A tweet about the privilege of romantic partnership in academia has sparked a complicated conversation in which I’ve taken part. That conversation has left me with two significant takeaways that I am carrying with me into the week:

1. That our efforts to talk publicly about romantic relationships and their influence on academic careers are threatening, hurtful, or otherwise distressing, at least a little bit, to most of the people I know.
2. That if we are going to invest meaningfully in building an academic community of care, we have to be able to talk about love.

In what follows, I’m going to try to unpack a little bit about why this conversation is difficult for so many people, and about how we might move forward in opening this conversation. I’ll give some examples of discussions about relationships in academia that I have seen go wrong, and try to understand what went wrong and how we can do better. CW: racism, misogyny, white tears.

Some anecdotes

1. At a book club once[1], when I was a graduate student, someone remarked that women in academia have it easier because so many of us benefit from the financial support of our (presumably male) (presumably financially secure) partners, and because affirmative action in hiring hurts white men. The person in question, a stranger, was a lawyer who had moved to Texas to support her husband’s academic career, and who was waiting for him to land a tenure-track job before she took the bar.

First, let me clear, this person’s argument was based in racism and internalized misogyny, which is sad.

But also, at the time I had recently moved into an apartment with a man I loved, who was in a high-earning career, and who would be able to support me financially if we remained together through my job search. There was some truth in what the stranger was saying. It was unfair.

To come into a privilege that you are not born with, to find yourself suddenly allied with power, is a condition common to straight(ish) white women. It is one way that white women are recruited to uphold white supremacy and patriarchy. So I heard those comments and I thought, it’s true, I am benefitting from an unfair privilege at the cost of my colleagues and peers.

And I also thought: why is it that we can only talk about my privileges by devaluing my accomplishments? This response, which was reactionary, was the predictable reaction of someone occupying sites of privilege: the resentment towards my privileges, often expressed in ways that are unkind, can make me feel unfairly targeted, and make it easy to confuse personal disrepect for structural inequality.

It is easier not to talk about the tangled web of partnership and privilege that enables some academics to risk financial insecurity, than to take on both the hostility and the reality of academic finances.

Further reading on academic finances

Something that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough in discussions of the academic job market: the effects on personal finances and credit. (Thread)

— Margie Housley (@margiehousley) March 3, 2019

1. After dinner following an invited talk at a university, an older man — the person who had invited me — offered to walk me to my hotel. I said I was fine, he insisted, and I caved. (This was early in my career. I do not cave anymore.) As we walked, he asked me about my relationship status. When I confessed that not only was I involved with someone, but that person had collaborated with me on several projects, he said: “Oh, so he does the hard work for you.” This was the first of an escalating sequence of conversations that, while never overt, nevertheless became disruptive enough that I made a formal complaint.

Collaborating with my lover was a wonderful thing, one of the happiest academic experiences of my career. It is also clouded by shame, because I know that when I reveal the nature of our relationship, I run the risk of being seen as someone who uses sex (and love) for academic advancement; as someone riding the coattails of my successful partner. This is similar to how I hear people talk about the jobs that they, or their partners, were offered as part of a succesful recruitment package.

If I were in a different sitaution, I might feel resentful towards people who were able to ‘jump the line,’ as I have. As it is, I worry about misogynstic responses to any honest discussion of my work and my relationship. I nevertheless cannot allow myself to be distracted by these reactions, when the real problem rests on the difficulty of finding gainful employment as an academic.

Just because academia is not functioning as a meritocracy does not mean that we don’t all have merit.

1. At a dinner very early in my career, a professor began to speak about the harrassment and ostracization she had experienced as a woman in academia who did not have children. She was expected to perform at a much higher level than her procreating peers, she said, and to take on additional labor in support of faculty who had childcare responsibilities at home.

A faculty member, another woman, who did have children remarked that actually everything about academia was designed to punish women with children, launching a barely-polite argument that I observed with discomfort, bordering on horror. Structurally, we know that women in academia face institutional punishment for having children, in addition to the financial costs of childraising in the United States. We also know that women who do not have children face real social costs.

What was clear from the dinner conversation was that in academia, women would be punished regardless of their family choices. It was also clear that because of this, the choice to have children or to remain childless were pitted against one another. Everyone was resentful.

1. two body problems.

Here are some things I know that academia expects of academic relationships:

• Academics are expected to benefit from the support of a single romantic partner (SRP).
• SRPs are expected to provide emotional support
• SRPs are expected to provide logistical support (childcare, housekeeping)
• SRPs are expected to provide financial support
• SRPs are expected to move cities as necessary

Here are some things I know about actual academic relationships:

• Many academics do not have SRPs
• Many academics are single
• Many academics have queer, poly, or other relationships
• Many academics of all kinds have family-like relationships that are not sexual
• Many SRPs have debt, not income
• Many SRPs have careers of their own
• Many SRPs require caretaking
• Many SRPs are unable or unwilling to move

Every time - literally every time - I’ve heard people try to speak honestly about academia and families I have felt threatened, excluded, uncomfortable. I don’t think I’m alone in this.

In my case, I feel uncomfortable because falling in love has come with a host of new privileges I did not foresee. Because I feel in love with a man with money, I became unexpectedly a heterosexual, monogamous white woman in a difficult career. I have been accused of having my work done for me. I have been advised to leave academia and let my partner support me. While I don’t love this treatment, I understand why people who are scrambling and desperate, in a profession that is often unkind, would feel angry at the benfits I accrued not through merit, but through love. I also recognize that is rooted is misogyny.

I also feel uncomfortable because in my case, and I suspect in many cases, my relationships and my romantic life are much more complex than they look from the outside. Because I feel that protecting the privacy of my partners is important, you will have to trust me when I say that being partnered has been both the greatest source of security and also the greatest source of struggle in my academic career. The best thing about this is that I have an academic community that has rallied around me — the romantic friendships that Sami Schalk describes. That’s why we need an academic discussion of family that is inclusive of friendship, of polyamory, of impermanent romances.

We also need to talk about children, but I can’t say much about this.

So I think we need to find a way to talk about our relationships and our families without reverting immediately into misogyny. We need to find a way to acknowledge and even distribute the benefits of partnered support, while also knowing that partnerships can also be costly. We need to find away to make academic success simultaneously less dependent on and destructive of romantic partnership.

I think we need to figure out how to be radically empathetic towards one another even if we are afraid, and insecure, and jealous. I’m about to sound preachy, but look: the collapse of our profession requires us to turn inwards towards each other, with love.

Family and Contingency

This is a reflection, not an answer, but my focus right now has been on academic contingency and I want to take advantage of this topic to think briefly about the specific intersections of relationships and contingency.

For humanists who are not of ivy league pedigree, rumor has it that it now takes 3-5 years of contingency to get an academic job. Let me tell you something: the first people to drop out are the people with families. No one with children can go for years without a secure paycheck. Very few spouses are willing to follow an itinerant academic not to one city, but to two or three.

And you know what? When the smoke clears from this chaotic job market decade, I am willing to bet that is women, and especially mothers, who bear the cost of growing contingency the most. If we want to retain women and mothers in academia, we have to do something to improve the security of contingent positions. My ideas?

• We need to make contingent positions that are renewable for 2, 3, or 4 years.
• We need more contingent positions that are internal hires, and we need paths to internal hires for those who are contingent.
• We need to rethink the VAP.

What are yours?

[1] We were reading Friday Night Lights, which was fab.

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