Letters of Recommendation (or Wreck-o-mendation) Addendum

24 Tuesday Sep 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Admissions Process, George Reid Andrews, Graduate School, Law School, Letters of Recommendation, Pitt, Politics of Academia, Transparency

A car wreck on Jagtvej, a road in Copenhagen, Denmark, May 24, 2005. (Thue via Wikipedia). Released to public domain.

Three years ago, I wrote a post about my various not-so-good to horrible experiences in getting my then professors to write letters of recommendation for me for grad school, for fellowships and for the academic job market between ’90 and ’99. Over the course of the past three years, this post has been one of my ten most popular ones, garnering comments, emails and mostly positive feedback about what to do (and not) in seeking letters from the professoriate for graduate and professional education and for a real career.

In June, however, Reid Andrews, one of my former professors at the University of Pittsburgh, sent me a rather terse email about my recollections from the 1990-91 school year. He had served as one of my examples of what not to do in terms of seeking a letter of recommendation (like getting a look at the letter first, putting aside the false notion of academic objectivity in the process) as well as in terms of what may or may not have been in the letter itself. In the email, Andrews wrote that my blog “contains false and defamatory material about [him]” and demanded that I “remove [his] photo and all mention of [him] from [my] blog immediately.” Of course, I didn’t remove the blog, or Andrews from it, which earned me a reply in which he called me a “back-stabber,” referencing something I had said about my letter writers in general.

But I did get something in return. Andrews’ letter of recommendation, allegedly from December 1, ’90. Andrews was right. It was hardly a terrible letter, as he described me as “‘exceptionally talented,’ rank[ed] [me] ‘among the ten best undergraduates that [he] ha[d] taught in [his] ten years at Pitt’ and [gave me his ‘strongest recommendation.'”

But I am actually more right. For there are any number of indications that Andrews’ letter, while not nearly as loopy or as detrimental as some from my former dissertation committee members at Carnegie Mellon, doesn’t in fact provide a strong recommendation at all. For starters, the letter is one long paragraph and a short one that actually takes away from the strength of Andrews’ recommendation.

He also brought to the class an unusually strong command (for an undergraduate) of US and world history, which was helpful both for the purposes of comparison, and for setting the Latin American revolutions in broader context.

How strong was my command? Why was this unusual? Why throw in the “for an undergraduate” at all as a dampener? Did this mean that I wasn’t ready for graduate school material? The long paragraph is about my performance in his Latin American Revolutions course, common for many a recommendation. The lack of specificity, though, would signal to any professor or administrator on any admissions committee that Andrews really knew very little of me as a student and a person. Despite the part about “the ten best undergraduates,” the first paragraph would read like a form letter.

Half True vs. half-hearted, September 24, 2013. (Politifact.com).

Half True vs. half-hearted, September 24, 2013. (http://Politifact.com).

Then there’s Andrews’ shorter second paragraph, the one that made it sound like I was equally interested in going to law school as I was in going into a master’s program in history. I had all of one conversation with Andrews about my forks in the road after undergrad at Pitt. As I told anyone who knew me between May and October ’90, I was “sixty percent in favor of grad school, thirty in favor of law school, and ten in favor of working full-time.” Andrews, however, wrote of me

As of last year his plan was to proceed to law school. However, his talent for history [and]…his enthusiasm for it were so striking that I urged him to consider graduate school in this area, and he has decided to apply both to law schools and to several graduate schools.

I had, in fact, decided by October ’90 not to apply to law schools at all (while applying to six universities for grad school), and communicated that to all of my letter writers at the time. To an admissions committee, this paragraph would make me appear indecisive, and likely to not be as passionate about the prospect of the hard work of academic history as I would be about the law and making money.

In light of everything else I said in my original blog post about letters of recommendation, Andrews’ letter actually proves almost all of my points. That “it’s important to get to know a person, to gain some sense of trust from them, before asking for a letter or a reference.” That “the process of providing a letter of recommendation or a reference ought to be transparent, so that the student or employee can be confident that they’re not being back-stabbed by the same people in which they’re placing significant trust.” Writing a letter of recommendation should always be a serious undertaking, as I’ve learned over the years. Sometimes it’s best to say “No” than to do it in a Freudian-slip fashion.

Freudian “Slip” (2012) by Nathan Davis, September 24, 2013. (http://redbubble.com). Qualifies as fair use – low resolution and subject matter related to post.

On the “one A in one course does not make for a good recommendation” rule, this has turned out to be inadvertently true. Even if Andrews had intended to write me a glowing letter of recommendation, his feelings about me as a student — ones that he verbalized to me on several occasions between ’90 and ’95 — may well have influenced his rather bland and half-hearted effort at that “good “letter that he supposedly wrote for me in December ’90.

“It was never a question I dared asked — to see my letter of recommendation — before I’d reached the final stages of grad school,” I wrote three years ago. Now that I apparently have Andrews’ letter from twenty-three years ago, my sage advice from three years ago rings as true now as it did then. Maybe even more so.

Wisdom, Youth and Voting

04 Thursday Nov 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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26th Amendment, Activism, Civic Engagement, Corruption Perceptions Index, Election 2010, Howard Fineman, Low Voter Turnout, Political Corruption, Ted Halstead, The Atlantic Monthly, Transparency, Twenty-Sixth Amendment, Voters 18-24, Voters 18-29, Voters 18-39, Young People

Two Great Symbols of Sanity and Youth, Rally to Restore Sanity, Washington, DC, October 30, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

Back in the days when The Atlantic Monthly was really humming with cutting-edge articles, New America Foundation founder and former president Ted Halstead’s “A Politics for Generation X” appeared in the magazine’s August ’99 issue. In his piece, Halstead wrote, “Xers appear to have enshrined political apathy as a way of life….” and “are considerably less likely than previous generations of young Americans to call or write elected officials, attend candidates’ rallies, or work on political campaigns.” This was part of a much larger piece on the lack of Gen X political knowledge, participation and activism, and served as a bedrock article for the civic engagement community for most of the ’00s.

For many, Tuesday’s midterm elections and the utter lack of participation of eighteen to twenty-four year-olds (folks born between ’86 and ’92, roughly, anyway) reflects Halstead’s words of wisdom and sobriety. Only nine percent of eligible Gen Yers voted in Election ’10, fully half of the number who came out overwhelming for President Barack Obama in ’08. Gen Xers came out in larger numbers, but still didn’t touch their near three in five eligible voter participation from two years ago.

How terrible, the scholars and pundits have said. From Keith Olbermann and Howard Fineman to Donna Brazzile, Melissa Harris-Perry and so many others, the reasons varied. It was the anger and disgust over being saddled with student loans and graduating college with no jobs available. Or it was the demobilization of the millions of folks kept active by the Obama campaign machine in ’07 and ’08. Or it was because President Obama had used up all of his political capital on a year of healthcare reform, with unclear benefits or with benefits that wouldn’t kick in until ’14.

While I’m sure some of all of this is true, all of the commentary and analysis reflects a bit of disconnect

Rally to Restore Sanity Crowd, Washington, DC, October 30, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

and condescension. The folks invested in politics can’t truly understand why millions of adults under the ages of twenty-five, thirty, and even forty find traditional American civic engagement about as vital as the Spanish Inquisition. Condescending because those with any voice in the public arena and around politics act as if those who choose not to vote are the reason for the bad politics we have in our wonderful country.

Pulling out the old “people marched and died for your right to vote,” as true as that is, is about as effective in mobilizing these voters as Sarah Palin is at appearing as intelligent as my seven-year-old son. Saying that voters who don’t vote “get the government that they deserve” only serves to prove the point of the most jaded among us. None of this works, and it hasn’t worked for the nearly four decades since the Twenty-Sixth Amendment passed in ’71.

Here’s the real truism of generational inactivity at the polls and in the campaign offices. As a group, the voters under forty see American politics as opaque, out of touch, corrupt and heavily influenced by corporate and moneyed interests. More than eighteen years ago, a friend of mine at Carnegie Mellon got into a debate with me about campaign finance reform and how then Democratic presidential candidate Clinton needed to make this the centerpiece of his platform. That didn’t happen.

Halloween & The Two-Party System, Rally to Restore Sanity, Washington, DC, October 30, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

But he was correct. The process — despite the passage of McCain-Feingold in ’02 and because of the Supreme Court’s decision in favor of unfettered corporate contributions earlier this year — is more corrupt and secret than it has been before. Transparency International’s 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index ranks the US twenty-second in levels of corruption and transparency, putting us between Belgium and Uruguay. This isn’t a joke, but those of us under forty see our political process as one.

One thing for the expert class in American politics to think about — especially those of us who see ourselves as progressives or liberals — is a Biblical truism about being “doers of the words, and not hearers only.” What does this mean in the context of this post? Well, on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, I left before 7 am to vote one day and to pick up some groceries the next. I bumped into City Year workers — so-called young people — on those days, rising early to do their good works, to engage in meaningful work, to — dare I say it — change the world.

Voting for the younger adults in this country is hardly enough, because they don’t see it as making any more difference than dumping salt in the Atlantic. Volunteering for campaigns, for people who could get caught in a scandal at any moment? That’s a ridiculous idea. Working and doing good work to change peoples lives, however, is much more meaningful, and less fraught with scandal, corruption and hypocrisy than coming out to vote for candidates of two parties seemingly the puppets of K Street and corporate interests.

Until the poets, priests and politicians of our era get that, we will continue to see the politics of the foolhardy. For the people who aren’t voting may be acting out of a wisdom that the experts don’t understand.

Letter of Recommendation (or Wreck-o-mendation)

23 Thursday Sep 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School

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Academia, Carnegie Mellon University, Dan Resnick, Daniel P. Resnick, George Reid Andrews, Joe Trotter, Joe William Trotter Jr., Letters of Recommendation, Pittsburgh, Race, References, Sy Drescher, Transparency, University of Pittsburgh

George Reid Andrews, University of Pittsburgh

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about a string of not-so-wonderful professors I had at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon who were less than fine with me pursuing anything beyond a bachelor’s degrees, much less with me becoming Dr. Collins. I talked about how some of them went so far as to tell me that I wasn’t “graduate material,” as if I were made from parts found at a junk yard instead of in the shop of an Italian tailor.

I’m more than aware of the fact that I didn’t let those doubters stop me from becoming who I am today. Some were undoubtedly ones whose skepticism bordered on racist because of their assumptions about my intelligence and writing ability. Still, it should be noted that there are pitfalls to be avoided, if at all possible, when you’re applying for a job or applying to a college or graduate and professional school.

One, even if a professor or teacher has assigned an A for your performance in one of their courses, that doesn’t mean that think that you’re a great student. I learned that the hard way with George Reid Andrews, my professor for Latin American Revolutions my junior year at Pitt. Twenty years ago this week, I asked him for letters of recommendation for graduate school. Andrews agreed, but only to tell me seven months later what he really thought of my work. My research writing samples were “problematic,” my GRE scores were “barely adequate,” and I should’ve considered myself “lucky” just to get into the master’s program in the history department. That terse conversation told me that Andrews’ letter was lukewarm at best, or had found me seriously deficient at worst.

Two, and related to my interactions with Andrews, the process of providing a letter of recommendation or a reference ought to be transparent, so that the student or employee can be confident that they’re not being back-stabbed by the same people in which they’re placing significant trust. It was never a question I dared asked — to see my letter of recommendation — before I’d reached the final stages of grad school.

It would’ve helped with Andrews, and it would’ve helped with two of my three dissertation committee members, Joe Trotter and Dan Resnick. I found out through my Spencer Fellowship that Trotter had written me a lukewarm letter, while Resnick had rambled on and on about my “close relationship” with my “mentor Sy Drescher,” who had played “an instrumental role” in making me a scholar. Drescher, while one of my best professors at Pitt, played much less of a role in me pursuing grad school than so many other professors and students, including his former student Paul Riggs. It was a Leslie Stahl, “let’s give the poor Black boy a hand” kind of letter.

Later, when I asked to see my letters of recommendation from Resnick before sending them out for jobs, he went on for ten minutes about the “sanctity” of the recommendation process, about how privacy and “anonymity” were critical to provide protection for all parties involved. Needless to say, if someone blusters about privacy when politely asked about a letter of recommendation they’re writing for you, do not use that letter!

Bruce Anthony Jones, University of South Florida

Three, it’s important to get to know a person, to gain some sense of trust from them, before asking for a letter or a reference. You don’t have to become friends with them or meet their family — although that does help. They just have to know that their recommendation or reference will be put to good use by you and that what they say about you matters to both of you, in the most positive light possible. Otherwise, what’s the point of writing a letter or spending fifteen minutes on the phone talking about your qualities as a student or worker, right? This can go a bit too far, of course, as I wrote one of my own recommendations for Bruce Anthony Jones, another dissertation committee member, for him to merely put his signature to. Once he changed jobs for the University of Missouri-Columbia, his, um, my letter became worthless, if it had been worth anything at all to begin with.

I’ve written about two dozen letters of recommendation for high school, college and graduate students, for jobs, school applications and fellowship programs. Not to mention about an equal number of recommendations and references for professional colleagues and friends in academia and the nonprofit world. I’ve always written my own letters, insisted on them being seen by the people I’ve recommended and required that they explain their own rationale for their acceptance in the process. Most importantly, I’ve made sure to say “No” if I didn’t feel I could recommend them well or provide a great reference.