I recently read a biography of James Franck. Many of you won’t recognize the name, but physicists might remember the Franck-Hertz experiment from a lab class. Franck and Hertz performed a decisive test of Bohr’s model of the atom, ushering in the quantum age and receiving the 1925 Nobel Prize. After fleeing Germany when Hitler took power, Franck worked on the Manhattan project and co-authored the Franck Report urging the US not to use nuclear bombs on Japan. He settled at the University of Chicago, which named an institute after him.*

You can find all that on his Wikipedia page. The page also mentions his marriage later in life to Hertha Sponer. Her Wikipedia page talks about her work in spectroscopy, about how she was among the first women to receive a PhD in Germany and the first on the physics faculty at Duke University, and that she remained a professor there until 1966, when she was 70.

Neither Wikipedia page talks about two-body problems, or teaching loads, or pensions.

That’s why I was surprised when the biography covered Franck’s later life. Until Franck died, he and Sponer would travel back and forth, he visiting her at Duke and she visiting him in Chicago. According to the biography, this wasn’t exactly by choice: they both would have preferred to live together in the same city. Somehow though, despite his Nobel Prize and her scientific accomplishments, they never could. The biography talks about how the university kept her teaching class after class, so she struggled to find time for research. It talks about what happened as the couple got older, as their health made it harder and harder to travel back and forth, and they realized that without access to their German pensions they would not be able to support themselves in retirement. The biography gives the impression that Sponer taught till 70 not out of dedication but because she had no alternative.

When we think about the heroes of the past, we imagine them battling foes with historic weight: sexism, antisemitism, Nazi-ism. We don’t hear about their more everyday battles, with academic two-body problems and stingy universities. From this, we can get the impression that the dysfunctions of modern academia are new. But while the problems have grown, we aren’t the first academics with underpaid, overworked teaching faculty, nor the first to struggle to live where we want and love who we want. These are struggles academics have faced for a long, long time.

*Full disclosure: Franck was also my great-great-grandfather, hence I may find his story more interesting than most.