I should have been the last person to be fooled by the labor-saving promises of new electronic systems to handle applications for faculty jobs and for graduate admissions. I am, after all, a labor historian, and one deeply influenced by the convincingly skeptical writings on academic work and on the social history of technology by the late David F. Noble.
It would have been easy enough, some years back, when I started to get requests to put recommendation letters on Interfolio, to connect the new practice with general trends to outsource university jobs, cut the positions of support workers, and privatize service work in public universities.
Indeed, my own department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign quickly moved from maintaining its own dossier service for graduate students to partially subsidizing their applications for jobs made through Interfolio. Back then, when I thought about the switch in labor terms, I was able to quickly decide that the change was justifiable because it saved work, including, for staff members, the drudgery of photocopying.
Mostly, though, I hoped the new electronic processes would save me labor. The department’s old dossier service file was acceptable to most employers and used by all students. However, when writing recommendations on behalf of colleagues who had jobs but were seeking new ones, each letter had to be an individual production, as faculty candidates were outside the dossier system.
Moreover, I hoped that the new systems would ease the burden of writing endless letters for undergraduates to get into doctoral programs and could centralize that process. Indeed, law schools were something of a model: Centralized recommendation-letter banks, organized either at the university level or by the Law School Admission Council, had greatly eased letting-writing, envelope-licking, and mailing. One student, one letter.
Several years into the process, it is clear that, within the humanities, labor is not being saved—even on the supply side of sending out the recommendation letters electronically. Interfolio itself remains cumbersome and, contrary to the centralized law-school model, graduate schools have adopted countless variants for handling the letters. Some schools require hard copies, sometimes gathered by the student into a file, sometimes not. Where letters supporting job applications are concerned, two schools recently asked that I forward my recommendation letters through the student, forgetting confidentiality altogether.
Odd little boxes asking that professors use a check mark to give a percentile ranking to students on everything from honesty to industry to leadership had been a feature of the older paper-application forms. Retaining those idiosyncratic grids—each school using them seems to survey a different set of virtues—sometimes now justifies departments’ holding on to distinctive formats rather than adopting a standardized recommendation letter. Fellowship applications are almost militantly idiosyncratic in the forms that letters are required to take. No standard practices have emerged.
Most important, school after school contracts for its own systems, meaning the letters are not just sent either through an agency or individually. Instead they fall into an endless number of electronic delivery systems, each slightly different, most new, and typically with giant bugs to be worked out. So frequently do those systems not work—or not work in concert with configurations of the sender’s computer—that some searches are now accompanied by the e-mail contact of the person shepherding tutorials or end runs around the system.
Faculty members much lament the bad experiences associated with sending out letters via those systems, but the annoyances are spread out over time, so it is possible for senders to assume the fault is theirs, or that of their aging computers. The stronger object lesson in the inadequacy of electronic systems comes when you are on the receiving end of e-recommendations.
I got such a concentrated lesson twice in the past three months, once as a member of a search committee and once as a member of my department’s admissions committee.
In the former case, the system proved so unwieldy that departments that had the money and confidence to do so hired yet more outside contractors to retool the software to make it workable. Thus there are variable systems within as well as between universities.
Even the small drawbacks of electronic systems are impressively thoughtless. Systems keep an applicant’s file from a previous year’s job search or admissions proceeding. Thus, someone who already “failed” becomes automatically identified as such, even though the applicant may now present new credentials, in different pools. The difficulties with producing spreadsheets showing all the applicants are daunting, so that the new digitally sophisticated formats have, for example, no easy way to generate a list of applicants from underrepresented minority candidates. In addition, recommendation letters are secreted in a location outside the main file.
In the case of graduate applications, the system we used from a year before had so discredited itself—in one case, in a department other than my own, the applicants could actually read the “confidential” letters submitted on their behalf—that a new one had been put in place. News of the switch was communicated to departments only after repeated tries at making the old link work.
By trial and error, our admissions committee gradually made the new system work, at least to read individual files. However, at a second stage, when the committee asked for broader feedback from faculty members about applicants, the learning curve began all over, complicated by widespread disbelief that the system could possibly be so hard to access, and so unfriendly once accessed. Anxiety abounded.
Presumably we’ll be mastering a new system yet again next year.
That those problems are so little remarked upon, or, to my knowledge, systematically investigated, testifies to the power of a priori assumptions. Such assumptions hold that new technologies are obviously labor-saving ones and that outsourcing is automatically cost-saving. As such, e-applications can be assumed to be efficient and economical even if they take the form of successions of unsatisfactory profit-chasing ventures, create much duplication of effort, and save precious little, indeed no, time or work for faculty or staff members.
