It almost never fails: You partner with a colleague from a different department or institution to apply for a grant, lead a workshop, teach a graduate seminar together, or write an article, and the next thing you know, word on the street has the two of you getting married or booking a clothing-optional cruise to Costa Rica.
And why not? Academic coupling—defined here as scholarly partnerships—seems inherently suspicious given the angsty tenor of most institutions these days. Research partners are surely expensive (two salaries), disingenuous (they don't really do the work of two people), potential traitors to their own disciplines and the institutional turf those disciplines occupy, and politically insidious (they're their own power bloc). It's a dangerous liaison, which is why there must be something else going on to make it worth the risk.
Unfortunately for the gossip mill, the truth is not nearly so strange or sensational.
In fact, research partnerships are generally inexpensive and highly productive (their synergies produce much more work than the sum of the parts). The two partners are generally honest about their collaborations and their roles within them; rigorous in their cross-disciplinary efforts; politically benign (they become so used to working with others that their sense of turf and ego is greatly diminished); and thoroughly nonromantic. Indeed, these academic couples really ought to be the least scandalous members of the faculty. Scientists seem to have learned that lesson decades ago.
We write about scholarly couplings from experience: Two of us (Adela and Stephen) work together on issues of youth, sexuality, and rights, while the other two (Ken and Judd) study computer games. So what is it about two people working together in academe that so often sets tongues to wagging?
There are the obvious explanations: the overemphasis on individual achievement in academe and the understandable idyll of faculty members seeking refuge from grading papers, committee assignments, and unrelenting students. Nothing breaks up a humdrum day in the department quite like the vivified phantasm born of a deliciously sordid detail that someone's concocted. To accept a workplace collaboration as just that and nothing more may be fair, but it's hardly exciting.
Especially in disciplines where co-authoring, co-editing, co-presenting, co-teaching, and co-directing are the exception and not the rule, perhaps the titillating story is simply the result of envy over someone else's productive comraderies and stimulating intellectual engagements.
Then there are the conventional norms (hetero, homo, and gender) that shape institutional hierarchies and public domains—norms in which sexuality trumps collegiality. Academic couplings have to be sexual in some way because men will never resist going all the way with their friends under the right circumstances ... or so the manifold stories of fraternity parties, business conventions, and workplace romances would seem to confirm. Orientation isn't particularly relevant either—male collaborators become sexually coupled in the minds of many of their colleagues, just as a male-female collaborating couple is often perceived as straight.
More treacherous than the dime-novel gossip or the outdated notions of gender and sexuality are the—often more powerful—assumptions about collaboration. By transgressing the norms of knowledge production and what constitutes knowledge, interdisciplinary collaborations can appear to muddy intellectual waters.
There's also the ingrained sense that work-related collaboration just isn't natural. True enough, at least in many disciplines. If it were "natural," promotion-and-tenure criteria would multiply rather than split the credit for collaboratively done projects, rewarding rather than punishing scholars for such work. Six months of work is six months of work, whether one does it alone or with a team of people, but for some reason, that kind of non-zero-sum math (i.e., 100 percent + 100 percent = 200 percent rather than 100 percent + 100 percent = 100 percent) doesn't sit well with many academics. Because collaboration often effectively equals twice as much work for half as much credit during evaluation time, it's perfectly understandable to think that something else must be driving a project other than the work itself. Why else would people submit to such institutional disincentives?
That sense of something fishy is magnified by the unusual directions that academic work can take when two scholars work together—the English professor who is suddenly doing social-science work, or the engineer turned filmmaker, for example. There's no question that collaboration has its own mystique and can be hard to understand, and it's often so difficult and complicated to pull off successfully that most people don't even bother.
At the same time, there's the wildly erroneous assumption among noncollaborators that working together is easier than going it alone, and that collaboration befits lazy people who are trying to get away with something in the academy—like an intimately involved couple trying to get dual credit for doing a single job (as if the ceaseless and often diabolically invasive reviews and assessments that define contemporary academe could even allow such a thing). For junior faculty members, such false assumptions can quickly morph from stories of coattail riding to those of the casting couch; for senior scholars, they morph from tales of parasitism (the junior does the work and the senior gets the credit) to those of the Lothario or Cougar.
We've often heard tell of conversations to that very effect in decisions over admissions, promotion and tenure, grant review, and hiring. And we've heard that from colleagues all over the country and at all kinds of institutions. Clearly, teamwork makes many people nervous.
Without question, academic coupling can be accompanied by behaviors that, outside of romantic relationships, look a little strange. For example, regarding our own couplings, we freely (although with some embarrassment) admit to routinely:
- Finishing each other's sentences.
- Using an "I'd better check with the boss" maneuver before committing to an answer about something.
- Complimenting each other in public.
- Keeping aware of and sometimes even organizing each other's schedules.
- Openly teasing each other.
- Ordering and paying for one another's meals at restaurants.
- Reminding each other of promises, obligations, and other easily forgotten information,
- Serving as the other's consigliere, as well as proxy.
- Expressing views openly about professional development and movement. (We are also close to each other's families, and have more or less committed to our academic couplings, which is discussed concretely in terms such as continual searches for new collaborative opportunities, and in one instance, conducting a dual job search.)
Do academic couples send mixed signals?
The best ones do. They're intimately attuned to how their partners think, write, speak, and otherwise convey their professional and private identities in a wide range of contexts. They trust each other with their careers, which among many academics is tantamount to trusting each other with their lives. And that Platonic intimacy matures, with new academic couples often exhibiting a kind of fresh, unstoppable energy, while longtime partners seem more methodical and steadfast.
To some outsiders, we realize, the separation between being work and sexual partners must appear paper-thin given all the other personal boundaries such couples cross. However, it's important to remember that the work is the thing—scholarly coupling is all about the projects, not the coupling.
There's no question, then, that inhabiting (intentionally or not) the couple identity involves both privilege and risk. There's privilege in the satisfying, even exhilarating, collaborations that emerge, and in the production of new ways of seeing and doing. And there's risk not only because many institutions (or their subunits) effectively punish collaboration, but also because when queer and straight identities (rightly or wrongly assessed) are superimposed over academic identities, the resulting palimpsest can take on a scolding quality—"If you collaborated less with Pat, your promotion case would be much stronger"—that no one wants on their record.
Unfortunately, we come by these various observations honestly. When Adela and Stephen—who are queer and who are both at the University of Arizona—were treated as husband and wife in their recent travels to, and presence at, a conference about sexuality and queer identity, their queer-scholar credentials were called into question.
Moreover, their continued institutional collaboration has aroused suspicions about them "coupling up" or "down" in rank, as well as about their intellectual commitments. At a time when many in the social and behavioral sciences are compelled to find an even more empirical angle to their research, why would Stephen choose to partner with someone from rhetoric, a field (in)famous for its mercurial approach to knowledge making? Shouldn't he be expanding into neuroimaging? Meanwhile, people in Adela's field wonder why she would compromise herself by working with someone who believes in the Truth of hard data, not to mention someone senior with the potential to overshadow and take advantage of her hard work.
Similarly, when Ken (University of Arizona) and Judd (Arizona State University)—who are straight—are presumed to be a gay couple, their scholarly credentials and professional aspirations are perceived as secondary to a desire to put an end to an imagined long-distance relationship they're assumed to be suffering through. That not only gives short shrift to their scholarly partnership, but also reproduces some very problematical sexual scripts and assumptions. Given the fact that their work is in computer-game studies, which already seems a little silly to many folks, their collaboration has few defenses to deploy against onslaughts coming from a more personal direction.
Understandably, we have some mixed feelings about how our academic couplings have been misread. We're angry but not all that surprised that traditional norms (e.g., being straight, being gay-but-just-like-straight) continue to be so powerful that overt cues to the contrary are readily ignored. And we're sometimes astonished that people respond so quickly and powerfully to what they want to see rather than to what they're actually seeing. We're disappointed, too, that collaboration and interdisciplinary work elicit so much suspicion.
Perhaps most unfortunate, though, is the fact that both hetero- and homonormative assumptions about scholarly couplings wind up impeding some academics from pursuing these avenues for knowledge production. Those entrenched attitudes are antithetical to the very mission of higher education: to expand the limits of what we know and how we know it.
To our way of thinking, it's time to start valuing the power so often wrought from close collaborations, and time to leave speculations about who's shaking the sheets to our friends over at the gossip site, TMZ.com.
