Some of you may recall that when the pandemic hit, I was teaching a course at UNC and was forced to complete it via zoom. One of the students in the course just asked me for a letter of recommendation, and the request put me in mind of three stories about letters of recommendation from early in my career.
The first concerns Harry Austryn Wolfson, the great
medievalist scholar with whom I had the great good fortune to study when I was
an undergraduate at Harvard in the early 1950s. In those days, and perhaps
still today, the jewel in Harvard’s crown was the Society of Fellows, an elite
organization that offered three-year fellowships to the very best graduate
student men in the world (no women, of course.) Noam Chomsky, for example, was awarded a Junior
Fellowship when I was an undergraduate, which is how I got to know him. The
story goes that one year, Wolfson recommended one of his students for the
Society, writing in his letter of recommendation that the young man was not
entirely without ability and might conceivably someday do something worth
publishing. The selection committee immediately awarded the young man a Junior
Fellowship. When a new member of the
committee asked in wonderment why they had made that choice, the response was
that it was the strongest letter Wolfson had ever written for anyone.
After leaving Harvard, I went to an assistant professorship
at the University of Chicago and that first year, when the department was
considering graduate admissions, a student turned up in the file of applicants
from MIT with a letter from Hilary Putnam, who was then teaching there. The letter sang the praises of the candidate
and made him sound like the second coming of Kurt Gödel. When the members of the department passed
over his candidacy, I asked in astonishment why they had not given
consideration to the young man. Someone with more experience than I explained
that Hillary wrote that way about everybody.
Several years later, I went to Columbia where I taught in
the later 60s. That was a good time to be a graduate student in America.
Colleges and universities were expanding rapidly and there were lots of jobs to
be had. One year, the Chair of Philosophy at one of the lesser branches of the
sprawling University of California system wrote to the Columbia department asking
us to recommend one of our graduate students for a tenure-track assistant
professorship. In my letter for the young man, I said that he was a first class
student who was in the upper one third of our graduate student body. In those
days we had very good students and that was, I thought, high praise. Back came
a letter to our Chair, Justus Buchler, saying rather irritatedly, “I do not
want one of your middling students, I want your best student!” Well, I was not
about to cost our graduate students jobs by being honest, so I called back all
the letters I had written from our secretary, attached an air pump, and
inflated them all.
12 comments:
In Southern Europe, it is not uncommon for a professor to ask their students to draft their own reference letter, which is then passed on to whoever is asking for one without much modification. This happened to me a couple of times, and I certainly made sure I was always in the top 5% in my class.
When I was applying for academic jobs after finishing grad school, I asked my adviser for a letter of recommendation. He wrote one but, as is or was fairly typical I suppose, I never saw it: it went through the school's placement service or whatever it was called, and they (presumably) sent it to the places I asked them to send it to. My adviser by that point had moved and was no longer in the same city, so I cdnt walk into his office and talk w him in person.
There was another member of my committee with whom the story was different. This person had not moved anywhere. I asked him to write a letter and he agreed, but then he didn't do it. Eventually he asked me to draft a letter for him, which I did. He made a few changes and signed it. In the U.S. this procedure is irregular, to say the least, but it was the only way I was going to get a letter from him as he cdnt be bothered to actually write it himself. In the end my job search was unsuccessful, so it made no difference.
I like the idea of writing one's own letter of reference, at least as a sub-genre of fiction and comedy. Alexander Cockburn once scribbled into his interviewer's notebook "God, he is brilliant" when the interviewer left to make a phone call. Is there a way of hyper-inflating oneself while meeting the highest and strictest standards of accuracy and truthfulness? How about this as a template: 'There was Isaac Newton. There was William Blake. There was Fred Astaire. And now, Madames et Monsieurs, there is John Rapko.'
JR:It seems to me that your suggested template language is ambiguous.
(JR responding) The ambiguity is intentional. The template works both for letters of recommendation and suicide notes.
When I was on search committees and reading letters of recommendation, there was one big obvious cultural difference between US letters and British letters. US were of two broad types the relatively short one-paging praising the applicant, ranking them (e.g., best student in the last five years, or best student since X) plus a few remarks about teaching experience and maybe a few words about research interests. The type, more common in later years, was the multi-pager that added serious details about the contents of the dissertation (and publications if any).
The British ones were two sentences.
I just want to make clear, in case anyone thinks the person described in my earlier comment was a philosopher, that he wasn't. As I've mentioned before several times, I didn't major in philosophy as an undergrad and my (so-called) advanced degrees aren't in philosophy.
I have a paper (Subversive Explanations) arguing inter alia that a sensus divinitatis is an unreliable belief forming mechanism since our propensity to devotion often leads to a belief in false gods or false religions, a fact which is acknowledged even by those who think that some religion is true, since they will typically think that other people’s religions are false. In other words our propensity to devotion often leads to false positives and is therefore unreliable. But if this is a good argument against relying on our propensity to devotion as a belief-forming mechanism, it is an equally good argument against the belief-forming mechanism of relying on letters of recommendation. If a lawyer on behalf of some candidate were to say to me ‘I put it to you Sir, that the candidate’s referee, the distinguished Professor X, states that the candidate is God’s gift to Philosophy’, I would reply with the immortal words of that great epistemologist, Mandy Rice-Davies, ‘Well, he would {say that} wouldn’t he.’ If someone is highly likely to claim that P whether or not P is true, the fact that they assert that P provides no evidence of its truth. Letters of reference are only worth anything if you have reason to believe a) that the letter-writer WOULDN'T say that somebody was good unless they genuinely thought that they were, and b) that their judgment about who is good and bad (and who is better and who best) is reliable. And this means either knowing them personally or knowing them by reputation to be unusually truthful and self-critical. (For example they should not be too prone to form an unduly high opinion of people who have a high opinion of them. I’m impressed with letters of reference which explain how the candidate REFUTED the referee on some point or other. THOSE letters I DO take seriously. Ditto letters which are simply copies of an EXTERNAL examiner’s report on somebody’s PhD dissertation.)
Charles Pigden,
"That great epistemologist Mandy Rice-Davies": you have to be over a certain age to remember her. I haven't laughed so hard for months. You have a true sense of humor!!
That was a very Profumo remark.
Charles Pigden,
Your comment which appeared in an email does not appear here.
Anyway, I was 16 or 17 at the time of the Profumo affair and there was only one subject which interested me, sex.
No one in my family ever talked sex and in high school I already sensed that 99% of what the kids said was empty bragging and bullshit.
Me, I was completely out of it, no girls who I was interested in looked at me and I was so inferiority complexed I wouldn't have noticed if they did. The ruling sexual mores in my school were more or less Pat Boone, although I was so out of it that I wouldn't have noticed if there were orgies going on. I hadn't been invited to a party in my life, couldn't dance and was the last person chosen for all teams in gym class, the key marker for male status.
However, there was this hot scandal in the newspapers which my father brought home every night (he bought several papers) and the first thing I did when the papers arrived, was search them for news of Christine and Mandy. The young ladies were cool, broke the rules (hoorah for them), sexy and I loved both of them in the way a 17 year old loves his sexual fantasies.
Charles Pigden,
Your comment about that great epistemologist Mandy Rice-Davies awoke memories which I hadn't been conscious of for many years. Mandy and Cristine sum up for me that period of my life
much more clearly than any political or artistic or intellectual event of that time.
Calling Mandy a "great epistemologist" struck me as incredibly funny because her comment, "well he would, wouldn't he?" was a genuine epistemological insight. Funny too because
I've changed so much in the years since and yet I haven't changed much at all.
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