Those reference letters

The older you get, the more reference letters you are asked to write. The price you pay for moving closer to death. - This thing cuts really both ways. Initially you spent your while hassling busy mentors of yours to do reference letters for you, and another, and another ... you felt bad, and no doubt, so did they. Well, eventually you find yourself in the same situation, provided you do/did some mentoring or other.

Here are several problems I have both with writing and reading reference letters:

1) More often than not what I read is utterly dishonest and stands in no relation to the person who is being praised over the moon. As a result of seeing this time and again, I barely - if at all - bother reading reference letters. I assume that whoever requested one asked someone with the understanding that it would be a positive, uncritical letter. Well, if all I find out is what is good about a particular job applicant, and I have good reason to assume that whatever is written down in the reference letter is hyperbolic, what's the point?

2) My problem as a reference letter writer is that I can't get myself to lie even in order to help good people. So, if you were to ever compare my reference letters to those of people who do the whole hyperbolic shebang, you'd think I hated a candidate who I actually think would be a good choice. Am I supposed to put on the rhetorical battle gear and write about that 'one in a life-time' future academic, a coming academic superstar? I don't even think of current crowned academic superstars (just check the philosophical gossip site Leiter Report for ongoing coronation activities) in those terms.  I know that, secretly they go to the loo, just like I do, and just like Professor Middle-of-the-Road at Popplesdorf University.

3) I would love a system whereby reference letters could be honest and balanced. In the absence of this, I prefer to stick only to objective markers like peer reviewed publications, citations of those publications, teaching evaluations, etc, when it comes to academic appointments. You might want to take a closer look and check how frequently, especially in the arts and humanities, appointments are made based on verifiable evidence of excellence versus appointments made entirely on a candidate's capacity to drop names and attract reference letters from crowned superstar academics. It's painful to watch.

4) Dishonest reference letters reflect very badly on the professional who wrote them! I mean, once I have seen Prof XYZ praise a weak student to me, and I fell for the praise, what would I think of future reference letters I received from that same professor? These sorts of activities can only work efficiently for a short period of time, begging the question why Prof XYZ thought it would be sensible to lie about her supposedly to brilliant student!

5) So, what lesson is there to be drawn from this? Are we really compelled to lie reasonably qualified to good candidates into jobs with our reference letters, because that's what everyone else is doing?

All a bit self-defeating, isn't it? As I said, I give close to no weight and attention to reference letters. I wonder how many others in more senior positions do the same. Are we all wasting our time with this sort of stuff?

ps: you're welcome to make use of the disposable bullshit bag displayed to the top left of this blog. Seems the perfect place for most reference letters.

Why study? and Why study arts and humanities subjects?

Students in most countries today pay tuition fees. Even countries that took great pride in their public universities (like Australia, Germany and the UK)started quietly with smallish top-up fees, higher education contribution schemes or whatever their euphemism for charging higher education students for their education might have been. Fees went up and up and up ever since. It goes without saying that people from poorer families face ever higher hurdles in their attempts at accessing higher education. They'll either often be unable to afford steep up-front fees, or the thought of gigantic student debts will put them off higher education forever. There are all sorts of rationales, some less rational than others, for why these fees were and are supposedly necessary.

It's probably worth noting that in each of the countries mentioned they were introduced by a generation of politicians that themselves benefited from tuition free access to university. Probably a phenomenon similar to that miserable little black man on the US Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas. A beneficiary of affirmative action policies if there ever was one, he now spends most of his time on turning back the clock on affirmative action (as well as civil rights like reproductive rights of women). I digress, I apologize.

Now, given that students pay ever more and more, and end up with ever higher debts when they graduate - let's ignore those scholarship receiving students attending investment banks with a little bit of education attached to them, like Harvard University, Princeton and other elitist outfits - it seems worth asking, why students continue to study for degrees in the arts and humanities, given that such degrees are not exactly leading to straightforward money-printing-press-equivalent degrees as law and medicine degrees , or even engineering degrees do.

Well, and here is the surprising finding from Great Britain: It is so, because only 35% of students polled in the UK declared that their primary reason for studying what they studied was the job prospects. 38% declared that they studied what they studied because of their love for the subject of their course. (This, of course includes people for whom their choice of study subject is both a subject that they love, and a subject that they chose because of job prospects.) That I find surprisingly reassuring.

Despite various governments' efforts to eliminate anything to do with culture from universities (by starving the arts and humanities of funding for research and teaching), our new 'customers' voted with their feet and elected to study arts and humanities subjects anyway. Many young people seem to have decided that universities are not merely educational factories designed to offer glorified vocational training and pseudo-academic degrees like Master's degrees in jeans design and similar such nonsense.

It is fair to say that academics have failed in most countries pretty miserably in defending the academy against the onslaughts of those aiming to transform universities into vocational training outfits. Students' love for the subjects they choose are probably one of the reasons for why arts and humanities continue to thrive these days, despite all the dooms-day sayers.