No reservations. . . not

Between job searches and graduate school admissions of all flavors, many faculty members’ offices are like little recommendation-letter factories these days. Letter-writing is part of my job, and I owe it to the universe not to upset this pyramid scheme that works as a pyramid scheme ought to work: since high school, over a dozen people have written letters on my behalf; since before grad school even ended, I have written letters for almost ten times as many students. Because I’ve taught more than two thousand students by now, and I once held a job where students needed faculty recommendations for the most absurdly trivial honor, I wouldn’t be surprised if more than a hundred people have received my Seal of Approval.

The most recent of these may not have been so deserving.

His request came via email, along with a flurry of others. On short notice, he had decided to apply to a professional MA program. He had learned a lot from me, he said, and thought that, of all his professors, I knew him best. To his request he attached some supporting materials. Among the thousand-plus students I have taught at JPU, I remembered him favorably. He seemed to have his shit together, to the extent of even being able to make a living with his newly minted English degree. I agreed to write the letter.

Over the next few days, I began to regret doing so almost immediately. I evaluated the attachments to the initial request. The statement of purpose was trite in the predictable ways, and he had requested feedback, which I gave with quite brutal honesty, along with links to some pointers on such statements that he could have found himself with the help of a little-known computer tool called “Google.” No problem: he thanked me profusely and revised prolifically, in the process revealing he had no idea what he was applying for and hadn’t done even the most basic research on what a statement of purpose is supposed to look like. Meanwhile, I had refreshed my memory of this student, who had barely earned a C from me. How on earth did I forget that? I had never written a grad-school recommendation for a student who had earned any less than an A. In fact, whenever I receive requests from people who had earned anything other than an A, I decline, telling them that they should request their letters from those from whom they had earned As. This approach not only gives me a graceful out, but (more importantly) it also prompts the applicant to reevaluate her or his goals.

But I couldn’t retract my “yes.” The deadline loomed (the request was on short notice, remember), the alum sent no re-revised statement (for which I was grateful), and the form waiving the right to view my letter never arrived (for this I was not grateful). I wrote the letter, vague and brief—though peppered with modifiers such as “quite” and “rather,” to make my assertions less pepperily commendatory, my hesitation more evident—with the bottom portion of the unwaived waiver form completed as truthfully as I could manage. It was all I could do not to check the “recommend with reservations” box, keeping my reservations hidden.

A year from now, no one, including me, will remember that I wrote this letter. But I have compromised my integrity. I have also learned not to rely on my memory. In my extremely mid thirties, that memory is noticeably already on decline. (As for my parlor trick of being able to go around the room naming all my students at the end of the session on the first day of class, that is, well, a parlor trick.) And boy howdy have I learned to go easy on the trigger with “Yes.” The Nancy Reagan of my childhood was onto something, and I should have just said no.

Thing is, I do think this alum would benefit from this graduate program, to which I do believe he would be a credit. Then again, maybe, given his self-induced short timeline and my harrowing critique of his statement of purpose, he wound up not applying. Yet my hemming-and-hawing recommendation will arrive, if it hasn’t done so already. And I feel like an idiot, because I was.