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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
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.
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.
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