The discussions on Twitter of student loan forgiveness, and the bitterness of those who don’t want to see others benefit from something they were denied, remind me of a conversation I had with a colleague in my first year on the tt.

A very senior male took me out for lunch and proceeded to regale me with the reasons he was adamantly opposed to spousal hiring. Long story short, when he started on the tt, he was told he had to live near campus and that there was no place for his wife on the tt.

She was a brilliant scholar with an Ivy PhD. I think of all she had to endure to get that degree in the 1960s. But there was no job for her where he worked, so she took a tt position at a teaching college about an hour’s drive away.