I got some great news last week: One of my Ph.D. advisees just won a residential fellowship for next year. I had helped her with her application and, of course, had written her a letter of recommendation.
I worked hard on that letter because I wanted it to count. If I’m going to take the time to write a recommendation, I naturally want the student to get the fellowship, win the grant, or get into the school. Of course that starts with my writing persuasive, bell-ringing prose. But I also need to make sure my presentation harmonizes with the graduate student’s own.
In last month’s column, I focused on how graduate students should ask for a recommendation letter. I noted that they shouldn’t just ask and then step back. Instead they need to assume a guiding role in creating the letter. That includes supplying me with information at the outset, including a copy of the personal statement (for admission to a graduate program) or project statement (for a fellowship or grant).
But there’s also something I can give the student in return: a copy of my letter. That has been my policy for years, and I base it on principle as well as practice.
Let’s consider the practical advantages first. If students know what I’m saying about them, then they can write a better application themselves. Where I speak in general terms, they can fill in the details — and vice versa. I tell students that their applications should be unified, and the best way to create that unity is for students to be familiar with all of the parts of their application.
My observations can also help theirs. One of my graduate students told me recently that my overview of her project — communicated in a recommendation I wrote for her — “helps me see my work more clearly.”
I’ve had that experience myself. When I applied for promotion some years ago, one of my outside referees sent me a back-channel copy of his recommendation letter. He saw ideas that ran through my work that hadn’t occurred to me, and I thought about them for a long time afterward.
It’s bound to be useful to see what someone else writes about you. That fact is obvious enough to qualify as common sense. Teaching observation reports are often shared — other kinds of assessments and recommendations should be, too. We produce better scholarship when we can learn from different views of the work we do, especially the views of experts.
So why do we keep our students in the dark about how we view them? Our recommendations can generate better results when their audience includes the person who is being written about.
But students also deserve to see what’s being written about them. It’s only fair. Instead, we pressure them so hard to waive their right of access to letters of recommendation that they now do it more or less automatically. They are already the weaker party in the transaction. The waiver only adds to their powerlessness.
The standard counterargument is that we as faculty can only be honest if we know that the student won’t see the letter. Really? The idea that we promote honesty by removing accountability flies in the face of logic.
It also flies in the face of real life. In my experience, most professors are mostly honest most of the time. But we all know of ugly cases where a writer uses the cover of “confidentiality” to sneak a negative letter into a dossier. That’s not confidentiality. That’s secrecy of a malignant kind.
Sometimes a dossier can be skewed by accident. In an essay in Voices From the Edge: Narratives About the Americans With Disabilities Act (Oxford, 2004), C.G.K. Atkins tells the story of person with a disability who applied for academic jobs. At first he got no interviews. Then he got an anonymous call from one of the institutions where he had applied. “You’ve got to change your reference letters,” the caller told him. It wasn’t that they were uncomplimentary, but rather that they talked about his illness. The caller’s committee was afraid to interview him because they feared that he’d sue them for discrimination if he were rejected.
Let’s leave aside the venality of that hiring committee, and the difficulties the story suggests in enforcing the Americans With Disabilities Act. If the applicant hadn’t gotten that call, he wouldn’t have known what his letters said. His recommenders meant well in this case, but they made mistakes, and he had no way to know. When he asked his recommenders to revise their letters and omit mention of his condition, he got a job.
Sociologists tell us that some professors can’t get comfortable with the idea of writing a letter that the applicant is free to read. Maybe so. But the problem doesn’t lie with the applicant’s right to access. It’s with the custom of denying that access, and, yes, with the professors who don’t try to work through their discomfort.
Some professors claim that recommendations won’t be taken seriously if the applicant hasn’t waived access to them. I doubt that very much. I’ve been party to more than 20 years’ worth of discussions of applicants and their recommendations, and not once have I heard anyone remark on whether the letters were confidential. Many readers don’t even notice.
Not all assessments will be positive. Sometimes my own recommendation will be for the publisher to reject the book, or for the journal to reject the article. Another reader may judge differently. After all, everyone is coming from somewhere, and it helps the author to know where. In fact, that’s exactly what I write at the close of these evaluations, along with the request to share my name.
If I can’t write a positive letter for a student, I’ll tell the student so up front. If a student got, say, a B+ from me, I’ll explain that I can write a “B+ type letter,” and that “you may be better off asking a professor who gave you an A.” Sometimes those B+ students have their own reasons for wanting my letter anyway, and if that’s the case, I write it — and give them a copy.
Professors write a lot of recommendations, but we don’t think enough about the culture of evaluation that those letters maintain. By sharing my letters, I’m trying to stay true to the values that are literally embedded in the word “evaluation.”
Higher education is supposed to be an open society based on free and honest intellectual exchange. We’re not the CIA or the NSA. We promote the creation and sharing of knowledge. And we do it through evaluation, inside and outside our classrooms. That’s our job. Let’s do that job openly, for the sake of our students, and also ourselves.
