Program makes life easier for spouses

When a professor moves to the north country to accept a teaching position at one of the universities, he or she is often faced with a difficult question: where will my partner find work?

For academic couples, the Associated Colleges of the St. Lawrence Valley can provide an answer. The Associated Colleges, a nonprofit consortium of SUNY Canton, SUNY Potsdam, St. Lawrence University, Canton, and Clarkson University, Potsdam, offers a fellowship for spouses and partners of full-time professors to pursue academic work through its Center for Independent Scholars.

"When you spend the time and energy and money to interview and get someone here who's just the perfect person for a job, you want to make sure that the people who accompany them are also happy with the area," said Anneke J. Larrance, executive director of the Associated Colleges. "It's meant to give someone without any other academic appointment this affiliation with Associated Colleges. We're not just giving them a title; we're also giving them resources for their scholarly work."

Although they are unsalaried, every Independent Scholars fellow is provided with an office in an appropriate academic department and library privileges at the four colleges. According to Mrs. Larrance, the program also provides an opportunity for scholars to build professional relationships, participate in an academic atmosphere, apply for grants and benefit from academic affiliation with the consortium.

Once accepted in the program, the fellows are expected to give an annual public presentation about their scholarly work, serve as a role model for students and other unaffiliated academics, and acknowledge the center's support in their publications and conference attendance. Established in 1984, the program sees several fellows each year, with topics of study ranging from Chinese landscapes and social identity in the age of the Internet to the history of science and medicine in 17th- and 18th-century Britain.

Janis S. Londraville, a former SUNY Potsdam professor and the wife of SUNY Potsdam professor emeritus Richard Londraville, has been an Independent Scholars fellow for 15 years and said the program has provided her with valuable opportunities for publishing her biographies and scholarly articles.

"What the program does for me is to provide me with faculty affiliation," she said. "When you're publishing academic work, it's a little bit easier to have academic affiliation. It offers such a wonderful opportunity."

Through the program, Mrs. Londraville conducts scholarly work in SUNY Potsdam's English department and is given access to a wide variety of electronic databases and rare manuscripts. Because of her academic affiliation with the consortium, she also has been able to apply for outside grants and travel to conferences around the country.

"It's wonderful, because what one college doesn't have, most of the time the other college does have," she said. "I have gotten so much from being able to sit down and talk to my colleagues and to other students about all the research that I'm doing."

ON THE NET

Associated Colleges: www.associatedcolleges.org