Recruiting for Two

The rise of two-career families means that when Harvard is wooing a star professor, it must often double its recruiting efforts--the University has to find a place not only for a prospective professor but that person's spouse.

And indeed, the University sometimes has to pull all the strings at its disposal in order to make opportunities available.

Joseph J. McCarthy, assistant dean of the Faculty for academic planning, says Harvard's searches for jobs for professors' spouses are quite broad--and sometimes exhaustive.

"I call people, I network, I call people who might know people, I ask folks in law, in medicine, you name it, who they know, what they know," McCarthy says. "We do everything we can to help the spouse or partner in the situation to find a professional position in the Cambridge area including reaching as far as Dartmouth or Brown."

Another administrator, associate dean of the Faculty for academic planning Laura G. Fisher, says administrators call upon a broad network among Harvard departments as well as other institutions, businesses and firms in the Boston area.

Although Fisher says she won't always take the responsibility for finding jobs for spouses, "it certainly could happen that way."

But although Harvard can sometimes pull strings to get a spouse a job, rumors that Harvard stows away money for that purpose are false, administrators say.

"It makes it harder but I think it's the right way to go," McCarthy says. "I think the other things we're doing, we have to do with even more energy and imagination, but I don't think we should get into the business of creating jobs where there isn't a job, or preferring someone who is less qualified just because they're the spouse of someone we're trying to recruit."

Some professors and administrators maintain that Harvard can sometimes give spouses the inside edge on certain jobs, but only if they are qualified for those positions to begin with.

"I think if there are compelling reasons they will try and probably create opportunities," Maier says. "They certainly wouldn't do it unless they thought the second person were qualified."

But on the whole, Harvard's decentralized nature makes it difficult for one unit to impose an appointment on another, professors and administrators say.

"What I think Harvard will not do and no one wants it to do is insist that a department take a spouse to get the other person," Maier says.

Is all this effort--directed only tangentially towards Harvard's mission--really worth it?

University Hall administrators maintain that it is.