Q: When is the "two-body problem" not always a problem?
A: When the bodies are at Duke.
All two-career couples face concerns, but when each spouse is an academic, there are particular problems to resolve. They can range from finding jobs at the same or nearby institution to conducting joint research.
It's a common issue for universities. One recent book reported that 40 percent of female faculty and 35 percent of male faculty have partners who are also faculty members.
Universities are taking notice. For the past five years, Cornell has had an annual conference on dual careers. Now Duke is planning a conference of its own for the next academic year, funded in part from an Alfred P. Sloan Award for Faculty Career Flexibility. Duke was one of five universities to win the award in 2006 in recognition of its efforts in dual-career recruitment and retention. The award will also enable refinement of recruitment and retention policies developed at Duke in recent years.
"There is not a set policy for negotiating with faculty couples," Dr. Nancy Allen, vice provost for faculty diversity and faculty development, wrote in an e-mail. "The provost, school deans, department chairs and search committee chairs engage a variety of approaches when the need arises and, in general, these have yielded good results, particularly in Arts & Sciences in recent years."
Several faculty couples in social sciences departments -- two of them new to Duke his fall -- talked with "DukeToday" recently about their two-body problems. The issues varied, but the couples agreed that Duke was unusually open-minded and progressive in its recruitment policies.
Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi
Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, new professors of psychology and neuroscience, met at an academic conference in St. Louis, at a dance on a riverboat ride on the Mississippi River. "Fireworks went off at the moment the Cardinals won the World Series (in 1982)," the couple recalled in an e-mail.
A native of Randolph County, N.C., Moffitt was teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Caspi (born in Israel and raised in Brazil and California) was at Harvard. "It took us a couple of years to end up at the same place, Wisconsin, so we could get married."
Both winners of Distinguished Awards for Early Career Contributions from the American Psychological Association, Moffitt and Caspi spent the last 10 years at the Institute of Psychiatry, London. They are co-authors, with others, of numerous research papers on the origins of normal and abnormal psychological traits.
"At first we tried not to work together," they wrote, "because all our senior colleagues, who had suffered through an era of nepotism laws when only half of a couple could be employed at a university, warned it would kill our careers. In the end, we gave up trying to work separately because it was so enjoyable for us to discuss our projects with each other. After we had made intellectual contributions to each other's projects, it seemed dishonest to not share authorship credit on the resulting publications."
How does the couple manage time, manage differences, share chores? "We look to our grandparents' generation for a model of couples who collaborate," Moffitt and Caspi wrote. "That generation often operated a family shop or farm, in which couples naturally worked together round the clock and made use of each others' complementary skills and interests.
"Duke offers us an opportunity to maximize the two most important aspects of lives, according to Sigmund Freud: Love and work," they wrote. "For work, we wanted a prestigious university with an internationally recognized medical school, a top-ranked psychiatry department, a strong psychology department with outstanding undergraduates and a clinical graduate training program, and a group of geneticists excited about working with us on genetic research into human behavioral disorders.
Love in the Natural Sciences
Emily Bernhardt needed someone to accompany her on a research trip to Chile. Her adviser suggested Justin Wright. In Chile, she ran into problems collecting data, but she came back with a future partner.
Read their story here.
"For love, moving here means that we will at last have our families close around us, instead of being spread over several different countries. Avshalom's parents are moving to the area to retire. Temi's [Moffitt's] family has been in North Carolina since the 1700s. We look forward to finally taking part in family celebrations without first making a 10-hour plane trip."
Duncan Thomas and Elizabeth Frankenberg
Duncan Thomas and Elizabeth Frankenberg, new professors of economics and public policy respectively, come to Duke from UCLA. Though they had both done graduate work at Princeton, "we never overlapped at all," Thomas said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles.
The couple met as colleagues at the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, a nonprofit that uses research and analysis to improve policy and decision making.
"Elizabeth was running a major new data-collection project on Indonesia," Thomas said. "I was hoping to begin a similar project in South Africa that didn't work out. Elizabeth said ‘Why not come to Indonesia?' So basically, she trained me."
"And Duncan made the project much better than it would have been," Frankenberg added.
Thomas, a native of Zimbabwe, and Frankenberg, who grew up in Hillsborough, have co-authored, with others, papers on health and mortality, family decision-making and developing economies in Southeast Asia. They've been able to work together from the start.
"We've generally looked for opportunities to take advantage of each person's comparative advantage," Frankenberg said.
"Being in different disciplines has been valuable for us," Thomas added. "People see us as two people with quite different perspectives and views. But we also have a lot of overlap in our research interests, and that has been very constructive for us intellectually. Working together means we've really learned to listen to each other. That's opened intellectual doors, but it's also strengthened our personal relationship."
"There's a real joy to working with someone where you share the same goals for the quality of the work and you understand each other and what each of you can contribute," Frankenberg said. "And on the personal side, we don't go to the same meetings all the time and we have some different hobbies, so it's not that we do everything together."
Why has the couple come to Duke? "We are both impressed with Duke's vision and its commitment to bring together people from different perspectives in innovative ways," Thomas said. "There are exciting initiatives underway in population, global health, policy and economics that struck a chord with us. And it's been gratifying that Duke has been very professional and treated us as two independent people who work together rather than as an academic couple."
Frankenberg, whose mother still lives in Hillsborough, added that with a four-year-old, "being close to my mother and having our daughter know her grandmother is icing on top of the cake."
Linda Burton and Keith Whitfield
Linda Burton, James B. Duke Professor of Sociology, and Keith Whitfield, a professor of psychology and neuroscience, came to Duke in 2006 after long careers at Penn State University, where they met.
Keith Whitfield and Linda Burton
"I was recruited for two positions -- in human development and in biobehavioral health," Whitfield said in an interview. "Linda was chair of the search committee in human development. I selected the other department, which subsequently allowed us to avoid a situation where it could have been said that she recruited her future husband. As it was, our friendship grew, and we started dating."
Burton, an ethnographer, born and raised in Los Angeles, focuses on the impact of poverty on urban and rural families; Whitfield, a developmental psychologist who was born to a military family in Fukuoka, Japan, and "moved 20 or 25 times," studies individual differences in the aging process. They have done research together and separately.
"I've been able to learn Keith's perspective and integrate it into my own work," Burton said. "It opens the door for other interpretations of the data. We probably do debate more passionately than research partners who aren't part of a couple."
"The conversations naturally can go on longer when you work together and have dinner together and have the evening together," Whitfield said. "We've actually become more efficient over the years and instead of talking through an idea over for two days, the way we used to, we come to our conclusions more quickly -- because we understand each other better."
The couple has worked hard to negotiate issues of free time and division of chores. "The good part of having a partner who's an academic," Burton said, "is that we understand what's expected of us in our jobs, which aren't 9-to-5 jobs. The downside, for me, is that sometimes I extend the work day much longer than I should."
In raising three daughters (one of whom went to Duke) and a son, "I was the bad cop on money, she was the good cop," Whitfield said. "She was the bad cop on boyfriends, I was the good cop."
The couple came to Duke with different goals. "Linda was looking for a place that had and an intellectual environment that enhanced her research and facilitated the translation of her work into public policy," Whitfield said. "I have some interest in administration, and had built a reputation at Penn State in terms of leadership and service. Coming to Duke meant, to some extent, starting over again. At the same time, Duke in no way treated me as a trailing spouse; there was genuine interest in and respect for my area of specialty. I've been able to strengthen connections with colleagues I've had loosely for years and I've become more productive."
"Because we're in complementary disciplines, Duke was great about finding positions for both of us," Burton added. "Where universities sometimes run into challenges is if the spouses don't have equal skill sets. Because we both work hard, we both bring things to the table that made the recruiting process a little bit easier."