Last year, Harvard lost one of its star professors, philosophy and Afro-American studies professor K. Anthony Appiah, because he couldn’t stand the commute anymore.
Appiah had spent seven years commuting nearly daily between Boston and New York, where he lives with his partner.
Though he says he racked up nearly every type of frequent flyer perk possible, the travelling grew to be too much to bear. So when Princeton came knocking on his door last year, he jumped at the offer to relocate.
“I realized that I was very worn down by the past seven years,” Appiah says.
Though a long-distance relationship is tough on any couple, raising children with a partner who lives across state lines is a particularly difficult task.
Harvard History Professor Susan G. Pedersen ’81-’82, who stepped down last year from her position as dean of undergraduate education, has two young children—and a husband whose academic career brought him to New York.
Her husband, Thomas Ertman, was a professor for nine years in Harvard’s government department, but when he was not offered tenure, he accepted a tenured spot in New York University’s sociology department.
For the year, he is back at Harvard as a visiting professor in the Social Studies program.
The family continues to reside in Cambridge, and Ertman keeps an apartment in New York.
When he worked at NYU, Ertman would stay in Cambridge through Monday night to have dinner with the children, but then he’d jet back to New York, where he would spend the rest of the week.
Though Pedersen’s family, like many others where both parents are professors, survived those long-distance years, she says the lifestyle took its toll.
“I can’t recommend this way of life,” she says.
And Harvard’s tenure system—whereby junior faculty spend several years at Harvard before the University decides, notoriously rarely, to tenure them—is tough on a young family, Pedersen says.
“Right now, it’s hard for junior Faculty to sit it out at Harvard with both people in very uncertain jobs,” Pedersen says.
OUTSIDE THESE HALLOWED WALLS
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