Ms. Mayne has her doubts. These days, her husband is working in a tenure-track position at Westminster. It's not that one of you doesn't get tenure and you only have one job. You can risk losing both jobs. In part, the risks are magnified because the rules for tenuring job-sharing professors are so unclear.
Some institutions maintain that if one party fails, the pair fails.
But most colleges say they consider job-splitting professors separately for tenure, meaning that either one or both can win academe's top prize. The requirements for tenure in terms of scholarship, teaching, and service are up for grabs, too. At Albion College, both Timothy Lincoln, a professor of geological sciences, and his wife, Beth, were expected to excel separately at teaching, but scholarship and service were another matter entirely. On those fronts, they were judged as a team come tenure time. But together we were supposed to have published as much as one full-time person and together we were supposed to have served on as many committees.