One day, a student approached English professor Ivy Schweitzer after a class she team-taught with another professor and told her how well she and the other professor interacted.
"You get along so well, why don't you get married?" the match-making student suggested.
Little did the student know that the other English professor, Tom Luxon, was Schweitzer's husband.
Schweitzer and Luxon are just one of many married professors at the College, and these couples say being married to another Dartmouth professor makes life at the College very interesting.
One of the major issues confronting married professors at Dartmouth is whether or not to discuss job-related matters at home.
For married Chemistry Professors Dean Wilcox and Jane Lipson, separating the workplace from home is very important.
"We work hard to try not to talk about work at home," Wilcox said. "It's easy to spend all of your time talking about things in the Chemistry department, so we try to declare a moratorium on that at home."
Other couples disagreed. Anthropology Professor Deborah Nichols said she and her husband, Anthropology Professor John Watanabe, do discuss business when at home.
Robert Maue, professor of physiology and biochemistry, who is married to Leslie Henderson from the same department, said trying to separate business from domestic life is virtually impossible. According to Maue, he and his wife bring their work home all the time.
Work life and home life is "smeared together," Maue said.
"We work at home all the time in the evenings, either on grants or experiments or preparing lectures," he said. "It really doesn't get pigeonholed just at work."
Maue said many times he and Henderson come home and spend time with their sons, and as soon as they put the children to bed, they start talking about how to prepare the next lecture.
Since many of the married professors work in the same department as their spouses, the level of contact during a typical day is obviously increased.
Mathematics Professor Carolyn Gordon said she and husband David Webb, also a math professor, see each other fairly regularly during a typical work day.
"We do some joint research together and our offices are right across the hall from each other," Gordon said.
Psychology Professor Ann Clark said she and her husband, Psychology Professor Jeffrey Taube, also bump into each other quite often during the day.
"Our offices are on the same hallway and we have labs right next door to each other," Clark said.
Depending on the day, Nichols said that she and Watanabe see each other either "very frequently or hardly at all."
Many of the married professors have different last names than their spouses, which makes it a little difficult for students to figure out that they are married. Wilcox said that he and Lipson are "pretty up front about it" to anyone who asks them.
Maue said that unknowing students have often made a funny mistake concerning him and his wife.
"When we're in the lab together and a student comes in, they automatically assume that one of us works for the other," he said. "There's a constant need to make sure we are both recognized as being faculty; otherwise to students it looks like one or the other of us is in charge."
Gordon, who married Webb when they both worked at Washington University at St. Louis, Mo. said "it was kind of funny when people started realizing we were married."
According to Gordon, she and her husband came to Dartmouth when they were both offered jobs simultaneously.
If the College hadn't offered both of them jobs, Gordon said, "We wouldn't have considered it otherwise."
Maue, who has team-taught a class for first-year medical students and also a two-term physiology course with his wife, said team-teaching a class has its advantages and disadvantages.
"Since we both have the same kind of jobs, my wife and I can find periods of time where we do nothing but sleep and talk about work," he said, noting one of the downsides.
"On the other hand," Maue said, "you have an immediate understanding of what the other person is going through in terms of stress and work."
According to Maue, this makes it much easier for him and his wife to help each other with problems, because each one of them "knows where the other is coming from."
Married professors who team-teach classes say they usually don't have serious disagreements about how to teach it.
Even Schweitzer, who said she and Luxon have "very different teaching styles," said those different styles help to create more variety and allows the students to see course material from different perspectives.
Maue said whenever he and Henderson disagree on things like lecture preparation or lab results, they usually "end up compromising."
Not all married professors get the opportunity to team teach a class.
Wilcox and Lipson, for example, have never team taught a class.
Neither have Clark and Taube, although Clark admitted "that would probably be fun."
