This post continues the occasional series on lessons learned
from three years’ service on the promotion and tenure committee at Duke. If you need to catch up, the previous posts
explained why lifetime labor contracts might make more sense than you think,
how junior scholars should go about pursuing tenure, and what newly minted
senior scholars should do once they get it.
This post is squarely aimed at senior scholars, and in fact there is
some chance that junior scholars who read it might freak out just a bit, as we’re
going deep inside the sausage factory here.
A few words of reassurance appear at the end of the post.
At the heart of every tenure or promotion review lies a set
of evaluation letters. I’ve read about
2,000 of them over the past three years – most positive, a few negative, and
some too confusing to understand. For a
tenured professor, writing a letter on behalf of a junior colleague at another
university is something of a solemn duty.
It is a commitment to spend hours immersing oneself in that colleague’s
work, then more hours composing a letter that can run to many pages of
single-spaced type. There is rarely any
compensation for the task.
The most common way to think about tenure letters is whether
they are “positive” or “negative.” For
reasons I’ll explain in a moment, “positive” letters are themselves often
subcategorized into a range from “lukewarm” to “over the top.”
There is a more important dimension on which to grade
letters, however, and that is on the scale from “useless” to “extremely
helpful.” The bulk of this post will
concern the problem that many letter writers are less helpful than they could
be, and suggest some solutions to that problem.
Problematizing the
letter
The main reason that tenure letters end up being unhelpful
is that their authors are afraid of saying anything negative about the
candidate.
Suppose you’ve been asked to write a letter on behalf of a
junior scholar, and the honest truth is that you’re not sure whether the
scholar in question has met the standards their department should apply. Were you not bound to keep the request and
the letter confidential, you might be inclined to ask others for their opinion
to help you formulate your own. Given
your lack of confidence in your opinion, you’d hate for a person to be denied
tenure solely on the basis of what you think.
Should you write an unambiguously positive letter or what we might call
a “nuanced” one?
This is what a game theorist might call a “multiple
equilibrium” scenario. Others might
invoke the concept of social norms. If
the norm in your field is to write positive letters in this scenario, then a
nuanced letter actually ends up looking bad.
If, on the other hand, nuanced letters are the norm then there’s little
downside risk to writing one yourself.
Among North American tenure letter writers, the norm is to
limit nuance. There are a number of
negative ramifications of this tendency:
- The norm against nuance leads readers to “read
between the lines,” inferring (perhaps erroneously) a letter writer’s true
thoughts when they could have been stated explicitly.
- The norm against nuance forces review committees
to treat the odd negative comment as though it were radioactive waste, with the
potential to contaminate the entire dossier.
- The norm against nuance leads letter writers to
engage in shallower discussion of a candidate’s work.
- The norm against nuance leads to “praise
inflation;” it makes it more difficult to signal to committees that they really
have a true superstar on their hands. A
letter with the concluding sentence “I would favor the granting of tenure to
this candidate” would in all likelihood be interpreted negatively: it’s
sterile, lukewarm. You have to say “this
candidate is the greatest thing since sliced bread and if you don’t tenured
him/her I’ll be flying down tomorrow to recruit him/her” to make an impression.
In short, the tendency to avoid saying anything negative or
neutral about a candidate makes letters less useful than they might be.
This can end up having negative ramifications for the
candidate. Suppose the candidate works
in a field divided into two camps. Let’s
further presume that the candidate aligns more closely with camp “X,” and
scholars in camp “Y” have a tendency to be critical or even dismissive of the
work emanating from camp “X.” You, the
letter writer, also align with camp “X” and you wonder if you should make any reference
to the criticisms that you might anticipate arising from camp “Y” scholars.
Your aversion to nuance leads you to omit this
discussion. The possibility exists,
however, that the candidate’s dossier will include negative letters from camp
“Y.” And if that happens, the question
is whether readers of the dossier will correctly discern that there are
differing camps in the field, or will instead interpret the camp “Y” letter writer as a
rare person who is willing to be candid about a scholar and is saying what
everybody else in the field privately thinks. Hopefully, somebody will step forward and contextualize the dispute for
the scholar’s colleagues, dean, and other decision-makers in the chain of
command. But this is not guaranteed to
happen.
You, the hesitant letter writer, have a chance to prevent
this from happening. But in order to do
it, you’ve got to resist the urge to write a rose-colored letter.
Bringing the nuance
back
In many fields, there are senior scholars who have an
established reputation for writing blunt letters. European letter writers are often ascribed a
similar reputation, though individual differences clearly matter.
If you’re a North American scholar who does not yet have the
reputation of being candid, how can you signal to the world that your nuanced
commentary should be seen as just that, and not a basic negative
statement? Just say so, right in the
letter! I’ve come to appreciate letters
that have this type of embedded meta-commentary. Tell people that you know about the norm
against nuance, and that it doesn’t apply to you. Then just say what you really think. Here’s a completely made-up (i.e., not cut and pasted from any actual letter), generic template for how the meta-commentary can play out:
“While I have focused to this point on the positive aspects
of this candidate’s work, of which there are many, it is important to recognize
that some scholars in this field would raise a few concerns. Personally, I do not attach much weight to
these concerns, and I should reiterate that I am a big fan of the candidate’s
work. I also understand that letters
with nuanced commentary are often read as negative letters and would urge you
not to apply that lens in this case. I’ll
provide you with my understanding of the criticisms so that you might
understand them in context.”
By providing meta-commentary, you temporarily elevate yourself from a participant in an
ongoing battle against the forces of ignorance to a referee of said
battle. That’s exactly the perspective
that your readers will be coming from.
You also permit yourself to raise concerns without assuming ownership of
them. Your letter instantly becomes more useful.
A few further suggestions for letter-writers
- Read the
instructions. Department or review
committee chairs will likely send you a boilerplate letter officially
requesting your evaluation. Pay
attention to it. Different universities
are looking for different sets of information.
Some want you to rank the candidate relative to peers, some don’t. Some want you to say explicitly whether the
candidate should receive tenure, others don’t.
You’ll be most useful to the review process if you provide exactly what
the requestor is asking for.
- Be
forthright with disclaimers. In most
cases, departments are not supposed to solicit letters from evaluators that are
“too close” to the candidate. So you
might think that the fact that you’ve received a request means that you satisfy
some sort of arms’-length requirement.
But requestors do overlook things sometimes, and other times there
exists significant gray area in terms of what qualifies as arms’-length. Disclose before you consent and you might
wind up avoiding some work. Disclose in
the letter itself and then your readers can decide whether they want to
discount what you have to say.
- Limit
bean-counting. In many fields,
letter writers tend to focus on easily quantified indicators of
productivity. How many articles? How many in the “top tier” of journals? How many citations? It’s fine to count the
beans in your letter, but bear in mind that the people soliciting your opinion
don’t need you to tell them about impact factors or citation counts. They can look that up themselves if they care
about it. The most useful letters go
beyond claiming that a candidate’s work is important; they explain why it is
important. Authors of the least useful
letters quite obviously did nothing more than look at the candidate’s CV.
- Be
generous in your interpretive commentary.
Describe what the candidate has done and why you find it compelling – if
you do find it compelling. If some
aspect of the work isn’t convincing to you, explain why. I’ve read many tenure dossiers where the
clearest explanation of what a candidate did, and why it was important, came
from a letter writer and not the candidate him or herself.
- To
whatever extent possible, avoid technical language. Sometimes it’s just much easier to say it
with jargon. But remember that your
letter will be read very closely by people who are not in the same subfield as
you and the candidate. They are the
readers who will need the most help in understanding what the candidate has
done.
Now of course, if you do all these things and cultivate a
reputation for writing very useful letters, you could pay a significant price
in terms of being asked to write them more often. Just remember the lessons from last time
about knowing when to say no and everything will work out just fine.
Reassurance for Junior Scholars
And now a special word for the junior scholars who have
completed this tour of the sausage factory.
If you happen to be working in a field with sharp divisions, are
worried that your colleagues might solicit letters from the other side of the
divide come tenure time, and further fret that your friends on your side won’t adequately rush to your
defense, bear in mind that you yourself have an opportunity to contextualize
your work in relation to the divide, in your personal statement. First, ensure that you have a complete
understanding of the nature of the intellectual dispute. It is unusual to arrive at such an
understanding after reading literature on only one side. Then, spell out the
arguments that a critic from the other camp would view your work in your personal statement, and describe
your counterarguments. Leave not to a letter writer what you can do yourself!
