Recommendation season

An adventure in patterned isolation

One of my pet peeves is “patterned isolation.” I first came across the idea in a book by Gerald Graff, but he took it from Laurence Veysey. Patterned isolation refers to the fact that people (or organizations), working in isolation from one another, will sometimes end up replicating each other’s labor to arrive at the same place. Or as I put it, once upon a time, “there are many things we do as teachers and scholars in patterned isolation from our colleagues, tasks that call upon us to reinvent wheels over and over in isolation from one another.” For me, patterned isolation often results in large amounts of wasted labor; it’s often much easier and more productive to tweak someone else’s work than to start from scratch. Patterned isolation was the motivation behind the way that I developed the collective approach to reading notes that I’ve used in a number of courses that I’ve taught.

But I was thinking this week about the recommendation letter, that ubiquitous genre in academia that no one likes to write and no one likes to read, but which nevertheless ends up occupying days worth of my time every year. Although it could be, this isn’t a post about the letters themselves. Instead, I was thinking this weekend about how much time I waste each year simply processing such letters.

When I was in graduate school, as I’ve said before, the internet was new. When I was finishing up my PhD, I’d already taken a temporary position at Old Dominion in Virginia. In the fall of 1997, therefore, I was embarking on my first, full-fledged foray into the academic job market. Living more than a thousand miles away from my support network complicated matters. So as I was preparing my application materials, I had to figure out how to best manage getting recommendation letters from my mentors into the hands of search committees. (Bear in mind that email was still relatively new, and not considered a legitimate form of submission yet. Also, PDFs didn’t become an open standard for documents until the late 2000s.) What I ended up doing was figuring out ahead of time all of the positions I planned on applying for (40-50?), and sending each of my references multiple sheets of mailing labels, ordered chronologically by application deadlines. They still had to print out letters, sign them, envelope them, apply the labels, and send them in time. Even now, I wince at how much I was asking them to do on my behalf, and that’s to say nothing of all of the potential ways that things could have gone wrong. Relying on the accuracy and stability of the USPS was probably less of a gamble back then, but still.

When I arrived at Syracuse in 2001, one of the services that the Careers office provided was the ability to store one’s dossier and one’s letters with them, and they would send out copies at the student’s request (and for a processing fee, of course). Having gone through the horror of a much more distributed (and dangerously unpredictable) system, I was thrilled to be able to advise our graduate students to use this service, regardless of how much it cost them. As a faculty member, this meant simply placing my recommendation letter on file with them and trusting that it would get to where (and to as many wheres as) it needed to.

Photo by Jordan Harrison on Unsplash

As the internet continued to develop, the prospects for centralizing and standardizing this process grew even more. Interfolio was founded in 1999, “to streamline the college application process for academic jobs by providing an online portfolio and application system.” For a while, too, it seemed to work well (although there were still processing fees, of course). More and more folks were using the service, schools were setting up job advertisement pages on the site, and it felt like it had reached critical mass. To my mind, this was precisely the kind of thing that the internet was best suited for—Interfolio took a fairly messy and idiosyncratic process, centralized and streamlined it, and made it much simpler and more manageable. In an ideal world, this would have standardized the application process and made it easier on applicants, references, and search committees alike.

In the world we live in, I don’t know what happened. I have a couple of guesses. One is the dreaded “monetization” problem, which is the source of generations’ worth of internet enshittification. It’s the legal version of ransomware: someone comes up with a good idea, lots of people rush to embrace it, then whoever’s in charge takes their enthusiasm as a sign to turn their priority to profit (as Cory Doctorow describes):

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Did this happen to Interfolio? I honestly don’t know. It still exists, and while they still offer their dossier service, it appears to be secondary in priority to a model where they offer third-party information systems to individual colleges and universities, a market where there’s probably a lot more money (and itself a pattern of “growth” that’s depressingly familiar).

(It may also partly be the fact that Interfolio is now owned by Elsevier, a company that tops many folks’ lists of the very worst corporate extractors of academic labor. But that’s a long, tangential rabbit hole here.)

Nowadays, though, we’ve reverted to a system that is even more decentralized (and even less patterned) than the one I grew up with. When I write a letter for a student, rather than placing that document in a dossier anywhere, I am responsible for getting it to the search committee(s). And that means that I have to spend 10-15 minutes navigating each school’s application website, answering variations of the same questions over and over (“how long have you known the candidate?” is a question that has mattered to no one ever, and yet, I’ve answered it hundreds of times in my career), before finally being allowed to upload my recommendation letter. Each of these websites is provided by a third-party vendor, featuring insignificant variations among the questions designed solely to prevent references from failing to read (or autofilling) them. Each of these sites is quite literally designed according to late-1990s aesthetic and accessibility standards—the students to whom I was teaching web design at Old Dominion could have designed these pages.

(At some point, universities began diverting their technology money to third-party vendors, rather than developing their own systems. Blackboard is perhaps the largest example of this, but there are third party sites for admissions, advising, student progress, faculty travel, and just about anything else you can imagine. And needless to say, these systems change every couple of years, without much (if any) direct input from the actual stakeholders whose work depends upon them. I’ll never forget when I was graduate director, and unable to answer a prospective applicant’s question about our process, because I didn’t have access to our own program’s application platform—I would have had to submit an application fee and fill out the muli-page form to find the answer. But again, this is a separate discussion, I suppose.)

I know, it’s peevish of me to complain about spending 10 minutes on another school’s site, however crappy it might be. But when you multiply those ten minutes by 5, 10, or 20 students, and you multiply it again by 30, 50, or even 100 applications per student, all of a sudden, those minutes pile into hours, days, and weeks. Bear in mind, too, that with the way that the internet has enabled us to move away from face-to-face interviews, recommendation season isn’t just a couple of months during fall semester. It’s literally all year long, And that means staying accessible through email for each of the individual requests that those sites generate over the course of a year (and patrolling my spam folder for the requests that run afoul of my filters—I find some there every year).

None of which I intend as a criticism of the most precarious stakeholder in all of this, the students on behalf of whom I write these letters. It is most decidedly not their fault.

It is the fault instead of bloated organizations who prioritize their own data collection over the needs of the applicants, references, and review committees that actually generate and work with the data. It is the fault of the people who make these decisions, choices whose consequences fall upon applicants and their networks and result in a colossal amount of additional, unnecessary shadow labor. And it is the fault of a system built on patterned isolation that can’t seem ever, even when the technology and the resources are available, to get out of its own way. It’s just so frustrating to me, to know that things could easily be better, but aren’t.

0/5, would not recommend.