As the lights go down in the seminar room, two veteran Stanford instructors prepare for a little friendly sparring. On one side of the table sits Wanda Corn, one of the country’s leading authorities on American art history. On the other side is the U.S. cultural historian Joseph Corn, her husband of nearly 40 years. They’re showing their Photography as History students a slide image of a Civil War battlefield photo by Mathew Brady. Wanda begins by pointing out the picture’s artistic qualities. But for Joe, what’s really important is that Brady exposed Americans for the first time to the brutality of war through photography. “Sometimes we even play up our differences so that our students might learn about different ways of seeing and thinking,” Wanda later confesses. “They say they feel lucky to have been taught by a married couple that can argue and still like each other!”
Stanford has been home to the occasional husband-and-wife faculty duo ever since Earl and Mary Sheldon Barnes were appointed professors of education and history in 1891-92. These days, with women earning nearly half of all doctorates awarded in the United States, the sight of profs pedaling his-and-her bikes to their respective campus offices is increasingly common. While Stanford keeps no official count, an informal tally reveals at least 20 married couples and domestic partners teaching in departments around the University.
Many of the pairs—like the Corns, or Al and Barbara Gelpi in the department of English—met during their student days and went on to build their academic careers side by side. Other Stanford couples already had established themselves when they became smitten. Associate professor Donald Barr, a physician who teaches courses on American health care policy in the human biology program, first struck up a conversation with his future wife, political philosopher Debra Satz, while they were standing in a slow line for coffee at the Poli Sci Café. It turned out that each was trying to create a service-learning course. “I mentioned that I was working in the same area,” Barr, MS ’90, PhD ’93, says with a grin, “and the rest is history.” Psychologists Laura Carstensen and Ian Gotlib—she an authority on the elderly and he an expert on teenage depression—first met at an academic meeting 10 years ago. Four years later, they decided to get married—even though he was at Northwestern and she’d been working at Stanford since 1987. “Individually, we’d always put our careers ahead of our lives, and so we figured it was time to stop that and do something for us,” Carstensen says. “We felt that we would find jobs together somewhere, and if that meant going to North Dakota State, we would do it.”
Carstensen didn’t have to go anywhere—Stanford’s psychology department was happy to welcome Gotlib into its ranks. But not all academic pairs are so lucky. If spouses’ fields of expertise are too similar, departments may be disinclined to spend their limited funds hiring both. Conversely, there may be little incentive for far-flung departments to cooperate when partners want jobs in different schools. One person who tries to help: law professor Robert Weisberg. As special assistant to the provost, Weisberg, JD ’79, frequently lobbies deans and department heads and sometimes even offers temporary funding to pay the salaries of talented spouses. “We don’t create jobs, but if a spouse or partner seems eminently qualified to fill a need, and if there isn’t immediate funding for that slot, we might help out with some resources to get that person going,” he explains. “This is a challenging task, but successes in this endeavor have sometimes clinched great recruitments.” Among them: the husband-and-wife team of Tamar Schapiro and Dmitri Petrov, promising young philosophy and biology postdocs from Harvard, who were married in 1996 and managed to land coveted assistant professorships at Stanford in the fall of 2000. “We have married friends from Harvard, both historians, and he had to turn down a prestigious offer from NYU because they wouldn’t even consider doing anything for her,” Schapiro says. “By comparison, we are by far the most fortunate couple we know.”
Fortunate is a word faculty couples use frequently when talking about their lives together on the Farm. Before settling at Stanford last year, philosophy professor Allen Wood spent 20 years commuting 140 miles each way over often snow-packed roads to Cornell so that his wife of 35 years, medievalist Rega Wood, could continue her tenured position in philosophy at New York’s St. Bonaventure University. Likewise, political scientist Jean Oi and sociologist Andrew Walder—China specialists who were married in 1984 and came to Stanford in 1997—spent years catching buses back and forth from New York City’s “gruesome” Port Authority terminal to see each other when Oi taught at Lehigh and Walder at Columbia.
Now that they’re nesting on the Stanford campus with their teenage son, Walder and Oi can touch base occasionally during the workday, proofread each other’s publications and cover each other’s classes in emergencies. The high point of each year: jointly hosting a traditional home-cooked Chinese New Year banquet for their grad students and guests. “Jean’s red-cooked pork is a favorite,” Walder says affectionately. Unlike Joe and Wanda Corn, Walder and Oi haven’t taught as a team. But one day, that course, too, may be on the menu.
