Job Discrimination against Faculty Wives

Abstract

A T A state university in the Midwest, the psychological clinic is headed by a man who holds both a Ph.D. and an M.D. degree. He is a past president of his state's psychological association, and has been a consultant to a number of Veterans Administration hospitals in the area. His wife, who also holds a Ph.D. degree in psychology, has established a national reputation in her own right. She has written a book which is recognized as an important contribution in her field and is used in colleges and universities throughout the country. Although she have been happy to teach a course in the medical school of the same university in a near-by city-a course in which her book was used as a text-university regulations precluded her appointment to the faculty, much to her regret and to the detriment of students who could have benefited from her vast knowledge. A man accepted an appointment to the faculty of the English department at a small state college in the Northwest with the understanding that a position would be for his wife, who held a Ph.D. degree in psychology. Although she was better qualified than any member of the psychology department, the young couple soon discovered that for her, as the wife of a faculty member, a regular appointment was out of the question. Under prevailing regulations, the only position that could be arranged was an emergency part-time appointment on a temporary basis. In practice this meant that, from quarter to quarter, she never knew until the day after registration whether or not she could teach at all, much less what courses and how many. There were even quarters when her teaching assignment consisted of evening courses offered at an extension center two hundred miles from the college. A book by a husband-wife team at one of the Big Ten Midwestern schools has just come off the press. Both husband and wife hold Ph.D. degrees; the husband is listed as an assistant professor, the wife as a research associate. Prevailing regulations prevent the wife from being