The couples problem isn’t unique to Harvard. Outside Cambridge, universities nationwide have instituted measures to confront the couples problem, with limited success.

Solving the problem will take creativity, say administrators at several major institutions.

“One of the things I had fun doing as the Yale provost was looking for academic couples,” Rodin says. “We challenged the faculty at that time to think about couples that were really exemplar couples, and we created extra slots—sometimes for the man, sometimes for the woman—and we brought four or five such couples.”

Universities should “encourage all their professors to marry airline pilots,” jokes Hanna H. Gray, president emerita of the University of Chicago and a member of the Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body.

But as long as professors meet their spouses in grad student seminars—as Gray met her husband—and not while flying the friendly skies, something must be done, professors and administrators agree.

Some schools attempt to accommodate two-professor couples with official policies that allow them to make new positions for the spouses of scholars they are recruiting, called “spousal lines.”

In some regions, schools work together to set up official networks, so that if one institution is hiring a member of an academic couple, the other schools will be notified and asked to consider hiring the spouse of that individual.

The University of Pennsylvania has set up such a network for all the schools in the Philadelphia area.

“The institutions all benefited from this,” says Mary Patterson McPherson, president emerita of Bryn Mawr College.

“Some collaboration and leadership is hugely important,” McPherson says. “You can’t do it all by yourself—a single institution can’t do all that.”

HARVARD’S UNIQUE PLACE

Harvard does not endorse the spousal lines policy.

One reason for this stance is that even assuming both members of the couple are of the highest credentials, using spousal lines can set a dangerous precedent.

“To actually create positions for spouses and to make that an official policy is tricky, because then everyone that’s hired will expect that for his or her spouse,” Diebold Professor of Indo-European Linguistics and Philology Jay Jasanoff says.

Harvard is unique for the extreme selectivity of who is offered tenure.