How Should Colleges Respond to Politics in Letters of Recommendation?

U. of Michigan

When two faculty members at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor declined recently to write letters of recommendation for students seeking to study in Israel, the ensuing controversy exposed an ethical tangle involving academic freedom, free speech, students’ rights, and the place of politics in academe.

Michigan has penalized John Cheney-Lippold, the first faculty member, withholding a merit raise and sabbaticals for two years. And on Wednesday the university announced a new faculty panel to “examine the intersection between political thought/ideology and faculty members’ responsibilities to students.”

Michigan’s response has reverberated elsewhere. When Katy E. Pearce, an associate professor of communication at the University of Washington, learned the news on Wednesday morning, she thought, “Gosh, I guess I’d better look into if my own university has any policies about this, because I have no idea.”

Pearce routinely declines to write letters of recommendation for students seeking work at another institution some professors disagree with: Teach for America, the organization that sends off new college graduates to teach in underserved urban and rural schools. “When students approach me about Teach for America for letters of recommendation,” which happens about once a year, she said, “if I can talk to them face to face, I will.” But sometimes she’ll send an email explaining her reasons for opposing the organization, with links to an article or two explaining the criticism.

Professors decline to write letters of recommendation for all sorts of mundane reasons: lack of time, unfamiliarity with the student, or the student’s poor performance. The recent cases raise thornier questions: How should professors handle recommendations for students who want to pursue studies or causes the instructors disagree with, and how should colleges respond?

Professors who spoke with The Chronicle aren’t aware of guidance on the matter from their institution. And they cited similar reasoning: The university doesn’t intervene in the content of syllabi, or whom a professor may allow to visit the classroom to speak. Why should it do so for a professor’s decisions on letters of recommendation?

‘A Delicate Process’

“It’s a delicate process, and one that has to be handled with utmost professional and personal care,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. “The thing is, nobody tells us this when we start the tenure track.” Recommendations were once a function of the “good-old-boy days,” he said, but now are “a lot more complex.”

In a Facebook post, Vaidhyanathan noted that while he was “rather vehemently” opposed to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, the Palestinian-rights campaign that led the two Michigan instructors to decline to provide recommendations, Michigan’s punishment of Cheney-Lippold was “unwarranted.”

Professors have a “moral obligation to represent our students in good faith” to the groups students want to join, Vaidhyanathan said. When they can’t do so for organizations they oppose for moral or political reasons, they should explain that to the student, in private. That’s his practice for students seeking to join Teach for America, which some have long criticized for undermining high-need schools by staffing them with inexperienced teachers who rarely stay long. He said he’d never encountered controversy for doing so.

“I don’t want to stand in the way of the student, but I also feel like I am not the best representative of the student’s interest in that transaction,” Vaidhyanathan said. “We have a sacred trust with our students to treat them well in these matters.”

Vaidhyanathan isn’t aware of his university’s policy on the subject, if one exists. “This is a conversation we should have been having years ago,” he said. Professors are “left on our own.”

Faculty members can’t “opt out entirely” of their obligation to write recommendations, wrote Matthew S. Hedstrom, an associate professor of religious studies at UVa, on Vaidhyanathan’s post, but “no professor should be punished for refusing a letter on principle.” He also saw Michigan’s response as unlike any other he’d seen. “That’s part of what’s so startling about” the news of Cheney-Lippold’s punishment, he said in an interview with The Chronicle. UVa and its Faculty Senate’s chair did not respond to requests for comment.

At Michigan, meanwhile, faculty members are divided on the university’s response. “We have a responsibility to support the academic aspirations and goals of our students, regardless of our own personal political or social beliefs,” wrote Paula Lantz, a professor and associate dean at Michigan’s school of public policy, in a letter on Wednesday afternoon to the school’s graduate-student instructors, supporting the university’s sanctions. “How to respond to student requests for letters of recommendation can be challenging,” she added, urging instructors with questions to consult her. Lantz did not respond to a request for comment.

Another Michigan professor, Clifford Lampe, wrote on Facebook that he would start declining all requests for letters of recommendation. Lampe, of the School of Information, declined to comment when reached by The Chronicle.

Michigan directed The Chronicle to its Wednesday announcement and did not respond to a request to share its existing policies on the issue. A relevant policy appears to be Michigan’s professional-standards guide for faculty members. “The university will not tolerate conduct which hinders other members of the community in the exercise of their professional responsibilities and academic freedoms,” it reads, promising that Michigan will intervene when behaviors “interfere with, or adversely affect, a community member’s ability to learn or fulfill the individual’s professional responsibilities.”

Correction (11:05 a.m., 10/11/2018): Katy E. Pearce is an associate professor of communication at the University of Washington, not an assistant professor. The text has been updated accordingly.

Follow Steven Johnson on Twitter at @stetyjohn, or email him at steve.johnson@chronicle.com.