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<p>In my experience this is quite uncommon among academics. One fairly typical arrangement is the two-professor household—after all, who else are professors going to meet and couple up with if they’ve spent their entire lives in academic institutions? Very frequently one of the two (and it could be either gender) will be much sought-after for a lateral appointment, but part of the price is an appointment for the “trailing” spouse who also typically gets a bump up in salary, prestige, and/or perks. Or sometimes, both are attractive catches in their own right. It’s a costly arrangement for the institution doing the poaching, but these “twofers” happen all the time. Indeed, the less-sought-after spouse’s desire to move up is often the motivating factor behind the “star” of the couple’s willingness to relocate. I’ve even heard of one Ivy League institution that did a “three-fer,” hiring both the current spouse and the ex-spouse of the sought-after academic star, because the ex-spouse had joint custody of the kids and the star would agree to the move only if everyone could come along with a nice career-enhancing package.</p>
<p>Also, there are far more young academic couples than you might think who are on faculties at different institutions, sometimes in different cities or in inconveniently distant corners of major metropolitan areas, who would like to simplify their lives by being on the faculty at the same institution and living in the same community, conveniently close to their workplace. There are also lots of gay and lesbian couples who want to move to be in more gay-friendly communities; college campuses themselves are generally pretty supportive of gay couples, but that’s not always true of the surrounding communities. There are also lots of single faculty (including divorced persons) who are looking to move because the social scene is just too limiting at a school in some remote rural or small-town location. Rumor has it that Cornell loses a lot of younger faculty this way; if you’re a single faculty member in a small town like that, you may not want to date grad students, you quickly run through the other eligible singles on the faculty, and the prospects among “townies” and in the surrounding countryside are limited. I’ve also run into lots of young academics married to young lawyers who have portable skills but are often underemployed in small college towns; for these non-academic spouses, the academic’s lateral move will be to a place where the lawyer-spouse’s career prospects are brighter.</p>
<p>The point is, it takes all kinds, and there are all kinds out there. Many, possibly most academics are not willing to move at any given time. But I think an overwhelming majority do move at least once, often more than once, over the course of their careers, and at any given moment there will be some significant number actively looking, or at least receptive to considering the idea of a move. This is really not anything new or different. The only unusual aspect of the current situation is that at least half of the institutions have shut down their hiring, while the fiscal crises at some institutions have probably pushed a slightly larger-than-usual number of academics into a posture of actively reconsidering their career options. That makes it an extremely attractive “buyer’s market” for the smallish number of schools that have money to do hiring.</p>