have much more defenders, silly him.

This isn't a manager hiring someone he's fucking. It's an employer hiring the spouse of someone they're pursuing as part of a compensation package. I don't think he difference is particularly subtle.

It is almost exactly the same scenario. There are three people: hiring manager, then there is the superstar fucker and then there is candidate that is being fucked. Superstar is pressuring hiring manager to hire his mistress "or else"- he leaves along with grants on his research or whatever. I can even construct it a such: superstar researcher with millions in grants comes to the hiring office that he fucks this student and she may be leaving for a job in other city. If they do not hire his mistress as an adjunct then he is going with her along with grants because he loves her. Now the same happens with my example of corporate manager: he fucks this young intern and she tells him that she has a good job lined up in another city. Manager sees this as a threat so he pressures his colleague in other department to hire his mistress, he even gets tacit approval from his own superiors because he is now responsible for crucial project and nobody wants to rock the boat for such a silly thing. How exactly is this different: except the fact that university has this as a written policy?

I don’t think the difference exists. Partly because the “spouse” appears to be just someone the candidate is fucking. Mostly because my objection is that one of the responsibilities of people in a hierarchy is to behave well to the people below them. That means giving applicants a fair shake and it means promoting people because of seniority, talent and experience, not because of who they’re having sex with.

Okay, I guess I'll spell it out for you. A manager promoting someone they are fucking (assuming it is not because they are the best candidate for the job) is presumably doing it as quid pro quo for the ass, to improve their own economic situation as they are sharing an income with the person they're fucking, and/or as a sign to future potential romantic partners that putting out pays out.

A manager negotiating a spousal hire as part of a compensation package is attempting to secure a business relationship that is in the best interest of the university and utilizing the various tools at their disposal to do so, including potentially that spousal hire. They aren't benefiting themselves except insofar as performing highly at their job (securing top talent) benefits them, which is precisely the purpose of their relationship with the university.

It not only isn't the same thing it is exactly the opposite.

You are literally describing the same situation. Manager/Superstar researcher is using his superstar influence in order to secure job for somebody he fucks is the same as saying:

Manager negotiating a spousal hire as part of a compensation package is attempting to secure a business relationship that is in the best interest of the university and utilizing the various tools at their disposal to do so, including potentially that spousal hire.

Yeah, that is the point. Manager is negotiating with the company (hiring manager) to secure new business relationship (for his mistress and for himself to the extent of getting potentially a good fuck as a result) and it is in best interest of the company (or else he leaves in the middle of the most important project to competitor or whatever) and he is utilizing various tools at his disposal (e.g. a lunch with hiring manager and his manager etc.) to secure that relationship.

I understand corporatespeak, no need to remind me that "spousal hiring" and "best interest of the company" means "hire somebody I fuck" and "do as I say or else something bad happens". Nobody with IQ more than 80 falls for this shit.

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You are being utilitarian, I am being deontological. It doesn’t matter who benefits, it’s not a moral way to handle your employees.

To put it another way, there are many, many things that a manager can do which is in the best interests of their employer (corruption, assassination, faking emission tests) but being good business doesn’t make those actions morally acceptable.

More comments

It is possible for things to be a reasonable idea in some circumstances without it making sense to make it mandatory in all vaguely similar situations. It is also possible to conceive of a society where the hiring unit is the family (whether nuclear or extended) rather than the individual, but that is not the society we live in.

It makes far more sense in an Amazon warehouse, where what’s needed is a functional human body, than in academia, which is highly prestigious and where your output depends heavily on your specific background, interests and talent. The difference is that a sufficiently powerful academic can push the university into taking their significant other instead of a more deserving candidate.

It is also possible to conceive of a society where the hiring unit is the family (whether nuclear or extended) rather than the individual, but that is not the society we live in.

This, or the living wage, works for me. As you say, the difficulty is getting there.

The difference is that a sufficiently powerful academic can push the university into taking their significant other instead of a more deserving candidate.

This is why it doesn't make sense for Amazon. In the university case, the university is choosing on the one hand between a superstar for a prestigious position and a somewhat-worse candidate for a lesser position (or even a useless sinecure), and on the other hand between a much inferior candidate for the prestigious candidate and the best candidate (or nobody) for the lesser position. In the Amazon case, Amazon is choosing between essentially interchangeable candidates for the primary position; there's no incentive for them to hire a spouse.

How involved are you in academia? It’s incredibly competitive - depends on the field but usually only a tiny fraction of postgraduate students move on to being full-time paid academics. And getting a position because of who you’re sleeping with is the dictionary definition of nepotism. At least if they limited it to marriage or shared children there would be a higher bar to climb. I sympathise with the aims of the system but even so I’m surprised people aren’t livid - I’d never heard of this system before.

For doctors it makes more sense to me. I’m not one so maybe I’m missing subtleties but within bars like rural / urban / deprived I would have thought that doctors and positions were pretty much interchangeable so it doesn’t seem unfair.

It's not the same, sure, but where you get residency can be very career defining, especially if you have ambitions at being something other than being a shopping center dermatologist.

I have medium experience wtih academia.

I sympathise with the aims of the system but even so I’m surprised people aren’t livid - I’d never heard of this system before.

My PhD chair was one of these. I found it entirely unremarkable.

And getting a position because of who you’re sleeping with is the dictionary definition of nepotism. This is word-thinking. I don't care that it's called, nepotism. It isn't just not bad. It's good. Liberalism should be subordinate to the family, not the other way around.

At least if they limited it to marriage or shared children there would be a higher bar to climb.

Sure No disagreement there.

Liberalism should be subordinate to the family, not the other way around.

So why is everyone in this subthread ignoring that there's an easy way to guarantee this that could almost never harm meritocracy at all?

It's simple: Women don't work. Women are never in academia. (The distribution of high IQ men vs. high IQ women, particularly in STEM subjects, proves that this won't cause much if any disruption to the technological and intellectual progress of society.) Women follow their men, who make enough to support their entire families by default.

Thus, any occupation is free to pick the best man for the job at any time, with the man secure in the knowledge that his wife can be firmly supported in her natural, biologically ordained role as his homemaker, mother of his children, and supporter.

And how do you propose to ensure that a woman can leave an abusive husband while still keeping herself fed and housed?

If a competent council of men determines that another man's treatment of his wife is really beyond conscionability, then custody of her could fall back to her previous steward (most likely her father). If he or any other reasonable steward (uncle, brother, etc.) is unavailable, then the state would take responsibility. Such cases would be uncommon and unlikely, as only extremes could justify severing a man's feminine property interests.

(The distribution of high IQ men vs. high IQ women, particularly in STEM subjects, proves that this won't cause much if any disruption to the technological and intellectual progress of society.)

Wouldn't a lot of high IQ men have to shift into less intellectually loaded but still necessary work? It's just the law of comparative advantage, more menial but unavoidable jobs being done by a bigger labour force frees up time for the cutting edge stuff.

That seems unlikely to me. How many women do blue collar "less intellectually loaded but still necessary work"? How many women are garbage collectors, miners, plumbers, etc.?

It seems to me like a significant portion of the jobs women do are either "make work" or a consequence of their own presence in the workforce and would significantly disappear without them in it. For example, without women to make discrimination claims about "sexism" or otherwise cause drama, you'll need a lot less staff in HR, DEI, and so on... who conveniently enough mostly tend to be women themselves.

(To be clear maybe my initial proclamation was a bit too broad and we can still have feminine nurses, babysitters, hairdressers, etc., leaving a few occupations open to them (though strictly under the supervision, guidance, and control of their husband and thus ideally operated on a small scale from their houses). Nothing too important though, not that this would change much from present circumstances in the vast majority of cases other than an end to counterproductive, socially destructive LARPing.)

It reminds me of how so many companies rushed to replace their indigenous programming workforce with third-worlders from countries like India for example. It seems like a great deal superficially. You get ten guys for the price of one!... until you realize that your new ten guys are only capable of producing Stack Overflow salad and aren't even a 100th as productive as the original guy.

Adding women to the workforce seems like a similar "deal" to me. You get twice as many workers! That really oughta boost your economy, right? Except due to the basic nature of IQ distribution by gender they overwhelmingly won't be high IQ enough to make big impacts where it matters, and overwhelmingly due to their natural predispositions they will simply refuse to do the hard manual labor that has generally been how those lesser in IQ have earned their keep. What's left? HR ladies, twerking on OnlyFans, LARPing in office jobs flirting with men to get them to do their work for them (obviously not all women do this, but it's almost certainly a heck of a lot more common than the reverse which is probably mostly non-existent), the occasional nice but expendable dental hygienist, and so on. (Women working also increases consumption, which women naturally do far more of than men, which requires more production but quite arguably mostly of the generally wasteful and frivolous sort. Imagine all of the resources we could free up without women with the disposable income to buy their 50th "Live, Laugh, Love"-esque sign. My point is that while women generate economic activity, a lot of what they generate is completely irrelevant without them.)

It's obvious that the deal is phony, because it's obvious that in basically almost any area of the economy affected by women there has hardly been a doubling of real, tangible value since women started entering the workforce. (Almost all of the additional economic value/productivity since then has been generated by information technology which was almost exclusively invented/developed by and is almost exclusively maintained by men.) Rather, the most important long-term capital of society, things like social bonds, healthy gender relations, families, and romantic partnerships/romantic relationship formation, the people, is pretty obviously worse off in most ways than ever before at least partially because of women's "liberation". The fact that anybody even has to discuss whether it's a good idea to hire women to pretend to be as smart as their husbands (or "sexist" to oppose it) just to secure the use of those husbands' intellectual gifts is proof of that. Only largely fake numbers are occasionally doing well, and even they're having trouble nowadays being massaged enough to avoid showing the true underlying cracks in society.

This isn't even getting into how much more productive high IQ men will be without modern adversarial gender relations weighing them down. With men being guaranteed secure domestic lives without having to fight for them in the Kafkaesque rumble pit of modern dating, their productivity will shoot up, and the productivity gains from the men who will be motivated to reenter the workforce (current NEETs, hikkis, "no pussy no work" guys, etc.) will likely eclipse all of the productivity that any amount of women ever added to the economy. (One high IQ man abstaining from present society due to his disgust with it could come up with a new invention or idea that could create more value for society than 500 million working women. And how many high IQ men from the past who revolutionized society or matters of the intellect otherwise would have their productivity vastly diminished by modern feminized/gynosupremacist society (were they made to live in it instead)? Would a "creepy incel chud" like Newton be able to readily innovate today as effectively as he did in his own time? Something to think about.)

One high IQ man abstaining from present society due to his disgust with it could come up with a new invention or idea that could create more value for society than 500 million working women. And how many high IQ men from the past who revolutionized society or matters of the intellect otherwise would have their productivity vastly diminished by modern feminized/gynosupremacist society (were they made to live in it instead)?

Addressing this specific part of the post: I think that your model of the motivations of scientific thinkers is off. The way I see it is that this sort of person, throughout history, is motivated by a combination of non-sexual social status (e.g. the desire to just friggin’ win that manifested itself in the mathematical duels surrounding the discovery of the solution to cubic equations) combined with an intrinsic curiosity to know things and solve hard problems. You could say that the former corresponds to the urge to prove people wrong on the Internet or accrue fancy academic titles, and the latter corresponds to a propensity to get nerd-sniped.

Even if scientist-types would appreciate scoring some poon as a side-effect of their labor, I imagine that very few have the willpower to push back against those very strong urges in order to protest any gynocentric society. N=1 here, and I’m no Newton to be sure, but even if I find it unfair that my tax dollars are going to fund a single mother’s hedonistic lifestyle or whatever, I simply cannot fathom pulling myself away from my research in protest. I would bet that high-IQ scientists feel similarly.

Conversely, if a NEET who watches anime adaptations of Kirara CGDCT manga all day were the kind of person who would be making huge scientific advancements if he just had himself a wife, then he’d probably already be making those advancements. (In fact, some of those NEETs are, although Haruhi isn’t CGDCT.)

ETA: Where you might have a point is in the case of NEETs who spend a full-time job’s worth of time writing SNES emulators or making furry VR games or what have you, who would instead, if they had a family to rear and mouths to feed, be forced to engage in more productive endeavors (if helping Google write better spyware is considered productive). But this strikes me as not a situation in which the NEETs consciously decide to opt-out of society to protest gynocentrism. I’m inclined to think that the autistic furry group is largely disjoint from the /r9k/ group (for example, the former group is more likely to be gay or asexual).

Maybe "abstaining" is the wrong term, as it implies an entirely conscious endeavor. But being high IQ doesn't make you immune to social contagion. The intellectual achievements of the 20th century Soviet Union (which did admittedly exist in some cases) vs. 20th century China vs. the 20th century US prove that. You simply can't achieve as much in a fucked up society.

I think The Haruhi Problem proves my point. Sure, as you said, those with an innate intellectual curiosity can't have it entirely turned off, as the anonymous individual behind that proof demonstrates. But because of the present state of society, instead of working in a proper math department with his intellectual peers and delivering the value that he could have provided them and vice-versa, he ended up posting this reasonably significant mathematical advancement in response to a gag post on 4chan. (Sure there's a chance that he's an actual academic who posed and answered the question himself, thinking it would be funnier that way, but I doubt it. Very few people would sacrifice a genuine shot at career advancement and clout just to create some humorous Internet lore.)

How much more could this mind achieve or have achieved if not pushed to the fringes of society? (Keep in mind, his correct solution to the problem was posted in 2011 and widely acknowledged as correct not too long after that. It then took until 2019 for it to be published academically in a manner that allowed it to be formally acknowledged as a part of "the literature".)

This is word-thinking. I don't care that it's called, nepotism. It isn't just not bad. It's good. Liberalism should be subordinate to the family, not the other way around.

What can I say? I watched friends half-destroy themselves trying to get an academic position. If they were missing out because they didn’t pick the right person to have sex with, then yes, I mind. There are enough unfairnesses in academic hiring without adding more.

It depends on the details. If these spouses are good enough to get the position on their own merits but things are smoothed a little to make sure that the right position opens at the right time, that’s okay. If the positions are clearly non-competitive salaried dead ends, that’s also okay. Though not very effective, I imagine.

I’m VERY pro-family, and it may be that no better solution can be found while two-wage families remain standard, but I don’t have to like it.

It’s kind of funny to imagine some very average white man STEM PhD marrying a black woman STEM PhD and then when she gets offered a bounty in tenure-track associate professor roles, she can demand that if Stanford wants the diversity cred of a black woman physics professor (they do have one, but I’m sure they would like more), they have to hire her mediocre husband who would be unfathomably lucky to get a tenure-track position at a small, unheard of state school.

I wonder if they’d take that deal.

There are actually a few cases in which a white man might be hypergamous by default (as opposed to because of the specifics of the person in question) in marrying a black woman. One example is government supplier contracting, where it’s already very common to put one’s construction business in one’s wife’s name.

I imagine that in such a case they would offer the husband a teaching-focused non-tenure track role like lecturer (I realize that lecturer means something different in the UK).

If the candidate has a choice between MIT and Stanford tenure track and she says that she really wants hubby to have an academic role with a long-term future, maybe they do?

My guess is that they still wouldn't, though it would depend on exactly how mediocre the husband was. But if he really would be lucky to get a tenure-track position at a small, unheard-of state school (as you said) then I would be pretty surprised if Stanford would really be willing to hire him to a tenure-track research position.

The funniest part is that if we look at the actual talent levels in purely physics the white husband might actually be the better one in this scenario. Affirmative action reaches truly obscene proportions at the top level like stanford physics professors (this makes sense, the father right you go on the bell curve the more a 1 SD difference in means affects the availability ratio)

At face value this is obviously corrupt and nepotistic behaviour, especially if the University gets government money. But even with private institutions, it is yet another crack in form of principal-agent problem when it comes to corporate governance. In practice, this is almost nothingburger - one can point out to many other similar cases as other people already pointed out such as affirmative action or other arbitrary criteria for hiring.

What I find interesting is how this proves a lot about how the PMC class is run and that it really is matter of aesthetics. For some reason spousal hiring of two people for let's say 150k cost each is better than paying 300k to one researcher and leaving it to them to sort things out. Spouse will not be happy even with cash on hand, they need to have credentials and job history and they need to be able to suspend their disbelief in their own abilities, so they can keep their position inside PMC class tooth-and-nail. Being stay-at-home spouse is death sentence in this regard. I recently had similar discussion regarding referrals in hiring, and it really surprised me how much the rules could be bent, when literally the same happened and people even collected money for referring their own relatives. You see, it is not bad nepotism, it is result of exceptional and valuable "networking", you should thank me that I populate your local branch of large faceless corporation with my family and close friends. And if you disagree by "anonymous" complaint to HR, then maybe you mysteriously get bad reviews in next 360 and maybe your twitter will get scrutinized a little bit more. So beware.

So my opinion is that this is immoral practice that will bring problems in the future in all the forms you mentioned - including further dilution of trust and expanding polarization. But at this point this is Moloch-like problem, it is almost inevitable especially if one looks how people make excuses for it. So just go ahead and do it, you will be stupid if you won't participate.

If the person with the spouse demanded "I want extra pay so my spouse can buy a private jet and fly to the nearest big city each week where they have a job", we might complain that it's overly expensive, but few people would call it nepotism; it's just a demand for a very high salary. Paying the employee by hiring the spouse for $X above market value is no different than just paying the employee $X. Yes, of course the university could have hired a better person instead of the spouse, but in the cash scenario, it could have hired a better person for some other position using the extra cash.

It's still subject to market forces. The person who is hired for $Y and demands that a spouse be hired at $X above market value (and thus is essentially demanding $X extra pay) still has to compete against other hires who are willing to be paid less than $Y+X. In the long run, the university isn't going to do this unless the hire is actually worth $Y+X.

If the employee had any influence over the hiring process other than "I won't take the job if you don't hire my spouse", that would be nepotism.

The comparison to affirmative action is bad because hiring someone based on ideology is not the same as hiring them based on value to the university (except insofar as the value is being created by non-market forces). If there were no non-market forces demanding affirmative action and if the affirmative action was an official policy of the university, then it would be comparable, but affirmative action wouldn't be sustainable under those circumstances.

Yeah, but it's all fake anyway. The correct way to deal with academia's fakery is to end the student loan program. The rest is just window dressing. This is like, the least offensive thing about academia. In fact it's somewhat endearing.

Getting appointed to a certain position based on things outside the person's own value of scholarship is a bit like "stolen valor", faked respectability.

The university could say "We can hire your spouse, but only at a salary that is what your spouse is actually worth", but then pay the employee a higher salary, which goes into the same household budget that it would if the spouse was paid a higher salary instead. That would be equivalent, but because the origin of the cash is being shuffled around, that would suddenly become acceptable by your standard.

I'm skeptical about a standard that depends on an accounting trick.

Oh, I am perfectly with you on this. Corruption, tribalism, nepotism and all that is very natural way of things, it even fits with what I meant around excuses driven Moloch - you exactly nailed it. So yes, if you can have advantages accrued to you by sucking out the system - be it academia or taking advantage of diffuse corporate governance structure, people will take it. I think what is new is that we may not even have to pretend to large extent, to have any kind of noblesse oblige. People will not only take advantage of the situation, they will even develop a new moral system why what they do is okay and possibly even their duty. And thus a new caste system is born with different rules for each strata of society.

A superstar researcher is happily single. While being recruited by a university, he asks that, instead of being offered a spousal hire, he is given carte blanche to sleep with his students and assistants.

A perk/benefit of being a male professor is having a high status, authority figure position in a replenishing sea of young women at their peak beauty or a few years after their peak beauty. It's basically a part of total compensation, just as bonuses and retirement and insurance benefits are. I'd guess on average the equivalent cash value of this perk/benefit would range in the thousands to tens of thousands USD when it comes to annual compensation.

I imagine a carte blanche to freely sling dick would probably have a lesser, but order of magnitude similar value. Even ethical dick-slingers who merely take advantage of hypergamy and the female penchant for status, dominance, and preselection (as opposed to grey-area dick-slingers who dabble in Weinstein-style quid pro quos) would feel relieved in not having to constantly look over their shoulder for nanny-university admins. Otherwise, one may never know when a conquested young or not-so-young woman might retrospectively accuse you of rape, grooming, and/or harassment with institutional backing. She was only 29, you sick fuck.

It's not university level rules that prevent this. It's federal legislation

Exposing the college to unlimited legal liability?

Even if it was legal, the students and assistants aren't party to the hiring agreement, so it can't include them.

They wouldn’t have to be included. If there were no legal prohibitions on this kind of thing a truly superstar researcher at a big university could hand pick his own harem.

I genuinely wish the biggest problem we had with the university system was too many undergrads getting knocked up by 140 IQ college professors. That would be an incredible blessing.

I think you're overestimating the attraction of college girls to research scientists (at least those who aren't hot).

At the free market equilibrium, you’re probably right that not too many professors would be able to pull that off, but at any given university there must be at least one harem worth of women perfectly willing to sleep their way to the top.

My solution is simple: If a set of people wants to apply for a set of jobs, then they can go right ahead. The company can hire them, negotiate, or refuse just like for individual hires.

This creates a couple of complications, but nothing insurmountable. If your partner is fired/laid off, do you get unemployment benefits as you search for a new city? Conversely, is divorce a valid reason to lay off the spouse (without triggering fired-without-cause penalties)? Should the bus factor be calculated based on groups or on individuals?

With that in mind:

  1. Yes, it's okay. The university is free to refuse if he isn't worth three (or more) salaries.

  2. Yes, it's okay. She can apply for 1.5 jobs if she wants to.

  3. Yes, it's okay, and it's also nepotism.

  4. Yes, it's okay until she starts lying. From a business perspective there's nothing better about a sexual relationship, so there's no incentive to lie either.

  5. Yes, it's okay. The university is free to refuse if he isn't worth three salaries.

  6. Yes, it's okay, but I foresee a divorce. It also places her judgment and character into question.

  7. Yes, it's okay but it shouldn't have any power at the negotiating table.

Interesting idea. Perhaps if academia had developed in a world where two-career households were common, this sort of thing would have become standard practice. In our world though, it's hard to imagine it happening any time in the near-to-mid-term future.

In my corner, I have not heard of anyone having strongly negative feelings towards spousal hiring, beyond "Huh, I guess this is technically kind of unfair" sort of idle musing. For one, in the bracket of universities that actually have the abundance of permanent positions to offer it, at the margin diligence/productivity/pain tolerance distinguishes candidates more than "brilliance", but in my experience academics curiously rarely feel it to be a well-earned advantage - so while one might feel bitter about someone mediocre getting a job through nepotism, few feel bitter about someone lazy or unwilling to play the shovelware publication game to the same extent doing so.

More importantly, in my observations, spousal hires tend to actually have a countervailing effect to AA - assortative mating creates academic couples that are similarly talented, which means that the female half of the couple has access to better universities and winds up carrying the male half. Since recent hires tend to be quite gender-balanced, few people are so deep in wrongthink as to mentally rank the men and women in their department separately and being able to negotiate a spousal hire tends to mean you are well above the hiring threshold, the similarly-competent male +1 tends to not draw attention as being unusually subpar.

In the rare cases where M>>F to such an extent that the AA advantage (which, in non-life-science STEM, is usually extreme) does not exceed it, the woman spousal hire tends to be put in either an admin position or a non-competitive subfield such as HCI or $subject education. I figure other disciplines have their counterparts to this (lab techs, intro course lecturers...).

This. The assortative selection + hiring trends means the effect is reversed from the historical

traditionally spousal hiring was seen as benefiting women

OPs referenced. The primary effect is benefiting the university, which is why they offer them.

For the tenure track spousal faculty hires I know personally 4/4 have had the wife as the primary hire, with the husband as or more capable than their wives. Additionally, there are inter-departmental considerations at play. Often the university/dean allocate only one faculty position for a department, but if the department makes a strong case a spousal hire is "necessary" they essentially get allocated an "extra" faculty slot. The net effect is that the university can hire two people of roughly equal caliber for substantially less than if they hired two people independently. The spousal offer is almost never as as good in terms of salary or startup package. In some cases the husband is essentially "free" to the university when a soft money position is offered. In this case they are responsible for funding their research from external grants and no salary is guaranteed. All they get is to have an official institutional affiliation, and maybe a lab space in the the basement. Normally a researcher who is capable of capturing that much external funding would be able to get a tenure track position at some university, but they might be willing to give that up to be able to stay with their wife.

OPs referenced. The primary effect is benefiting the university, which is why they offer them.

I think it is primarily benefiting the university and most importantly their existing employees as a class. You know, university is special so we all have to vote to get ourselves tenures, spousal hiring, sabbaticals and all those other perks necessary to keep our demanding jobs of getting state to keep the grants flowing and all that.

From an outside (non-academic) perspective this strikes me as fairly banal. All high end firms have spousal placement programs. T1 law firms have deep connections to governments and corporations, so while they don't hire the good-not-outstanding spouse, they ensure he/she gets a respectable, appropriate, job working as an attorney. Academia is both constrained and unconstrained in this way. Its less likely for a T1/T2 job partnership to be available or make sense for the T2 institution in a city, but academia also has way more totally bullshit jobs that "need" to be filled (approximately 70% of positions at colleges didn't exist in 1990 IIRC).

Spousal hiring, in this context, is totally normal. The college is actually getting services on the cheap. Instead of making a real hire for useless DEI officer #7, they get that person for free, instead of paying the researcher that extra amount, and the DEI officer.

In my experience, spousal hires are typically not for things like "DEI officer" (or at least I wouldn't call that a spousal hire) but for research or teaching roles.

I also think your example with law firms is a bit different because if a different organization is doing the spousal hiring then that organization still has incentive to make sure the person they hire meets their standards. Also there are typically far more jobs for lawyers in one city than for, say, theoretical physicists.

It is different for sure. I was just observing that the practice seemed to make sense to me. I am not entirely surprised spousal hires doing go into the admin roles, although they probably should, but I guess universities are actually true believers in that stuff.

All high end firms have spousal placement programs. T1 law firms have deep connections to governments and corporations, so while they don't hire the good-not-outstanding spouse, they ensure he/she gets a respectable, appropriate, job working as an attorney.

Wait, really? I don’t work in those circles but I’ve never heard of such a thing. Have other people heard of this? Is it limited to America / poster’s home country?

In the hedge fund/prop shop space etc. this is pretty rare, especially if your spouse isn't working in that part of finance. If you're moving country they generally will pay the visa fees for your spouse and any children though, and you might be able to use the fact your spouse is losing their job as leverage to increase your own compensation. Generally though your spouse's career will take a hit, which is why it is important to choose your partner early on to be someone who's fine making this sacrifice for you if you eventually plan on making such moves.

Interesting, thanks! From the responses by you and @2rafa, it seems fair to say that in the majority of cases ‘something’ will probably be done to help but that’s very unlikely to extend to actually giving your partner even a low-level job. Or maybe finance is different, and it’s just T1 law that does this?

In finance what sometimes happens is that if you get moved to, say, Singapore or Hong Kong (or occasionally Paris or even London/NYC) the company - if they really want you - might agree to hire a high-end recruiter for your partner so that they can get a work visa instead of a spouse visa. This is only for long-term roles (eg. if they anticipate you’ll be out there for 5+ years) and for senior positions. It’s arguably more common now because some countries like Singapore have tightened rules on working as a dependant.

You can always go from front office to back office (though it’s a one-way trip), but I can’t imagine a hiring bank finding a front office role for a spouse of someone they recruit or send overseas beyond maybe offering them a good recruiter. But as is not uncommon in law, in these cases one person’s career usually takes a back seat and they move into ops/HR/compliance/investor relations/marketing anyway.

I am aware that schools like Cornell are in relatively remote locations. However, doesn't this suggest for couples where one partner is an academic and the other partner is a non-academic with a high-powered career (e.g. lawyer or surgeon or something) the academic partner would have a lot of trouble accepting a job at Cornell? Perhaps the lesson is that in an era in which two-career households are common, top research universities in remote locations just don't make much sense.

It would, but partner hiring gives them a shot at some academics they wouldn't otherwise have a chance in hell with. Advantages to that kind of thing.

I ask because there are a few really remote college towns, and if you've never been to one of them you might not understand just how isolated it can be moving there.

Welcome to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a truly notable research university with a rich history of computer and materials science, located in the middle of fucking nowhere.

I don't even understand what the culture war aspect of "spousal hiring" is here. Yeah, there are a lot of land grant universities in the United States, they're in the boonies, so they create their own economic ecosystem around them to support the families of the faculty. And that's…bad? Good? Who cares?

Another great example!

Who cares? People with an attenuated sense of fairness, who I mostly picture as people giving some pissant version of the Brando "I coulda been a contenda" speech centered around legacies/affirmative action/Nepo babies/racism/sexism/fatphobia.

As I said, I really don't have a firm opinion about whether spousal hiring is good or not (or under what circumstances) and I'm curious what all of you think.

Some scattered thoughts:

Partner hires pretty clearly evolved from the complexities of what is an insanely punishing market--but also partly, I think, just plain old-fashioned feminism.

Suppose you finish your undergraduate education quickly--let's even say you were double-promoted as a child, dual-enrolled your way to an Associate's degree at age 17, completed the rest of a five-year Master's program at age 20, and launched straight into your PhD. You get your first postdoc position at, let's say, 24 years old, but this requires you to move to a new community, perhaps a new country. Call it a three-year postdoc, during which you are consumed with applying for long-term positions all over the map; say this is when you get involved in a potentially long-term romantic relationship with a fellow academic in a similar position.

Now you are 27 years old (I don't know what the real median age is for people completing their first postdoc, but it's probably more like early to mid 30s). Statistically, you're lucky if one of you gets a long-term position, and the other is going to be an adjunct, or do a second postdoc, or something similarly menial. Here it's pretty common for couples to start having the "whoever gets the best job, the other one will follow" conversation--but unless the "best job" is in a place planted thick with colleges and universities (Boston, say), the "one who follows" is likely to be stepping out of academia, creating a career break that could very well become permanent.

If the "one who follows" is ready to settle down and raise some children in a single-income household (rule of thumb, the pay schedule for professors is commonly 10%-20% above what a kindergarten teacher in the same geographic area makes)--no problem! The timing is good (assuming you only want one or two kids--if you wanted more than that, you should have started before you finished your undergrad!) and life goes on. But of course the person who is traditionally expected to give up everything to raise children, at least for the first several years, is the mother. Many mothers are totally okay with this. But a feminist might observe that not engaging in partner hiring perpetuates patriarchal oppression and contributes to the particular subjugation of smart women.

Throwing the "one who follows" a low-salary, untenured teaching position may be an effective way to fill out the ranks of the underpaid teaching positions on which most universities rely to stay solvent; I doubt Yale has too much difficulty finding all the teachers it needs, but even large state universities are sometimes left scrambling for qualified instructors. At any institution smaller or less prestigious than that, you can bet they are in a somewhat perpetual staffing emergency. Not for tenured faculty, no! Everyone wants those jobs. But for qualified adjuncts, lecturers, and the like, absolutely. Partner hires thus also help alleviate the single-income-household problem, though it probably discourages actual childbearing less than one might suppose--I have never been part of a department where more than about 60% of the faculty had children, and my female colleagues generally have fewer children than my male colleagues. I have one co-worker right now who, when she joined us 5 years ago, had no children but planned on having one "in the next year or two." She recently turned 40 and mentioned that "the longer I go without having children, the less it appeals to me to do so."

People who are determined to succeed in academia are, in short, often faced with years of brief residence followed by dramatic relocation, and it only takes two or three such stints to put you past prime childbearing years--especially when you are female. This is true almost regardless of how precocious you are, or how efficiently you complete your studies.

So while I wouldn't personally advocate for a partner hire (because I am old fashioned enough to feel comfortable battling the two income trap by asking others to make costly defections from the status quo), I don't think there's any real harm in them. The colleagues I've had who did the long distance relationship thing so they and their partners could pursue separate academic careers have often been poor campus citizens, as they spend so much time traveling that their service contributions suffer. This is just one way in which partner hires can be made to the advantage of the university, and on balance they probably do not shut any competitors out of any highly desirable positions. Rare indeed is the university willing to hand out tenure on the basis of romantic entanglement!

I mostly agree with your explanation of how spousal hires came to be common and accepted, but I think feminism might play a somewhat smaller role than you ascribe to it. It had some influence, but in my opinion, its most important effect was simply increasing the number of couples where both partners are academics. As long as such couples are common, and as long as the academic job market works the way it does now, spousal hiring will be appealing.

It had some influence, but in my opinion, its most important effect was simply increasing the number of couples where both partners are academics.

Well, okay, but in the larger sense that partner hires would not be a thing at all if women were still overwhelmingly homebound, feminism is the single most important cultural factor responsible for all partner hires.

I think this is buying the propaganda a bit. Feminists would love if that were true, but I think it's a more complex story on how that happened.

I think this is both an interesting and very complicated topic. I have actually wondered before if the changing demands of the job market (i.e. a shift from physical labor to more desk jobs which it is easier for women to be competitive at) partially drove the growth of feminism (rather than feminism causing the job market to accept more women).

Not sure if the timing works out, there.

The textbook answer is that women entered the workforce thanks to the World Wars. That meant a lot of manufacturing, not just desk jobs. Our transition to a service economy really hadn’t taken off.

Women really started getting involved with factory work in the 1800s, which was definitely before the growth of desk jobs. In this era, they also started gaining access to higher education. I think that predates the main suffrage movements.

Yes, I completely agree with that.

Spousal hires are a little to nothing burger for me when it comes to “fairness.” They’re infrequent relative to hiring preferences based on sex and race, which are ominipresent.

The hired spouse will tend to be female, and especially in STEM, the affirmative action benefit extended to the female spousal hire will generally lie within the grace usually afforded toward women. The racial preferences extended toward non-Asian minorities tend to be much larger.

It’s also funny when a cursory web search reveals a given female spousal hire was originally a young professor, graduate student, or even undergraduate who played her cards right at the finish line, e.g., a former advisee, lab member, or junior professor who went with her de facto boss. Academia is hardly safe from hypergamy.

In CS and Maths, at least, I know of more cases of male spousal hires, chiefly because there would have to be extreme hypergamy involved for the spouse of a man who got a permanent position on his own merit to not qualify on (her merit plus AA). (That being said, in the majority of those cases I actually do get the sense that the woman is the more prolific one. Open question to what extent this is intrinsic competence and to what extent being a spousal hire withered the man's productive spirit. I have not tracked any of the couples' outputs since before they got hired.)

The optimal solution of course is to raze academia to the ground and salt the earth so nothing can again grow in its place.

More seriously, spousal hires make a ton of sense. They provide a large benefit to the desired candidate, in exchange for a small cost to the university (i.e. the value-below-replacement of the hired spouse). So if you want to bid for a desired researcher, it makes sense to bid up in a more leveraged way rather than just making the salary offer bigger. It correspondingly makes life marginally harder for non-superstar academics who are not married to superstar academics, but I don't think there's any real public benefit (either at a societal level or an institutional level) to intervening on their behalf and preventing this type of arrangement.

I tend to think it makes more sense to think about issues in terms of their costs and benefits to the various parties rather than in terms of principles. Principles don't care how much they cost, which means they can get very expensive.

The optimal solution of course is to raze academia to the ground and salt the earth so nothing can again grow in its place.

On the one hand, this but unironically. On the other hand, I agree with most of the rest of your post. I actually think the history of spousal hires didn't involve precious faculty positions. Back in the day, there just weren't as many spouses (mostly female) who were even in competition for faculty jobs. It was that your university was often in the middle of nowhere (as mentioned above), to the extent that it was nearly a "one-company town", so you just found the spouse some job that probably wasn't even very highly desired anyway (and would otherwise be filled pretty much by just who was available and willing to live/work in that area). Frankly, most companies don't care if they have some secretaries that are only 90% as productive as the maximum they could get if they spent the effort to find the most qualified candidate. A 10% better main faculty hire is wayyyy more valuable.

What exactly is a superstar researcher? What kind of deliverable or output do they produce?

The cynical side of me is thinking that there really is nothing of value being generated here. That it’s just another mechanism to funnel more tuition, endowment, and federal funny money into the hands of friends and allies.

What exactly is a superstar researcher? What kind of deliverable or output do they produce?

To the university, their main value is prestige (but also occasionally lucrative patents). For society as a whole, it greatly depends on the field the researcher works in. In humanities, it is sometimes hard to quantify the worth of a researcher's output but in science and engineering, it is often more clear-cut. To take one recent example, Jennifer Doudna became a superstar researcher for her part in discovering CRISPR, which seems likely to have a lot of value to society.

In my opinion, you have a level of cynicism about academic research that does not seem warranted. I agree that a lot of research is not useful and some is also in service of a political agenda, but over time a lot of tremendously useful/important scientific discoveries and inventions have come out of academia. I heard that once, superstar researchers in physics even invented a new type of bomb.

I heard that once, superstar researchers in physics even invented a new type of bomb.

That was over 75 years ago. What have they done for us lately?

How about the discovery of graphene or the development of quantum computing? Going back a little further, how about high temperature superconductors (not to be confused with room temperature superconductors)?

Graphene brings us up to 1961, though it's small potatoes compared to nukes. High temperature superconductors came out of industry. Quantum computing also largely came out of industry.

  1. I should have said something more like "techniques for producing of graphene" (early 2000s) than discovery of graphene (1961 as you said).
  2. I don't think you can seriously argue that quantum computing "largely came out of industry." The idea was, in the first place, entirely dreamt up by academics like Richard Feynman, David Deutsch, Umesh Vazirani and others. The first truly convincing application of quantum computers was the factoring algorithm discovered by Peter Shor, another academic. Quantum error correction, which is necessary for quantum computers to work in practice, was also developed by academics. And even experimentalists actually building quantum computers for corporations, like John Martinis, were trained by and worked in academia until fairly recently (Martinis was hired by Google in 2014, but had already worked on quantum computing in academia for years).
  3. You're mostly right about high temperature superconductors, but even there, the discoverers were trained in academia.

Thanks for answering. I’d suggest that cynicism does seem warranted after the past few years.

Someone downthread suggested that there’s not a lot of difference between the superstar researcher and the median researcher. I really have no way to know if this is true or not. Your response talks about all the benefits of university research. I’m not suggesting that there is zero benefit to university research. I’m just highly skeptical that the marginal benefit of this spousal hire policy is realy worth the cost. Of course academics will defend the policy. From the outside though, it sounds like bullshit.

I don't totally disagree with you. As I said, I think academia produces a lot of things of zero, or even negative, value and a lot of humanities research doesn't impress me much. I'm also pretty open to arguments that as a society we invest too much in academia or that academia should be greatly reorganized to be more cost-effective. I could even understand someone who believes that the net benefits of academic research are not worth the cost (though I disagree). But the view you seemed to express above, that superstar researchers don't produce any deliverables and that academia produces nothing of value, seems clearly wrong to me. My experience has been that in science and engineering, superstar researchers generally do have impressive achievements (though this is not quite the same thing as claiming that their achievements are worth the amount of money spent on them; I believe that too, but it's a different claim).

As I said in my original post, I personally am ambivalent about spousal hiring.

I find it utterly bizarre how you managed to write such a long post without mentioning the key reason why spouses need to be employed close to each other, which als blows up all your examples and which was the justification in all actual cases of spousal hiring I personally know about(not too many, admittedly): Children.

You can easily have a ldr without kids, me and my wife did phds in different countries, but you can't look after kids that way. If we want academics to be able to have children, we need to give them a way to live in the same place. None of your examples include looking after children, so none of them make sense to me.

I find it utterly bizarre how you managed to write such a long post without...

This is a bit meta, but I find myself noticing and recoiling from this language formulation lately. It seems dismissive and uncharitable.

His post is in no way bizarre. There are better ways to say "I think you missed an important point".

Hmm maybe I should avoid using it. I was a bit sleepy and writing haphazardly, so if it came off as too abrasive, I apologize.

On the other hand, it's a genuine statement of bafflement on my side, and I marked it as such - I didn't say it's objectively bizarre, just that I personally find it as such. Children aren't just an important point among many, they are imo the entire point of human couple formation.

And in general, I do consider the modern insistence of decoupling relationships from family formation and treating the latter as just a life style among many, well, bizarre.

His post is in no way bizarre.

This is where you're wrong, Inferential distance is a bitch.

I'm curious what you mean. Did you also find my post bizarre? If so, why?

Did you also find my post bizarre? If so, why?

For the reasons already stated, you've effectively dismissed of agency/interest on the part of any involved as a factor and then are acting surprised when your model based on a theory of perfectly spherical frictionless cows operating in a vacuum doesn't reflect the observed behavior of your local bovines.

This is an interesting point, but I disagree that my post was "utterly bizarre" and that my thought experiments "make no sense" because they (mostly) don't involve children. Let me respond in three different ways.

First, I did kind of mention children, but only briefly and indirectly. I said that the academic career path makes it harder to start a family.

Second, all of the spousal hires that I am personally familiar with did not involve children (although it is always possible that the couple in question will have children later and in one case this did indeed happen). I realize that your experience was different. I have also never seen the existence of children used to justify specific spousal hires, but of course I don't know what was said in hiring committees or private conversations. In any case, from my experience it's absolutely clear that spousal hiring often takes place with no kids involved and that many people support it for reasons besides those involving children. So I don't think my thought experiments are invalid at all.

Third, and most importantly, I am not sure if the presence of children should make a difference. From a university's perspective, spousal hiring is justified because giving extra benefits to prestigious researchers makes them more likely to accept your job offer. You point out that the convenience does not just have to be the convenience of being in the same place as your romantic partner, it can also include the convenience of having your entire family (including children) in the same place. Part of the point of my thought experiments is that there are other notions of "convenience" (such as being in the same place as your close friend) that may be valued by researchers and could, in theory, be addressed by something similar to spousal hiring.

There are also other tricky ethical questions involving spousal hiring and children. Why does a university owe it to its employees to make it easier to have kids? Does the fact that a practice makes it easier to take care of kids make it not nepotism? Should couples with children be treated better than couples without children? Moreover, it seems hard to build a coherent policy where spousal hiring is justified mainly by concerns about raising children. If spousal hires are extended only to people with children then what about people who don't have children yet, but plan to? Or if spousal hires are extended to couples who have or plan to have children, what happens if a couple claims to plan to have children but then doesn't?

I want to emphasize that I don't necessarily disagree with you. I said that one of the strongest arguments in favor of spousal hiring is that it is convenient and makes the lives of (some) people in academia better. One part of that is that it helps people in romantic relationships in general and another part, as you point out, is that it helps people with kids. Perhaps someone who is strongly pro-natalist could also support it on the grounds that it may increase the number of children. I am genuinely unsure if spousal hiring is on net a good thing and the fact that it makes things easier for couples with kids is certainly part of the argument for it.

There is another point I would like to address. You say that "you can easily have a ldr without kids" and that "you can't look after kids [in different locations]." I don't fully agree with either of these. Many people find it difficult to maintain a relationship long-distance, especially when the long-distance phase lasts for many years. I know of at least one academic couple who have lived in separate states for decades but I think they are very unusual. In any case, it is clear that many people prefer to live in the same place as their romantic partners. Also, I have known couples with kids who lived apart for several years (including couples where one partner was in academia). It surely sucks a lot and I would not want to do it, but it's not impossible.

When I look through your drawbacks there is only one that I find slightly compelling and it is that the hire could reduce the quality of researchers, but you've already admitted that to offer a spousal hire the university is at least landing one researcher who is above the caliber they would normally hire. What are the odds that their partner is sufficiently below average to drag the level of the university down?

The others such as someone feeling like it's unfair... well, whoever you hire that will be side effect so it hardly matters. Drama? Once more, drama will make itself. I doubt spousal hires move it much off of baseline.

At the end of the day, the university is trying to win in a market and spousal hires are what the marketplace demands. Most research is fake anyway, so why does it matter if research money is going to a superstar liar or a mediocre one?

The puzzles you offer to sharpen our intuition just further demonstrate that it's just a market problem. The answer to almost all of them is "is the demand for the candidate sufficient to justify this expense". That expense of course also includes setting a new norm and injuring the feelings of those to whom one would not offer these various forms of compensation. As norms can be slow to change, I doubt that these would happen quickly, but if they do I'm not concerned. If the researcher is getting his daughter hired at a university it just demonstrates he's being a protective father who puts his family first, and I'd like to see us back in a place where this is normalized and celebrated anyway.

What are the odds that their partner is sufficiently below average to drag the level of the university down?

Yes, for the university it is probably a net improvement (at least in terms of prestige). But for the field as a whole or for the broader society, it may not be.

Maybe? Difficult-to-impossible to model this. It's basically an intuition or supposition. I'd rather top talent (insofar as it exists in academia, which I mostly find doubtful) get rewarded. Not all that worried if a mediocre psychology adjunct gets displaced by the wife of a brilliant researcher, even if that's her only qualification.

With the sheer number of Ph.Ds being minted in comparison to the number of available positions, I doubt spousal hiring hurts the quality of research or teaching much. You won't optimize, but you'll still get someone pretty good.

Within the fields I'm familiar with, there is a clear and reasonably large difference in quality between the median researcher at a top university and the median researcher at a mid-tier university. So I'm not sure I agree with you.

Well, in philosophy people act like that's true but I'm not convinced it actually is. Can't speak to any other field with any real authority.

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