By Trysh Travis
Inside Higher Ed
Originally Published February 27, 2012
Can I ethically say, "No, I will not write you a letter of recommendation"?
I'm not talking about saying no to a student who comes in the day before a deadline and asks you for a letter, or the cases where the student is unable to get you a transcript, waiver form, and all that stuff by the deadline. Those are easy calls. Nor am I talking about the — fairly frequent — occasions when a student who did not do particularly well in a class asks for a recommendation. At a huge public university like mine, students will often seek a letter from any instructor who knows their name. Since I teach relatively small general education classes, that is often me. In such cases, it’s easy to tell a student, "I'm happy to write for you, but you have to know my letter will say you earned a B- and were absent six times; are you sure you want a letter like that?" Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, but either way my conscience is clear.
No, what I'm talking about here is the ethically fraught situation where a student wants a letter for a program in which they are unlikely to succeed — and in which they may actually come to harm. Since the economic downturn, I have found myself in this position a few times. One extreme example occurred last spring, when a student wanted a recommendation for an unpaid internship with an NGO in Africa. There was very little information about the organization on the website, and the student was not really sure what she would do as an intern there. She'd had an interview, but was reluctant to ask too many questions, she said, for fear she would seem "difficult" and not be offered the position. Despite knowing almost nothing about it, she'd decided the internship was necessary for her career goals. The issue of safety and of the cost of traveling and living near the placement, not to mention the substantive question of what kind of experience (if any) she’d gain from working in an organization that couldn’t even describe its expectations for employees — all this seemed, to her, irrelevant. Should I recommend a student into such a potentially useless, if not outright exploitative situation?
A less exotic version of this conundrum has come up several times in the last 18 months or so: the students who seek a recommendation for a graduate degree at a for-profit university, which they plan to finance through private loans or, worse, a credit card. The best undergraduates I teach get into top-flight graduate and professional schools and, even though law school placements of late have shaken my faith in the value of that degree, the insane costs of such programs make a kind of sense — at least for now.
No, what I'm talking about here is the ethically fraught situation where a student wants a letter for a program in which they are unlikely to succeed — and in which they may actually come to harm. Since the economic downturn, I have found myself in this position a few times. One extreme example occurred last spring, when a student wanted a recommendation for an unpaid internship with an NGO in Africa. There was very little information about the organization on the website, and the student was not really sure what she would do as an intern there. She'd had an interview, but was reluctant to ask too many questions, she said, for fear she would seem "difficult" and not be offered the position. Despite knowing almost nothing about it, she'd decided the internship was necessary for her career goals. The issue of safety and of the cost of traveling and living near the placement, not to mention the substantive question of what kind of experience (if any) she’d gain from working in an organization that couldn’t even describe its expectations for employees — all this seemed, to her, irrelevant. Should I recommend a student into such a potentially useless, if not outright exploitative situation?
A less exotic version of this conundrum has come up several times in the last 18 months or so: the students who seek a recommendation for a graduate degree at a for-profit university, which they plan to finance through private loans or, worse, a credit card. The best undergraduates I teach get into top-flight graduate and professional schools and, even though law school placements of late have shaken my faith in the value of that degree, the insane costs of such programs make a kind of sense — at least for now.
