In the 1970s, a small number of academic couples did manage to balance two careers and marriage. Their stories sound remarkably like Jamison’s and Watkins’ today.

Saltonstall Professor of History Charles S. Maier ’60 and Pauline Maier ’60, a professor of history at MIT, were one of the rare two-professor couples of that era.

In the 1970s, Charles Maier taught at Harvard, while his Pauline Maier taught at the University of Massachusetts.

In 1974, Charles Maier’s assistant professorship expired and he was not offered a new appointment at Harvard.

He found a position at Duke University, but at that same time, she received a tenure offer from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

He spent roughly three years commuting between Wisconsin and North Carolina.

He says the traveling took a serious toll on his family, both personally and financially.

It was not until the 1980s that Charles and Pauline Maier were both able to find employment in the Boston area.

Maier says good posts at a university or college are much harder to find than jobs as doctors or lawyers.

“If both members of a couple are academically ambitious and both well qualified, the problem is not just finding jobs, the problem is also finding jobs that both think are fully rewarding,” Maier said.

In the 1980s, the problem made divorced couples, who were often freer to pick up and move, better hires for universities.

At Yale in the 1980s and early 1990s, Judith Rodin—then a dean and provost, and now president of the University of Pennsylvania—noticed the trend toward looking for divorced couples.

“That was the time you could move someone,” Rodin says. “I thought that was so un-family friendly.”

HERE AND NOW

With no solution in sight, the couples problem is still very much one that troubles academia.