Dual Academic Couples and Long Distance Living

In 2008, the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University published a report on dual academic couples, confirming what many of us in academia already know: there are a lot of professors married to other professors. In fact, 36 percent of the U.S. professoriate are academic couples, in which both partners are professors.

I’m in one of these couples. So are many of my friends and colleagues, as well as many of my wife’s friends and colleagues. What separates my wife and me from many of the dual academic couples we know, however, is that we’re not at the same institution. We’re not even in the same state.

My wife is a tenured professor (and now, department chair) at a prestigious small liberal arts college in North Carolina. I am an assistant professor (up for tenure this year) in a large state university in Virginia. It’s a seven hour drive between our campuses. As the crow flies—or, in my case, as US Airways flies—it’s an hour flight, accompanied on both ends by two extra hours of driving, parking, line-waiting, and so on. I typically squeeze in all my classes and meetings between Tuesday and Thursday, and the rest of the time I spend back at home with my wife and our two sons, ages four and seven.

This is what my work week looks like: on Monday I volunteer at my youngest son’s co-op preschool and spend the afternoon hanging out with him and my other son. On Tuesday I wake up at 5am, drive 30 miles to Charlotte Douglas International Airport, fly at dawn to Washington Dulles International Airport, get myself over to George Mason’s campus, where I teach, advise, write, grade, collaborate, eat, and occasionally sleep until Thursday at 7:45pm, when I fly back to Charlotte, making it home in the best of times by 10:30pm. In the worst of times—say, flight delays due to inclement weather—I might not get back until 2am or even until Friday morning. Then on Friday I attempt more work while the kids are at school, but it’s not unusual for this work to be derailed by all the life-management tasks I put off during the rest of the week—doctor appointments, paying bills, getting the car repaired, or, as happened last Friday, staying home with my feverish and vomiting older boy and taking care of him. Saturday and Sunday are a blur of spending time with my family, working around the house and yard, and catching up on all the reading, grading, and writing I’ve fallen behind on.

Then the following week I repeat the entire schedule. And the week after that. And so on.

The only aspect of this commute that makes it tolerable is that I love my job. I’m good at my job. I thrive at my job. And I’m surrounded by kind, generous colleagues at an institution that values my unconventional teaching and research. My wife likewise loves her job and is committed through and through to the project of undergraduate liberal arts education.

And yet.

It’s a grueling, brain-frying, wallet-emptying, time-wasting, body-breaking, soul-draining way to live.

It’s incredibly hard on myself, schizophrenically split between two commitments—work and family—that I both take seriously. It’s incredibly hard on my wife, who for three days a week is essentially a single working mother. And it’s incredibly hard on my children, who, I am relieved to say, don’t seem to hold it against me.

Commuting even creates difficulties for the institutions for whom we work. The Stanford report on dual academic couple notes:

Couples who do not find positions at the same or neighboring institution(s) often commute (or one may drop out of academia altogether). When professors face long  commutes, universities tend to lose in terms of faculty research, contact hours with students, committee work, and, most importantly, in terms of the kind of serendipitous intellectual exchange that happens when people run into each other informally. Faculty tend to lose in terms of time spent with family and with scholarly colleagues. (Schiebinger et al., p. 68; emphasis added)

Commuting is no way to work. It’s also no way to live. And yet I’m surprised by how many of us there are. Probably every professor knows at least one couple in a similar situation. And I hear many tales of other professors who once had difficult commutes but who are now in the same city or even better, at the same institution as their spouses or partners.

When I hear about these couples who have managed to end their commutes and continue building their careers, I experience a moment of hopefulness. I am truly happy for these couples, and their examples encourage me. But only for a moment. Lately, every story of academic commuting misery that has a happy ending only discourages me. I have a deep, gnawing sense of dread that if my commute were going to end, it would have done so already. My wife and I have been a dual academic couple since 2005. That’s a long time to be commuting. And of course we have both tried the obvious ways to end this commuting. To no avail. Despite doing everything right, we can’t help feeling we are doing something wrong. If we haven’t somehow managed to find ourselves in the same city let alone the same institution by now, then it must be we’re doing something wrong.

I can tell myself that I’m being irrational, that landing a job—any job—in academia is a lottery, as Jason Mittell put it in an earlier column on Antenna. But the problem with irrationality is that even the suggestion that one is being irrational can itself seem irrational in the face of the mounting evidence.

What do I do when I am buffeted by irrational thoughts, weary pessimism, and the general bleakness that goes along with years of commuting?

I think about the word commute.

I look past the historical origins of this word that describes how I keep my job, a word, it turns out, which is a shortened form of commutation ticket—in the 19th century, a ticket issued by a railway company for repeat travel over the same route during a period of time. (Incidentally, no airline I ever encountered has commutation tickets.) This etymology of commute, which highlights its sooty industrial age machine-like repetition, does me no good. It does my wife no good, nor my sons.

Instead, I think about the verb commute, which is not an abbreviated legacy of some 19th century suburbanite’s daily life, but a deeper, more powerful word. Commute: from the Latin commūtā-re, meaning to change altogether, to alter wholly. And that is my only hope, that one day, and one day soon, my commute will itself commute, changing altogether. Wholly altered.

Notes

Schiebinger, Londa, Andrea Davies Henderson, and Shannon K. Gilmartin. Dual-Career Academic Couples: What Universities Need to Know. Stanford University: Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, 2008. http://gender.stanford.edu/dual-career-academic-couples-what-universities-need-know.

I strongly encourage any administrators reading this column to take a look at the full report (PDF) of Dual-Career Academic Couples, which offers guidelines and best practices for hiring academic couples, as well as significant reasons why it makes logistical, pedagogical, and economical sense to do so.

[Crazy Sad Face Drawing by my son, Niko]

Tags: academia, commuting, dual career couples