have spouse, will travel

I ran across this story today in the Boston Globe about academic couples. The focus couple in the story were a tenured professor at Harvard and her husband, who had been a non-tenured professor at Yale before leaving for a position at Harvard. The article tells about the couple's 13 years of commuting between MA and CT. Not to belittle their plight but it's nothing I haven't heard before. I've heard of further long distance relationships among even married academic couples. It's become a fact of life if one or the other spouse refuses to put his or (usually) her career aspirations aside for the other. This, among other factors, is what results in the spreading epidemic of the "academic gypsy". It's a lifestyle I won't and can't accept for myself.

What struck me when reading was a quote, below, from Henry Louis Gates Jr. (a former chairman of African and African-American Studies at Harvard):
"I don't think universities do themselves any favors if they lower their standards to recruit a spouse."

I have to say, while I think that the academic gypsy lifestyle is misery on ice - sometimes literally due to winter commutes - and things need to change, I gotta agree at least a little bit with Dr. Gates' sentiment. Such compromised standards are after all how my department ended up with one of our least liked faculty members. His wife was a desirable hire and he was, well, baggage.