Married with tenure: Spouses share Princeton

For ordinary couples, detailed complaints about hassles at work and juicy tidbits picked up at the water cooler may mean little to the other spouse. For a good number of Princeton professors, however, work and family can blend together almost seamlessly.

Like many other university communities, Princeton has its share of faculty members whose spouses are also members of the University faculty.

Because teaching positions are so hard to come by, aspiring professors are often forced to accept positions that separate them from loved ones. Couples who have managed to secure two positions on the Princeton faculty consider themselves lucky.

Lucky to be together

The saga of Deborah and Philip Nord’s more than 10 years of commuting is one of these stories.

The two intellectuals were studying and working at different institutions, commuting back and forth between New York City, Connecticut, Cambridge and New Jersey at various points for close to a decade. The Nords also had two children during this time.

“All of those years, we were constantly applying for jobs near each other and trying to be together,” said Philip, a history professor.

Finally, in 1989, Deborah, then at Harvard, was invited to join her husband at Princeton. After serving as an assistant professor in the English department, she was soon offered a tenured position in the Program in the Study of Women and Gender.

This decade of struggle made the Nords appreciate being together at Princeton even more. “I think we both felt a pretty strong loyalty to Princeton and a feeling that we owed Princeton a lot of our energies and time because we felt very fortunate to be here together,” Deborah said.

“Statistics show that academics are increasingly married to each other,” religion professor R. Marie Griffith said. “Many stories are really difficult, and for some people, they’re never able to land at the same institution.”

Griffith and her husband Leigh Schmidt ’85, both professors in the religion department, met before coming to Princeton. “It’s sort of an amazing story,” Griffith said. “We’d both applied for positions here and then started dating.”

Schmidt was hired in 1995, and Griffith was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship at the University the same year.

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After finishing her fellowship, Griffith spent several years commuting to Princeton to be with her husband until she was hired in 1998 as the associate director of the Center for the Study of Religion.

“For those of us here who have managed to get great jobs at a great institution ... I think it’s a wonderful life. We feel very fortunate,” Griffith said.

Gene Grossman, a professor in the economics department, met his wife Jean in graduate school. When he came to work at Princeton in 1980, his wife was working for a nonprofit think tank in Philadelphia. Then, seven years ago, Jean joined the faculty as a part-time professor in the Wilson School.

Princeton is very generous about finding jobs for faculty spouses, Gene said.

“It’s becoming a bigger and bigger factor in recruiting people to Princeton,” he explained. “There are any number of spouses of faculty that we’ve recruited. More often than before and quite frequently you just need to find something for a spouse to do.”

Meeting at Princeton

Princeton set the scene for the marriage of Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel and economics professor Burton Malkiel GS ’64. Burton was already an economics professor when Nancy joined the staff in 1969 as a history professor. At the time, the two departments were both housed in Dickinson Hall.

Nancy and Burton got to know each other better when Nancy headed a committee of tenured faculty to consider the introduction of a women’s studies program at Princeton. Burton was included on that committee.

Nancy said that she stayed in close contact with Burton and his first wife, Judy, even when Burton left Princeton to become the dean of the Yale School of Management.

When Judy passed away after battling brain cancer, Nancy and Burton began their relationship, with Burton returning to Princeton after they married in 1988.

Overlapping lives

Having a spouse who works in the same institution can give the benefit of perfectly synchronized schedules, sympathy for gripes about work and an easy way to stay connected. “On the most mundane level, it means that we can touch base with each other during the day,” Deborah Nord said.

Sharing the same hours and vacations can be a perk, too. “We have the same schedule in the sense that if we’re going to do any kind of traveling, we know when spring break is. For both of us, we know when there are certain University obligations that need to be done,” Burton said.

Deborah and Frank Popper, both part-time professors in the civil and environmental engineering department, take this coordination to a new level. Each fall since 2001, the two have co-taught ENV 305: American Regional Planning. They use their different teaching styles, areas of expertise and interpretations of material to enrich the class.

The dynamic that the Poppers create is one where both “often disagree publicly about course material, frequently interpreting it in different ways,” Frank explained. “Early in the course, we tell students this will happen, then disagree deeply but civilly in front of them, sometimes about quite central matters, and the course goes on perfectly nicely.”

“When one of us is tired or flat, we can spell each other. Sometimes when one of us simply can’t answer a question, the other can,” he added.

Being a fellow academic makes Deborah Nord appreciate her husband’s work and share his appetite for intellectual discussion. “Even if we weren’t teaching in the same place, we would share ideas and have a very good understanding of each other’s work,” she said.

Burton Malkiel admits to relying on his wife to help him improve his articles and books. “I don’t write anything that she doesn’t go over with a red pen and improve dramatically because she herself is an extremely clear writer,” he said.

Knowing Princeton as an institution can also help the couples understand day-to-day challenges.

“When you talk in the evening about what was new in your day, there’s clearly a much deeper understanding,” Burton said. “There’s a kind of frame of reference that I think helps [create] an understanding of what the issue might be.”

Deborah Nord offered similar sentiments. “We are both working at an institution, so we can share each other’s institutional life whether it be intellectually, socially or gossip,” she said.

Griffith said that, since they attend departmental faculty meetings together, she and Schmidt have a great deal of understanding about work issues.

“We’re always interested in each other’s work,” Griffith said.

Family time

Though there is much benefit in staying close throughout the workday, too much of a Princeton focus can also be overbearing. “On the positive side, we’re never bored when we have stories to tell,” Griffith said. “On the downside, it can threaten to take everything over.”

Griffith emphasized the importance of her children to balancing her family’s dynamic. “When we leave work, our lives are about family,” she said. “I think that that separation is for us essential. If all we had was our work, it might be overwhelming to live with someone whose life overlaps [with] yours so much.”

Gene Grossman echoed Griffith’s thoughts. Though he appreciates that he and Jean can have “a common language for some jargon or concepts that we use for thinking about the world,” sometimes there can be too much focus on their shared academic field.

“There are also times when you want your spouse to be a spouse and not an economist ... you just want support and not criticism,” Grossman said.

He added that he and his wife were careful to limit their economics discussions around their kids lest they pigeonhole their two daughters into the same profession.

Perks of proximity

Working with a spouse can have other unforeseen impacts on a professor’s life. Gene and Jean Grossman frequently get each other’s e-mails, and when Gene wrote an op-ed for The Daily Princetonian, the byline mistakenly credited Jean.

Nancy Malkiel also knows that in case she needs to leave the office, she can always rely on Burton to come and walk her Schnauzer Skipper. Even the secretary and Public Safety at West College have come to expect Burton being charged with “Skipper duty,” he said.

Griffith and Schmidt always know they’ll see each other at late-afternoon receptions in the department and that they may even share the same students. “We sometimes have graduate and undergraduate students who take our classes,” Griffith said.

Amusing mishaps and occasional overbearing exposure aside, most couples are very positive about their shared experience.

The Nords’ offices are only 100 yards apart, and Philip likes to escape to relax and eat the chocolates in Deborah’s office, which he calls an “oasis.”

“Princeton is an extremely supportive institution for faculty couples,” Griffith said.

“It’s wonderful to share a life that is made up of such related parts. We both get to live in the same house, work at a wonderful institution that’s a five or 10 minute drive away. That’s a real gift when you’re an academic. Not to have to commute between two institutions and to both have wonderful jobs at the same place is just a wonderful gift,” Nancy Malkiel said.