It is academic reference season. Daily I receive requests from former and current students, or people whose work i’ve got read or examined, or met in a boost, to write in support in their application for further study or for tutorial jobs. I’m usually happy to do my bit. But as these references accumulate in files around the globe, I do wonder what percentage of them will ever be read.
Data protection has taken the thrill out of reference writing, and hence the joys out of reference reading. Gone are the times when it was possible to put in writing on a plain note card “Grab him while you can,” as apparently Gilbert Ryle, professor of philosophy at Oxford, did for one in every of his students within the 1960s. Or within the strangulated prose of Isaiah Berlin, in his recommendation for the intense legal philosopher HLA Hart, “What he’s tortured by is the idea that he’ll never be better than [AC] Ewing and may never hold other views than Ewing. He realises himself that this isn’t an extremely exciting frame of mind to be in … Nevertheless … he can’t be worse than Ewing, who, in the end, is … in his own way, not contemptible.”
These days one has to bear in mind that the man you’re writing for may eventually see the reference. Accordingly, reference inflation has set in, and everybody is just wonderful. One reference writer has said of several of his PhD students, “He jogs my memory of the young Wittgenstein.” (That’s right! He can never get his shirt to remain tucked in either!) Perhaps the oddest comment I’ve seen is “Pound for pound she is the right philosopher within the department.” What can that mean She’s not first-class, but however she is actually small
The US variety of academic reference writing needs a significant look. Typically, job candidates compile a “dossier” that comes with perhaps 5 or 6 references. And unless a reference is three or four single-spaced pages then the support is thought of as somewhat half-hearted. But usually there’s not that much to inform, and so we receive, in effect, six different versions of the candidate’s CV in prose form, combined with summaries of his or her PhD thesis, and some lines of detail designed to convince that the reference writer really knows the candidate well and have been truly, deeply, impressed.
But readers of references also are writers, and so we all know the guidelines. When reading job references our eyes glaze over until we reach the business paragraph: the single where the comparisons are made. The rule of thumb is that the more the reference writer stands proud his or her neck, the stronger the advice. In the event you say the candidate is ideal, meaning nothing. Should you say “within the top three of the cohort”, again, little or no. But when you assert the candidate is the ideal this year, or for several years, or for a decade, that suggests something. Certainly one of members of the comparison class could be reading, and be pointed out very sharp. The strongest reference of all says the individual is best than some starry named figure, albeit done in a slightly more positive way than Berlin’s comparison between Hart and Ewing.
For all of the effort and ink, what, as readers of references, can we hope to locate Only this: is the candidate better or worse than apparently from their CV Well, nobody goes to claim: beware, we must always never have admitted this person to our PhD programme and the thesis only passed since the supervisor kind of wrote it. So that’s half the explanation gone. And we probably won’t trust a referee who raves on and on. So the opposite half bites the dust, too. Hence the worth we get from academic references is minuscule in comparison to the hassle involved on both sides.
Perhaps it is time for academia to follow standard practice elsewhere on this planet of labor, seeking references only on the final stage. a brief form, with three questions. Can they be trusted to maintain their fingers out of the till Did they truly get such a lot of A stars at GCSE Are they neat and tidy The right answers, for sure, are yes, yes, no.
• Jonathan Wolff is professor of philosophy and dean of arts and arts, University College London
