sundai
Editor: Stephen Hersh R
maigiza ne
\ssociate Editors: Ann 'Marie Lipinski, Elaine Fletcher
inside:
page four-books
page five-
perspective
Number 6
October 17, 1976
Sharing a car er as we as a marriia
Fe.
By LAURIE YOUNG
IT IS NOT UNCOMMON today for a husband and wife to see each other
only on weekends. The woman may practice law in Washington D.C.
and the man may be a professor in New York City and, if they're lucky,
they join each other at the end of their work weeks.
It is also common for a husband and wife to be fortunate enough
to work in the same city and see each other ten hours a day. Sometimes,
however, they are no better off than the "commuter couple" because
more often than not eight of those ten hours together are spent asleep.
Dual career marriages-marriages in which both members are com-
mitted to related lifelong careers - present an unique and challenging
appointment, biochemistry professors Harvey and Carolyn Whitfield
have opted for the same kind of appointment and say the "Jacksons
blazed the trail for us."
A shared position has given the Jacksons and Whitfields an oppor-
tunity to do what they like best-research. Although they enjoy teach-
ing, research not only makes them better teachers, they claim, but also
leads to further advancement in their prospective fields.
"We share a position in a special sense," David Jackson explained
sitting comfortably in his wife's office which adjoins the laboratory
they share. "What we've done is reallocate the jobs that we have so each
of us spends more than the usual amount of time on research and less
than the usual amount on formal
classroom teaching."
"The whole training process for
scientists emphasizes research and
naturally you get people becoming
scientists who like very much to do
research and who are good at it.
Most people, I think it's fair to say,
are dissatisfied with how little re-
search time they have."
Harvey, Whitfield, a 1976 teach-
ing award recipient, agrees. "I
think both the University gains
and we gain, because we get a
chance to be more productive. In
my case, I have a one-track mind.
It's very hard for me to put a sus-
tained effort into a research pro-
ject when I'm worried about teach-
ing because I take teaching very
seriously."
Each couple began to examine
the possibility of a shared position
when Carolyn and Ethel were fin-
ishing up their post-doctoral fel-
lowships and were ready to begin
looking for jobs. Harvey and David
already had faculty positions at
* the University.
"A shared position is a way in
Daily Photos by PAULINE LUBENS which we could both'stay at Mich-
iRan without having to look for
Hield jobs elsewhere - that's the key,"
said Harvey.
"It became apparent to me that if Carolyn couldn't find a job around
here and if the marriage was going to stay in one piece, that she'd have
to find a job around here or we'd have to move. So a shared position
was a' possible way out of it."
"It isdifficult to find a job that you like, that pays a good salary, is
in a place where you want to live and has nice professional colleagues,"
David said. "That's a relatively low probability for one person-say a
possibility of ten per cent. When you've got two people married to each
other, then the probability is now one per cent . . . That's the nature
of the whole problem for married people."
The factor apparently contributing the most to the success of a
shared position is that each individual is professionally independent of
each other. They each have separate areas of expertise and separate
research projects. And they each receive separate research grants. This
independence is particularly important for the women, who are under-
dogs not only because they are younger than their husbands, but also
because they must fight the traditional female sereotype.
"The fact that I'm two years younger (than Dave) and that I came
when Dave was already here, and that I was his wife, makes it a some-
what more ambiguous position for me," says Ethel. "I think the thing
that makes it work and makes it possible for me to be reviewed as an
independent person, rather than someone who just works with Dave,
is that I'm doing research on something quite different, something Dave
has not worked on."
"And, David adds, "you have your own grant which you got in a
competitive system that I had no part in at all."
"If I had worked with Dave on the same project and we published
together," Ethel continues, "then really no one but us would know how
independent I was and everyone would assume he was the one generat-
ing the ideas and that I was just the follower."
Carolyn faced the same apprehension. "Harvey already has tenure,
Harvey and Carolyn Whiti
set of pressures to participants. Vpt these marriages, along with dual
job marriages "are likely to be th" formal career pattern of the future,"
predicts University Psychology Prof. Judith Bardwick.
These stresses on dual career marriages, says Bardwick,' are "eco-
nomic, logistical and ultimately psychological" and are made worse
because of the limited market place.
But two young married couples at the University medical school
have discovered a successful way to be satisfied with their dual career
marriages and in the process, open up the system for other couples as
well.
David and Ethel Jackson, assistant professors of microbiology, share
one full-time faculty position. They each work full time, and supplement
each of their half-time salaries with money from independent research
grants. Their situation is unique in that they rotate their faculty re-
sponsibilities on a yearly basis. In a given year, one is responsible for the
teaching and administrative load, while the other is then free to do
full-time research.
Now, as the Jacksons enter the third year of their experimental
Laurie Young is a Daily staff writer.
Ethel Jackson
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By LINDA WILLCOX
ALMQOST 3,500 years ago, an Egyptian queen named Tiy was
sent off into the after-life with a mammoth funeral.
Shortly afterward, grave robbers plundered her grave-
taking, among other things, the precious markers which lab-
eled Tiy's mummy with her name.
That spelled bad news for the spirit of the dead queen,
because according to Egyptian mythology of the period, a
spirit couldn't stay in the next world as long as its corpse
was unmarked.
Well, it seems as though Tiy's long vacation in limbo is
finally over. Last week, her mummy was positively identified
by archeologist and University professor James Harris.
The identification of Tiy was the most spectacular arche-
ological event since the unearthing of Tut-Ankh-Amon's tomb
in 1922. But the find is spectacular only in scientific terms.
The queen's body was not surrounded by jewels, works of gold,
or other antique artifacts.
The university research team has worked for about four
years searching through the royal mummy collection's cata-
logues, analysing x-ray comparison of Tiy with other mum-
mies and performing detailed chemical hair analyses before
Tiy was finally identified.
"It was not extremely dramatic," Harris admitted late in
the week. "But after working hard for so long, we were grati-
fied to see our research going along the lines we wanted it to."
Harris added that not all member of the team had such
scientific reactions to the find, Prof. Edward Wente of the
University of Chicago had a more romantic thought in mind.
"Wente thought how pleasing it would have been to Queen
Tiy to have been found and have her identity re-established,"
said Harris.
The tombs, which he described as several hundreds of
feet underground, consisted of a burial chamber for the mum-
my and sarcophogi (cages containing the mummy and some
nersonale ffets). ieic hamhrs for offerinos .everal nther
David Jackson
but when I come up for tenure, they can't say, 'let's see his work.' My
work is completely different. If we were working on the same project,
no one would be able to tell. If I hadn't had an opportunity to share a
position, we would have eventually had to go interview somewhere else
because I don't think I would have wanted to stay in someone else's
laboratory forever - even though it was a good lab."
Working in a shared position has created special advantages for
each person - both professionally and personnaly. Having a person
who is both your spouse and a trained scientist in close proximity pro-
vides companionshill as well as a constant sounding board.
* "One thing that's really nice is that we get to see each other fairly
often," says Ethel. "And certainly I feel I'm a lot luckier than a lot of
couples we know where the man is an assistant professor in science and
the woman is not in science at all. At this stage in his career, a scientist
is in his lab twelve hours a day, six days a week and somebody who's
at home really isn't going to see him very much, whereas I can walk
over to Dave's office on the other side of that wall and we can have