It’s January, meaning I am busy plowing through hundreds of application to our PhD program. The process made me think once again, how writing the recommendation letters is an act of sheer altruism, and how much our job depends on acts like these.
I mean, sure, there is a lot of unpaid work we do as faculty, and we love to complain about it. But honestly, a lot of it is benefiting us personally, one way or another. Say, reviewing an article in your area is directly helping you: besides internalizing others’ work (often an extremely useful, if not necessarily an enjoyable exercise), one can make a material impact on where the area does or doesn’t go. By writing job letters to help your PhD students we obviously expand our circle of influence (“empire building”). But letters for applicants to a PhD program? Altruism, pure and undiluted: you help the kids, and they become someone else’s students. No tangible benefits to you at all, as far as I can see.
I always wondered how this is sustainable in a capitalist society, and whether this practice will evolve into something else, presumably much uglier.
Well, the wait for an answer is over. This year, dossiers of five of so candidates contained nearly identical letters from a well-known mathematician, talking at length about achievements and successes of the writer, inserting, at some pre-defined places some slight variations on how the candidates performed in an summer undergraduate research program the writer ran last year.
Reading these recommendations one after another in a row is depressing: what the author got to learn about the students over two months of, I presume, close daily interactions got reduced to a couple of paragraphs with some bland variations on she was so excited and his contagious enthusiasm. Students personalities became tired cliches buried within a template… “\FNAME \LNAME is a thoughtful, talented student who is working diligently to cultivate \PRONOUN2 talent and who is already engaged in research,” stuff like that.
Clearly, these form letters contribute very little to our understanding whether or not the student will succeed in our program, and so do not help students, and waste the effort of their readers. But what bugs me most, is the fact that these letters are generated by someone marketing themselves as mathematical humanist, professing that “every student deserves to be treated with dignity and respect.”
Do you believe that, \FNAME \LNAME?