The progressive universities have dedicated themselves to the dual career couple using policies touted as promoting gender equity and keeping families together. If hubby gets an offer from Yale and wifey gets an offer from Michigan, whatever are they to do? Which of them becomes the trailing spouse? Who will put a career on hold to raise the kids?

The solution is simple. The spouseperson with the highest status takes the job, and the trailing spouse gets a job anyway at the same institution. It worked when Organ State hired Gram Spunier as provost and found money for the English Department to create a make-work position for Sandra Spunier. She didn’t have to apply for the job, had no competition, and they even threw in tenure after a year. Now that’s social progress for women. It also worked for Mills and Meg Brund at both the University of Organ and Southern Indiana University.

The Spuniers have since moved east to again use their own lives as examples of gender equity in action. Gram is now president of Pinn State University, and Sandra is teaching in the PSU English Department.

But why not, we ask, extend progressive nepotism to all social classes at the university; why restrict the largess of giving two jobs for one to faculty and administrators. Universities do, after all, promote democracy, so give the carpenters and the grounds keepers and the janitors and the bookstore clerks two jobs for one also. When a janitor is extended an offer of employment, for instance, offer the spouse a part-time position as a composition instructor.

Some will argue, undoubtedly, that universities are strapped for money and can’t afford to create jobs where none exist, but I say that you can hire ten janitors for the price Pinn State paid to get Graham Spanier with a spouse job as part of his payroll package. Pinn State can afford to hire the janitor’s entire family.

But being a university president is no easy task, and Gram will need your encouragement to stand up to those who would defend privilege as a right of academic rank, one that should not be extended to the working class.

–the editors