"We recognize that life is very complicated today, not that it wasn't before, but you do have more situations of two-career families and one has to be mindful of what the dislocation of one will do to the other, personally and professionally," Fisher says.
Turning Down the Big H
A tenure offer from Harvard University is a great honor for any scholar.
Universally acclaimed as one of the top research institutions in America, Harvard's library system is eclipsed only by the Library of Congress, and its breadth of talented scholars and students is perhaps unsurpassed in the world.
Sometimes, however, no matter how enamored a professor is of the University's facilities and people, family considerations must come first.
And an increasing number of professors are turning down tenure offers from America's oldest university.
Some professors feel that Harvard's diminishing influence is another factor in the choice of family over appointment.
"A lot of Harvard's way of doing things is based on the Olympian view of when you call people they will come and life's just more complicated now," says Professor of Astronomy Robert P. Kirchner '70, chair of the Astronomy Department.
Schauer agrees.
"People no longer think that Harvard is sufficiently more wonderful than everywhere else that they are going to ask their spouses to make a professional sacrifice just so they can be at Harvard," he says.
But Harvard still does manage to bring in its share of recruits. Administrators attribute part of the edge to the wealth of professional opportunities--academic and otherwise--that the Boston area offers.
"We are mercifully fortunate in our location: this area has masses of opportunity in universities and other fields," Knowles says.
Harvard faces perhaps a little more difficulty recruiting people with families because it tends to hire more people directly to senior professorships than other universities, according to Kirshner.
"Harvard is different from other places in the sense that we tend to hire more people at the tenure level," said Kirshner, "and of course what that means is people put down roots in a community and that means both people in a couple."
Modern trends have led some professors to call for a change in how Harvard does its hiring.
Baird Professor of Science Gary J. Feldman, for example, says more internal promotions would help solve the problem.
"The main effect of professional spouses is that we cannot recruit some people whom we would like as senior faculty," Feldman wrote in an e-mail message. "This makes it more important to make excellent junior appointments and promote them."
But no matter what, the family issue can not be ignored, professors say.
"I think that if in the course of recruiting it's taken seriously from the beginning it can be either an enormous draw or it can be an impediment and ultimately trip up and make impossible recruitment," Galison says.