Separation in Academe

Bonnie Wheeler, a slender, long-haired blonde of 28, does not like flying, so she always takes an aisle seat and avoids looking out the window. "I'm a Chaucerian, and I don't quite believe that planes are licit," she says. She recalls that Geoffrey Chaucer, in The House of Fame, described his own feeling of panic when a great golden eagle carried him off into the skies. "The eagle flies Geoffrey around on his back, and tries to show him all the marvelous things there are in the world. All Geoffrey says to each new sight is, 'No, no. It's unnatural. I don't want to see.' "

Natural or not, Bonnie Wheeler has been boarding a plane at 8 o'clock every Tuesday morning in Cleveland, where her husband Robert is an assistant professor of American history at Cleveland State, and flying 405 miles eastward to New York City, where she herself teaches English 94001X (Medieval Literature) at Columbia. From Tuesday to Thursday, she occupies a two-room apartment on Manhattan's West Side and communicates with her husband only by telephone ($100 a month). On Thursdays she wings back to Cleveland. Her husband picks her up at the airport and drives her to their suburban home in Cleveland Heights, to their 18-year-old adopted son and their Saint Bernard.

Controlled Chaos. "Most people I know would be terribly unhappy with this kind of life," says Mrs. Wheeler. "But I enjoy sharing things with someone whose own life-style lends itself to this peculiar situation. The times we have apart make us more conscious of the time we have together. The labors of living are totally divided by convenience. Any one of the three of us might make dinner or vacuum the house. It's a life of controlled chaos."

In times past, when two graduate students married each other, the man often went on to become a professor while the woman became a research assistant. Many colleges had "nepotism" rules against hiring a husband and wife, and those rules were not designed to bar husbands. All that is changing, partly under the pressure of last year's federal guidelines that require any institution receiving more than $50,000 annually in federal grants to take "affirmative action," ensuring more and better jobs for women. Wisconsin, for instance, now encourages the hiring of husbands and wives "wherever dual appointments are appropriate," and the University of Kansas even goes out of its way to recruit academic couples. Hamline and Stanford universities, among others, are trying a different technique: hiring a couple to share a single appointment.

Despite these innovations, an academic wife looking for a job is apt to find one far from home; then, like Bonnie Wheeler, she must decide whether she or her husband will face the rigors of long-distance commuting.

> Annis Pratt, 36, wife of Political Science Professor Henry Pratt of Detroit's Wayne State University, says she was feeling "stifled" at the lack of a job.

"Then I heard about a sudden opening teaching English at Wisconsin, and I took it just like that. I was going for broke." She says that her 326-mile weekly trip between Detroit and Madison represents "an academic separation" (which also chews up most of her $12,000 salary), and "there never was any question but that Henry would take care of the children [two daughters of six and eight]. They have been very cheerful so long as I turn up in Detroit every Thursday night." Mrs. Pratt has never missed a homecoming--or a class.

"One time, though, I had to run out on the airstrip and wave at the plane until it stopped, and they let me on. The other passengers cheered."

>Alice Berry, 35, says that she was barred by a surviving nepotism rule from getting a job at Georgia State, where her husband Will teaches political science, so she left home to accept an assistant professorship in French at Yale. "It was a necessity both for me and my marriage that I have a career," says Mrs. Berry, who lives at one of the colleges at Yale and flies back to Georgia for three days every two weeks. Her chief concern is her daughter Vanessa, 4, who attends a day-care center in Georgia. "My husband and I are tough --we can stand this--but I'm not sure that she can, although I don't see any signs of upset in her. You explain it to a child as a necessity. It's very hard to deal with your own guilt, but you really have to be careful never to say, Tm sorry.' " As for Will, he puts up with the situation, but Mrs. Berry says it is a matter of free choice, adding, "If my husband were ever about to divorce me, I'd quit."

> Mary Ann Ferguson got an appointment teaching English at the University of Massachusetts while her husband remained at Ohio State. "I thought I should be home on weekends because our youngest daughter was in her last year in high school." Concerning her marriage, she says, "Being apart hurts.

You have to explain things, and that's very fatiguing. The commuting cost me $3,000 a year, but it was less than half my salary, and it was an investment, not so much in my career as in my sanity.

How much would it have cost to be institutionalized?" Ferguson now also has a job at the University of Massachusetts. He is 57, his wife 54, and this is the first year in a lifetime of teaching in which they have had tenured jobs on the same campus.

It takes a strong sense of purpose to drive such women to such lengths, but that kind of purpose is becoming increasingly common. Bonnie Wheeler, too, spends most of her $12,000 salary on her $600-a-month commuting and apartment bill. It does not faze her. "I feel as though I'm in the second generation of liberation," she says. "The first generation, that of my women professors at Brown, taught me that there were alternatives to staying home and being a housewife. There is nothing bizarre about a traveling salesman, but somehow the male idea of the female is violated by a woman commuting. Sometimes I feel that the men I sit next to on the plane consider me an extra stewardess--that I should converse and be entertaining. When I told one man that I was busy working, he began screaming about liberated women."

One question remains: Why is it so often the woman teacher who does the commuting? Now that, too, is being adjusted. Next fall, Robert Wheeler is going to begin doing some of the commuting from Cleveland to Bonnie's New York apartment.

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