Higher education can be a family affair.

When Kansas University recently revealed its picks for two of several top administrative openings, the university also announced it would put their spouses on the payroll.

“These days, more often than not, you’re really recruiting two professionals to your faculty when you go out,” KU Chancellor Robert Hemenway said. “I think of it as a family employment policy. We believe in family values.”

Incoming Provost Richard Lariviere’s wife, Janis Lariviere, will be a program director in KU’s School of Education. And Gail Agrawal, the new dean of the law school, will move to Kansas with her husband, Naurang Agrawal, who will join the medical school faculty.

While it may seem foreign to those in other industries, many in academia say the practice of hiring couples is not uncommon.

“It’s become more acceptable because places like KU want to compete for what they believe are the best faculty,” said Susan Twombly, KU professor of teaching and leadership and co-author of the book “The Two-Body Problem: Dual-Career Couple Hiring Practices in Higher Education.” “The attitude has changed dramatically precisely because it’s a competitive world to find highly qualified faculty.”

The 1999 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty found more than 10 percent of full-time academics are married to another employee of the same institution.

But colleges and universities are not completely alone in this phenomena, said Lisa Wolf-Wendel, KU associate professor of teaching and leadership who also co-authored “The Two-Body Problem” along with a third KU professor, Suzanne Rice.

Wolf-Wendel said she viewed the recent dual hiring as normal.

“The higher you are up in the hierarchy of the institution, the more likely you are to have the institution accommodate your spouse or partner,” she said.

Such hirings fall outside the state’s conflict of interest statutes, said Carol Williams, executive director of the state ethics commission. Laws regarding nepotism deal with such cases as already employed workers hiring family members or spouses, and in these cases the main job seeker is not yet employed.

The practice is more rare in private industry.

Suzanne Layton, human resources manager for a manufacturing company in North Kansas City, Mo., and president of the Human Resource Management Association of Greater Kansas City, said hiring couples could cause problems in her business.

“Other employees can be really protective of their benefits and their perceived lot in the ranking of the company,” Layton said. “It may happen more in higher education than it does in the general work world.”

Kelli Christman, a spokeswoman for Cerner Corporation, a major employer in the Kansas City metro area, said dual-spouse hiring was not a common request.

Creating jobs

Dual-career couples at KU are nothing new.

In another recent hire, Rick Ginsberg, who started in August as Dean of the School of Education, also came with his wife, Lauri Herrmann-Ginsberg, who is a faculty member in the same school.

Herrmann-Ginsberg said she talked with a number of different departments on campus about positions that would be opening.

“I didn’t have any perception that I was just going to be walking into something,” she said. “I didn’t expect that the university was going to simply provide me with something.”

But for Herrmann-Ginsberg, the matter of whether she worked at the university was not the biggest factor in determining whether to come to Lawrence.

She said she checked out the churches, schools and even the veterinary clinics.

“Family was the thing that came absolutely first,” she said.

In some cases, accompanying spouses or partners fill vacancies that universities have been looking to fill. In other cases, the positions are created to accommodate the spouse.

KU spokeswoman Lynn Bretz said Friday she was unable to determine whether the positions for Agrawal’s and Lariviere’s spouses were specially created. But Bretz provided detailed information about Janis Lariviere’s resume and said the university was lucky to have her.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln once had an employee who worked exclusively trying to find opportunities for dual-career partners, said Evelyn Jacobson, UNL’s associate vice chancellor of academic affairs.

Though the position was cut for budget reasons, the university now has an informal networking process for such hires, Jacobson said.

“It’s very much a problem for higher education in dealing with this,” she said.

Wolf-Wendel said the benefits of such hiring practices were that institutions can enhance their ability to recruit and retain quality people. Those people could stay longer and be happier, more loyal and more productive. She said institutions could also get two good hires at once.

“Smart people marry smart people,” she said.