(3) It creates incentives for people to curry favor with the “big names” in the profession and thereby causes more of this to happen, due to point (e). For example, if one is at a conference, the incentive would be to chat up the high-status philosophers at the conference, rather than, say, talking to students or other low-status people.--Mark Huemer "What’s Wrong With Soliciting Letters of Recommendation?" [HT Dailynous]
To write a carefully crafted letter of recommendation can involve quite a bit of time and energy. You need to pay considerable attention to wording, and sometimes you need a refresher on the candidate's work. It can also be emotionally draining to a certain soul, who dislikes having to make comparative judgments about others. As one becomes more senior in the profession, one may find oneself writing not just (i) for one's own PhD students, but also for (ii) other people's students, and (iii) even colleagues one basically understand as one's peers. And at some point one may even encounter that utterly bewildering in-flexion point where one is asked (iv) to write a reference letter on behalf of somebody one always considered more senior. Given the considerable opportunity costs involved one may wonder why the practice persists. The simple and truthful answer is that there is a collective action problem. But in follows I'll argue that it arose and persists because it reinforces the prestige and status hierarchy of the profession and generates consequences that benefit those at the top.
Before I get to that, I stipulate , for the sake of argument, that
- most letter of recommendation writers do so out of a sense of duty and a desire to help deserving others;
- even those letter writers who enjoy ranking or helping others, may well have better things to do with their time than write letters of recommendation;
- most hiring departments use letters prudently in hiring as just one of several, imperfect measures;
- nobody can unilaterally decide to stop writing letters of recommendation or to start writing completely sincere ones (this is a collective action problem that transcends the discipline);
- most letter writers merit their high status;
- it is possible to benefit from actions performed from a sense of duty.*
Here I'll be agnostic about how one should write letters of recommendation and if one should eliminate the use of letters in job-searches.**
A request for a letter of recommendation is a judgment about the would-be-letter writer's status in the profession. This is most clearly so in cases (ii-iv) that do not involve one's direct supervision. While undoubtedly being an expert on and informed about the requester's work play a non-trivial role in any such request, such expertise is irrelevant if the perception is that the judgments involved carry no disciplinary weight. Now, the person asking for a letter may not be in a good position to judge whose views carry professional weight. So she may well rely on imperfect testimony of others, and use various imperfect proxies for disciplinary status.
In fact, asking for a letter is a bit like investing in shares or options for trading purposes. What matters is not a judgment of intrinsic merit of philosopher X (the would-be-letter-writer), but rather:
- a sense by Z (the person in need of a letter) of how others (Y) perceive the credibility of X in the foreseeable future (that is the next job cycle). In addition,
- Z must judge (with imperfect information about past performance) how X will perform his letter writing duties toward her. (Sometimes a placement officer or a discrete friend can help out on this point.) So, Z will use all kinds of imperfect proxies about X's reliability and status in various bits of the profession. At the same time, and this is often ignored,
- being asked by sufficient number of (promising) Zs to write a letter also conveys information about X to hiring departments (Y) about X's perceived status in the field. That is, to be asked to write a letter is both a sign of perceived status as well as status enhancing.
Most of one's initial letter writers are in one's own department, or connected to one's supervisor, so one relies heavily on local knowledge. (Some other time, I'll discuss how imperfect these proxies are because wherever one is in the profession, one only encounters a small slice of it.) But as one moves on in the profession, the horizon of potential letter writers also becomes broader. One tries to pick up a letter from a colleague in the department one was a VAP, adjunct, or post-doc; a senior scholar shows interest in one's work, etc. One may discover that one's initial, local heroes are not widely admired, etc. (One can think of this in terms of portfolio diversification.)
As Huemer notes, Z will be careful not to antagonize X and to try to win his favor. Even if Z hedges her bets by asking a number of letter writers, she will still be incentivized to develop a working relationship with X rather than others. Such working relationships can be quite innocent, but still useful: e.g., reading and citing each other's work, doing panels at conferences together, or inviting each other to speak (etc.). It would be a mistake to understand any of this in terms of a direct quid-pro-quo. In fact, much of X's interest in Z -- and attention is the most valuable resource in the profession -- is outright gift or supererogatory.
For, professional philosophy is -- like most academic disciplines -- a gift-giving credit economy. And in this economy credit is a positional good; one’s stature in the field is one’s relative standing compared to others.+ We get credit for our contributions by way of jobs, citations, conference and volume invites. (As regular readers know, I think most citation in analytic philosophy is (aspirational) status signalling.) We show our status by providing others with goodies: an introduction to the right network, a place on the program, a conference invite, or, most valuable at all, our attention (to read, cite, or discuss your work, etc.).***
For the central fact is, and this helps explain why to be asked to write a letter is evidence of status and status enhancing, that in a gift-giving credit economy, the more one can give, the more one receives, indirectly, in return (in invites, attention, recognition, etc.). If you don't believe me go read an anthropologist (I picked up the idea in Marshall Sahlins).
So, next time you hear a dutiful academic complain about having to write letters of recommendation, commiserate with their plight -- it really is no fun to write letters --, but also note that they are signalling not only their virtue (nothing wrong with that [recall here; or Liam's much better piece]), but also their status to those that need and read letters of recommendation.++
*I trust my regular, loyal readers to recall how I think about these stipulations.
**In my current department we rarely use them. But we look at CVs, in part, with an eye toward grant-making potential. Choose your poison.
***I leave aside here the would-be-favorable referee report or tenure review. I do so not because I think we are a discipline of angels, but rather because I do not want to detract from my main point.
+I owe this reminder to Liam Kofi Bright.
++I am grateful to Jonathan Kramnick, Michael Kremer, Rebekka Kukla, Kate Norlock, Lewis Michael Powell, Ingrid Robeyns, Lynne Tirell for critical discussion on Facebook.
This is much more thoughtful than the DN post that you're addressing, but I still have issues with the cynicism of the DN post and some residual bits here in yours. You are really mainly talking about people in departments with PhD programs. Having been in an undergrad-only institution for a long time, my perspective is different. Letters not marked by the actual area-based expertise of the writer, using that expertise to evaluate the work carefully, just don't carry much weight. Candidates should use careful judgment about who writes for them. My letters, for what they're worth, are sincere, contra the above. Perhaps naïveté, but actually about ethics: writing a letter is saying "I stand behind this person, because I respect them in the ways I outline here." So respect is key. Maybe no one reading such letters cares about the content (as the DN post writer shows no care) but I do, and my colleagues at UMB did too. I've recently moved, but I presume the same will hold more widely. I accept your general point about networking being status-enhancing, and letters being tied to that, but there is so much more going on. Attacking the letter-writing-practice is a mistake. Improving it is a good idea.
Posted by: Lynne Tirrell | 10/16/2017 at 01:23 PM
Thank you for your response. I am, however, a but surprised by several elements in it. First. my post is explicitly intended to cover letter writers who may be outside doctoral programs. (These are meant to fall under ii-iv above.) Second, my explicit position is that expertise is a necessary condition on being asked to be a letter writer, but not sufficient. If it were, we would see a lot more junior letter writers (often the most expert). Third, I agree both that a letter is a way to convey one stands behind a particular person and that the content is key--this is why letters involve such huge opportunity costs. And, of course, I did not mean to be exhaustive.
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 10/16/2017 at 03:09 PM
But decorum and courtesy demand acknowledgements too--as with your ++ footnote above. Clearly that is part of the norms of the profession and our place(s) in it. And our profession would be impoverished should such social forms of acknowledgement go the way of the dodo. However, a natural by-product is the very kind of "credit economy" explained here (nice term--though perhaps I should decline credit for crediting that--but is that even possible?). Is there any reform needed for doing such common favors that would benefit philosophy? And I'd also point out that in these days of Trump, an exalted sexual harasser and worse, while we may need to micromanage our own peccadilloes and motes in our eyes, society at large has beams and beams in their sockets we desperately need to chain-saw through. BTW I am a nobody in the profession, but I've written lots of colleague recs and external reviews of promotions and grants, and even for some figures that readers of your blog would easily recognize. We're not as harshly stratified by the credit economy as some might think.
Posted by: Alan White | 10/17/2017 at 03:46 AM