Last week I got a letter from a student requesting a law-school recommendation. The student had received a respectable B in my class two years ago, but she was no star of the show. I did what I always do in such situations: I suggested that she might get a stronger letter from a professor who had given her a higher grade. I said that I could write the letter, but it would be different from the letter I’d write for an A student.
Many students disappear after that caveat, but some persist. When one does, I write a B letter, and I do what I always do -- I send the student a copy. It’s not easy to share an evaluation that’s less than fully positive, but I see it as my duty -- not just to the student, but to the process of evaluation itself.
I think people deserve to see what’s written about them, and I think they deserve to know who’s doing the writing. When I was younger, I considered that a commonplace notion, but the longer I work in academe, the more radical it appears. Waivers of access and warnings of confidentiality fill our profession. Sometimes it seems that I can hardly evaluate anything without concerning myself with who shouldn’t be allowed to see it.
Academics live in a culture of evaluation. As a professor of English, I spend most of my time evaluating. I evaluate the work of my students, naturally. I also observe my colleagues’ teaching and write evaluations of their practice; I read and evaluate their work when they come up for reappointment, tenure, promotion, and merit raises. I serve on hiring committees and evaluate applications to my department, and I evaluate the dossiers of tenure candidates at other colleges. I also evaluate article and book manuscripts for publication, and I write reviews of published books. And that doesn’t even count my literary criticism -- the evaluations of the books I read for research and as preparation for my teaching.
Most of the evaluation I just described is “confidential.” In other words, my identity, and in many cases my assessment, is kept from the person whose work is being judged.
That’s not fair, and it’s not right. As the word suggests, evaluation communicates values, our values. When we wall off our scrutiny from view, we invite unfairness and bad decisions. Perhaps worst of all, we open the door to suspicion of our professional work. Is it just coincidence that such suspicion is now widespread?
We all have to look more closely at the workings of our secret society. We need to do so for the sake not just of those at the bottom of that society, but for all of us who depend on the integrity of the system. As institutions that serve the public, colleges need transparency. The university works at its most basic level by propagating and exchanging information -- in public. Its internal workings should be no different. The truth will sometimes sting, but it cools down in the open air.
Our students expect to know how and why we evaluate their classroom performance, and we regularly meet that expectation. Imagine a freshman composition class where the teacher evaluated the papers in secret, revealing only the students’ final grades. The scenario is pedagogically absurd, of course, but it’s also outrageous because students rightly expect to be able to see and understand the process that ranks them in class.
When it comes to our own review, we run a very different shop. Peer review -- where professors evaluate the work of their colleagues -- became the foundation of academic practice after World War II. The sciences adopted peer review first, not least because scientists had a lot of government money to give out and needed a fair way to do it. The humanities and social sciences followed, and by the 1960s peer review (sometimes anonymous, sometimes not) had entrenched itself in American universities. Inside and outside academe, peer review is viewed as the procedural bedrock that supports our culture of evaluation. But that culture has gradually become a culture of secrecy.
And with secrecy can come manipulation and deceit. A colleague at a prestigious university told me of a senior professor who, at a confidential faculty meeting to decide which M.A. students would be admitted to his department’s Ph.D. program, distributed a damning written evaluation of one prospect, effectively dooming that person’s chances. At the end of the meeting, the professor walked around the table, carefully collecting everyone’s copy of his memo. Such sleazy letters are not the rule, to be sure, but I’ve seen them often enough in dossiers when I’ve served on hiring committees.
That kind of secrecy threatens the very workings of peer review. When a prominent physicist faked his experimental results a few years ago, his peer reviewers were anonymous to one another and unable to share their suspicions -- so they accepted his papers for publication.
Secrecy in tenure is especially egregious. Tenure amounts to a life-and-livelihood decision about someone. Making it “confidentially” is akin to conducting a covert trial. Moreover, the super secrecy surrounding tenure reviews has created procedural uncertainty for evaluators, with the result that the role tenure letters actually play has become an open question. I heard a dean say recently that he no longer trusts tenure letters because outside evaluators fear that confidentiality will be breached and they will be sued if they criticize a candidate’s work. If such defensiveness exists now, I can hardly imagine what rhetorical convolutions would ensue if the writers’ identities were a matter of public record. At the very least, universities should indemnify their tenure evaluators in the event of any possible prosecution.
But accountability does not just police the malicious and curb the corrupt. It also builds character. If I’m going to slam someone, I should have the probity -- and the guts -- to do it to that person’s face.
Moreover, if I know that my name will be attached to my criticism, then I know that I need to be polite. I’ve gotten a lot of confidential reader’s reports evaluating my own work over the years. Many of them have been positive, but not all. Of the negative evaluations, a few have been, well, rude. I’ll never forget one university-press reviewer who sneered that my writing style was “adolescent.” Years after the fact, let me finally reply to my anonymous critic: I certainly want to know why you don’t like my work, but do you have to be so nasty?
Open access offers more advantages than a defense against bottom-dwelling character assassins. It also improves the quality of information. When I was applying to graduate school years ago, I met with the graduate director at one of the institutions I was applying to; let’s call it Stuffy University. The Stuffy professor counseled me to waive my right of access to my letters of recommendation. I didn’t take his advice. I refused to sign the waivers, read my letters, and was able to construct my personal statement to complement them; I filled in the details where my recommenders omitted them, and my application was stronger for it. (Incidentally, I got into Stuffy with a fellowship, and the Stuffy graduate director told me how impressed he was with my recommendations. I suspect he never noticed that they weren’t confidential.)
Applying for academic jobs for the first time seven years later, I received similarly despotic advice (however benevolent) to waive my rights to my letters. Fearing unemployment, I relented that time, but one of my more subversive mentors offered me a copy of my dossier anyway. I didn’t refuse it. Reading about the ways that others understood my work encouraged me to think about it from different angles myself -- and that analysis helped me prepare for my interviews.
Open access can also help people become better scholars and teachers. In the case of readers’ reports on manuscripts, writers will benefit when they know who’s evaluating them. Everyone’s coming from somewhere, and if I know the points of view of my critics, I can learn more from their assessment of my work.
Recommendation writers wouldn’t be able to be candid, however, the argument goes, if they knew that their judgments would be open to scrutiny from the people they’re writing about. Indeed, some sociologists have shown that confidentiality can promote candor. But does that result from nature or nurture? If academe turns itself into a society that performs its evaluation in the open, isn’t it possible that its members will then become acculturated to its ways? In any case, evaluators’ opinions currently come at too high a cost -- accountability.
In small fields and subfields, everybody already knows everybody, and anonymity is something of a polite fiction. Those fields are already partly open, and their practice offers a trail to follow toward change.
For years now, I’ve been waging a private battle against the unexamined practice of confidentiality. When I write readers’ reports, I add a postscript requesting that the press or journal attach my name to the evaluation. Then I hope it does so. I add my request for openness to my tenure-evaluation letters too.
But as I try to live in the sunshine, locked doors keep getting in my way. I recently called a prospective graduate student to tell him that he wouldn’t be admitted to our graduate program. The graduate director doesn’t usually deliver such news personally, of course, but the applicant had been sending me e-mail messages to schedule a campus visit from out of town. When I called the admissions office to get the applicant’s phone number, its director didn’t understand my request at first. “We’ll take the heat for you,” she assured me. She was puzzled that I actually wanted to take it myself. But the call proved frustrating. The applicant wanted to know why he hadn’t gotten in, and I could only tell him part of the reason. His recommendations, it turned out, were confidential.
Leonard Cassuto is a professor of English and director of graduate studies at Fordham University.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 46, Page B16
