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The importance of doing unfavorable tenure reviews

Brian Leiter

A senior philosopher writes:

You recently ran a post on Leiter Reports about tenure reviews, asking just how many one should take on in a given year.  But there was an issue which came up in that post which is particularly important, and I hope you'll run a separate post addressing that issue.

One writer offered the following opinion: "I do think it's really important to not agree to do it unless you think there's a non-trivial chance you will be able to recommend the candidate."   Another suggested that this principle is too weak: one shouldn't take this on unless one thinks it probable that one will write a positive evaluation.  I have certainly met others who subscribe to a still stronger principle.

I really think this is appalling.  While this sort of principle seems appropriate for letters of recommendation, where one is being asked by an individual to write a letter of support for that very person, external evaluations for tenure and promotion are a different thing altogether.  One is being asked by a department (or a university) to offer an opinion on the quality of a person's work.  Surely it is legitimate for institutions to try to determine the value of a faculty member's scholarly work.  And I take it that we can all agree that not everyone's work is of equal value; some individuals who come up for tenure or promotion have not done work which merits advancement.  It is one of the responsibilities we have as faculty members to provide honest reviews of candidates so that philosophy departments and universities can make responsible decisions about tenure and promotion.  Those who refuse to write negative reviews, or who refuse to take on reviews where they think there is some risk of writing a less than enthusiastic review, make it difficult for departments and universities to make responsible decisions.

I have written letters of evaluation which have not been positive.  At times, this keeps me up at night.  The thought that I have played some role in a negative tenure decision, with all the pain that inevitably causes, weighs very heavily on me.  I understand the desire to spare oneself this sort of thing.  But this is no excuse for undermining a legitimate system of evaluation, and this is exactly what one does when one refuses to evaluate candidates one cannot support.

I have not posted these remarks in response to the earlier comments both because I believe this issue deserves a post of its own, but also because I wish to remain anonymous.  I do not usually ask for anonymity on controversial issues, but in this case I am concerned that making my views on this matter public, given the other views on this issue, will only make it likely that I receive many more requests for external evaluations in cases where a negative opinion is called for.  I do not want to become a magnet for controversial cases, or worse, for cases which are uncontroversially weak.

This seems to me exactly right.  I would add that the willingness of members of the profession to write an unfavorable tenure letter is essential to defending the institution of tenure. 

I'll permit anonymous comments on this thread, since those who agree with my correspondent will no doubt share the concerns in the final paragraph; I will ask, however, that commenters include a valid e-mail address, but that will not appear.  (By agreeing in public with my correspondent, I do not think I run much additional risk, since as readers know, I am not hesitant about expressing critical opinions, even in public.)

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17 responses to “The importance of doing unfavorable tenure reviews”

  1. Christopher Hitchcock

    I agree, and said so in the earlier thread.

    One issue that relates to the earlier discussion: If people routinely turn down requests to do tenure reviews when they have a negative opinion, that will lead others to interpret refusals in a negative light. Even if I decline an invitation to review a candidate for legitimate reasons (it is not really my area, I have three others due at the same time…), some might interpret it as a kind of negative evaluation.

    Reply
  2. Jon Coburn

    Since I'm one of the philosophers being quoted, I would probably behoove me to explain myself a little bit.

    (1) I think philosophers are on balance *very* bad at rationally coping with their own heuristic biases. We are very confident in our ability to recognize bad arguments from our students, and this confidence tends to metastasize to where we have way too much confidence in our own judgments of quality about things unrelated to student logic exams. In addition, we are also very, very good at rationalizing things. Given this, I do not think one should be overconfident in one's own ability to assess other people.

    If you agree with me that there is a non-trivial amount of uncertainty and bias in your own assessments, what is the rational response? How can one do the least harm?

    I know that writing a negative review could cause immense harm to the candidate, but I'm not at all sure that refusing to write a review will harm "the institution of tenure" in any meaningful way. First, nobody is defending being dishonest in letters. Second, it just seems incredible to me to posit that tenure in threat now because a bunch of people who don't deserve it got tenure due to people like me not reviewing them when we know our report will be negative. [As far as I can tell tenure is under threat *entirely* because the accreditation agencies have allowed schools to rely on contingent faculty.]

    (2) My null hypothesis is that if the department is putting up the person for tenure, and if the department is going to support the candidate, then the person *probably* deserves tenure in that department. I realize this isn't always the case, but for times that it is not, see the following.

    (3) The effects of a positive and negative letter are not proportionate. On balance- My positive letter isn't going to turn a negative departmental vote into a positive one. What it will do is convince a college level committee to go along with a positive departmental vote. My negative letter isn't going to turn a positive departmental vote into a negative one. What it will do is convince a college level committee to overturn a positive departmental vote.

    I'm not convinced that this is actually a good thing. It strikes me that administrative micromanagement of departments is a much, much bigger problem than the supposed threat to tenure caused by people who don't want to write letters in cases where they know ahead of time that they won't be supportive.

    Again, to the extent that my negative letter has any effect whatsoever, it's likely to help the administration overturn the department. If the department was already going to go negative, then my refusal to write a letter, or even me writing a negative one, isn't going to change that.

    (4) Again, let me repeat that no one is defending being dishonest. But viewing the letter writing process as putting yourself in the position of being a gatekeeper over and above the person's own department seems to me like the definition of epistemic pride, which we all knows goes before a destruction. It's very easy for us to recognize heuristic bias in others, but psychological research shows that it's very, very hard for people to recognize instances of it in themselves. In all things regarding personnel decisions I think it is thus extremely important to realize this fact and organize your actions accordingly.

    Finally, rather than thinking of myself as a Roman Emperor at the gladiatorial games (or Roger Ebert on his T.V. show), when I write a tenure letter I think my *primary* job is to charitably explain the candidate's philosophy to people who don't have the requisite background. This is a really important task, and I think one that helps the candidate and department quite a bit vis a vis administrators who may or may not think that philosophy is silly.

    Reply
  3. Anonymous

    I agree completely with this. We write negative referee reports for journal editors. Why? To protect the integrity of the discipline and maintain standards. For exactly the same reasons, we should write negative tenure reviews, etc, when that is warranted.

    Reply
  4. Chris Tucker

    Hi Jon,

    As I understand you, you are defending the Never Be Negative Thesis (NBN): you should never agree to do a tenure review if you believe you will write a negative report. First, I will argue against NBN. Then, I will provide a partial response to your defense of NBN.

    AGAINST NBN
    Having external referees involved in the tenure review process is not micromanagement; it is an intelligent way to compensate for biases the department may have. The department may have all sorts of biases—it’s their colleague after all!—that lead them to overestimate the worthiness of the person for tenure. Some departments may also have biases that lead them to underestimate the worthiness of their colleague. An administrator, therefore, has good reason to seek independent opinions on the quality of the candidate’s research profile. If the administrator is seeking independent advice, it seems extremely sensible to consult experts in the field.

    External evaluation of the candidate’s research profile, then, plays a valuable role in the assessment of the candidate. Now suppose everyone in the profession followed NBT. Either one of two things would happen: administrators keep asking people until they get two (or how many ever) people to say “give him tenure” or they just give up and are then forced to make some interpretation concerning why no one wanted to referee file. Assuming the administrator is aware of the NBT norm in the discipline, they will likely conclude that the person is not tenure-worthy. This might unfairly hurt the candidate when there was just bad luck in asking people who were super busy. In any event, the end result is that the independent check on the person’s credentials becomes pretty thin. Unless the report is “glowing”, the “give him tenure” recommendation is not much evidence in the candidate’s favour when you pretty much know beforehand that if a report is submitted, it is going to be positive.

    In short, here is an argument against NBN: external evaluations are important features of the tenure review process which compensate for biases the department may have; but they can only play that role well when there is a reasonable chance someone will say “don’t give him tenure” if the person doesn’t deserve it.

    Here are three other considerations to keep in mind when evaluating NBN. First, in the current job market, if an unqualified person gets tenure, then you are (when the dept wouldn’t lose the line) denying that job to someone who is likely going to do a much better job in the long run. Second, surely there are at least some clear cases where the person doesn’t deserve tenure. If everybody just keeps denying reviewing that person’s file, then you are simply wasting the time of the administrator. Just put the candidate out of his/her misery and be done with it.

    AGAINST JON’S DEFENCE

    Re biases: I don’t know the biases literature all that well. But, going solely on what you said, I don’t think biases support NBN. The point you stressed is that we are bad at identifying and managing our biases. But if it is unlikely for us to be biased for or against the candidate in some way, then biases aren’t a big deal. And even if we are likely to have a bias, unless we are especially likely to have a negative bias, I don’t think we get support for NBN. And even if we—the external referees—are likely to have negative biases, it’s unclear how bad that is if the department is very likely to have lots of positive biases.

    Re epistemic pride: I don’t know how much of your point here was intended as rhetorical flourish, but I can evaluate a person for tenure review without committing epistemic hubris. Remember, an external evaluator’s opinion is one among several. It should be taken as such. If a particular administrator always sees one negative evaluation as sufficient for denying tenure, then the problem is not with external referees who are willing to be negative; the problem is with the administrator in giving one opinion more weight than it should have.

    Reply
  5. V. Alan White

    My position with respect to this issue is that you, as an external reviewer, have been invited as advisor to the committee to better inform them on how they might vote. Such advisors are additional data points in addition to what the committee has more immediately available to them. A committee that regards such additional data points as definitive in casting the vote either faces a really close call on tenure or promotion or has an undue regard for the role of external review that reflects intellectual insecurity or professional lassitude or (perhaps in some cases) star-struck regard for others' opinions (a mutant meme of insecurity). (I should say I'm certain the latter has never been a factor in assessing my input!)

    You have no control over how that committee assesses your input. You only control aspects of the quality and forthcomingness of your assessment, and of course your willingness to be part of the process in the first place. I'd not been aware prior to this discussion (thanks Brian and Professor Atherton!) that refusals to assess could have an impact, and so that's now an additional factor in my thinking. Fortunately–in recognition of Jon's concerns–the requests I've received thus far have only been only clear calls in favor of positive recommendation. But now I see that if I have been considered worthy to participate, then I should render the best decision I can, simpliciter. I have struggled over tenure votes before in more direct circumstances; why should I shy away from this responsibility? So from now on, unless there are additional reasons (conflict of interest, etc.) I should refuse to act as external reviewer, I will do so whether the case is easy–as it has been thus far for me–or much more of a problem.

    Reply
  6. Henry Jackman

    I think that John’s response underestimates the amount of weight that positive letters are allowed to carry at some universities. For instance, at York, a Department’s Tenure and Promotion Adjudicating committee is now expected to base their judgment of the quality of the candidate’s research almost entirely on the letters of evaluation. They are not permitted to base judgments on that portion of the file upon their own evaluation of the work.

    Consequently, if there was a candidate whose research the department thought was terrible, but whose work was consistently characterized as, say, “highly competent” by his or her letter writers, then that candidate’s work would have to be characterized as “highly competent” by the department. Anything less would be, justifiably, overturned by the Dean as a clear violation of the Universities Tenure and Promotion procedures.

    I don’t think that there is anything particularly wrong with this, and there are good reasons for giving the judgment of impartial experts in a field priority over the judgments of colleagues who might not only lack expertise in the candidate’s area but also have their judgment clouded by personal sympathies or animosities.

    However, this sort of system only works if we can expect external referees to be willing to write a negative letter if they don’t think the work is up to snuff.

    I recognize that there are still many schools were departments have the latitude not to recommend a candidate in spite of what their letters say, but I would expect that this number is shrinking.

    Reply
  7. Ralph Wedgwood

    It has long amazed me that the tenure promotion process at most US universities relies so heavily on external letters of evaluation. The system has at least the following flaws:

    1. The external evaluators are hardly ever a truly representative sample of the relevant experts; and they are also often affected by the various biases that Jon describes.

    2. The external evaluators are usually very busy people, who typically have difficulty squeezing their evaluation of the candidate's work into their busy schedules.

    3. The external evaluators are usually not paid for their work (if they were paid, this might help them to feel an obligation to do their evaluation especially carefully).

    4. The external evaluators have little incentive to ensure that the right decision is made: they will not become colleagues of the candidate if the candidate does get tenure; and since their evaluation is anonymous, they will not suffer any significant damage to their reputation if the process results in the wrong decision.

    By contrast, the tenured members of the department in question are usually in a better position to make the right decision: they have had ample opportunity to get to know the candidate's work; and they have a very clear stake in making sure that the right decision is made. So I believe that the tenured members of the department in question should make up their own minds, and the letters of external evaluators should be accorded relatively little weight.

    Unfortunately, administrators often attach enormous weight to any negative comments in external evaluators' letters. Any external evaluator who has a realistic sense of the system's imperfections, and of the limitations of his or her own judgment, will shy away from having such a great influence on the outcome.

    So while the system is flawed in this way, it is unrealistic to expect many external evaluators to be willing to include negative comments in their letters. Moralizing admonitions from Brian Leiter and Chris Tucker (et al.) will hardly change that!

    Reply
  8. Jon Coburn

    Chris,

    Thanks for the response, which I think clarifies a lot of important issues. I actually agree with almost everything you wrote.

    However, I wasn't attempting to defend NBN. What I defended was not agreeing to do a letter when it was a priori very clear to me that I would have a hard time writing a positive letter.

    I think we do disagree about one of two things. First, possibly the amount of heuristic bias in human life, and the importance of strategizing to deal with it in your own behavior. As far as the amount, I think the avalanche of research following Kahneman and Tversky's groundbreaking work speaks for itself. So this leads to questions concernign strategizing in terms of it. One must realize that one is bringing heuristic biases and think of what policies will lead to the least possible harm, given these inevitable biases. [It's much easier with journal articles. When I do council rejection, I always do is give the person detailed advice about how the article might be rewritten as well as where the rewritten article might be submitted. I think this mitigates greatly the possibility that I was being unfair. Even if I was being unfair I'm to some extent making up for it by helping the writer.]

    But one who agrees with me about the amount of heuristic bias might rationally disagree about the best strategy to confront it with respect to writing tenure letters. This is one of the important takeaways from your post, and I realize that informed people of good will can disagree about this.

    But let me reiterate. With the case of tenure letters, I'm being asked to balance two potential harms. A biased negative letter is likely to harm the candidate, her family, her students, and her department. As long as I try really hard to be fair (not giving in to inflated praise; concentrating on explaining the work itself) a biased positive letter is not likely to have near the harmful effect. First, the department will probably get it right. Second, there are so many other hoops the candidate has to jump through. It is very unlikely a biased positive letter is going to get someone tenure who would not have gotten it otherwise. But, given all the hoops, it is far more likely that a biased negative letter will result in a deserving candidate not getting tenure.

    Finally, there are checks against writing a biased positive letter. If one takes the most important thing to be actually describing the candidate's work, then the letter will be helpful independent of the thumbs up or down assessment. Another check is not to confuse an unwillingness to say "yes" to cases that you know you would not support, with an unwillingness to ultimately conclude, after laboring to explain the work as charitably as possible, that the candidate does not deserve tenure at her instituion. But, again, nobody has been defending this latter form of unwillingness.

    Reply
  9. Rebecca Kukla

    I don't think I have a legitimate defense of my disinclination to do reviews I suspect will not be positive – so my claim in the other thread was not intended as a prescriptive one. It is just very hard for me to trust myself enough to play a significant role in torpedoing the career of someone I don't know well. It's a huge moral weight. I have done it before, and will do it again I am sure. But I admit, I avoid it.

    At many institutions, some of the external referees are chosen by the candidate and some by the department. I am curious if the many people on this thread who are standing up for agreeing to write reviews that will be negative feel the same way in cases where the candidate approaches them. I know I, for one, would have an incredibly hard time saying 'yes, put me on the list' to the candidate herself and then writing a negative report.

    Reply
  10. anonymous

    Writing negative tenure letters is an unpleasant business. But if tenure is not to be a sham, it really must be done, when the case at hand calls for it to be done. I speak as a person who spent many years as the chair of a department in a university that at least purports to have very exacting tenure standards. I also spent several years on our school wide appointments and promotions committee. So I've seen lots and lots of tenure cases up close and personal and not just in philosophy. Several things are worth noting in no particular order.

    First, I have seen a few tenure cases that were so-called "slam dunks" in which just about everybody — both internal departmental evaluators and external referees — agrees that the candidate is either already a superstar or on a steep trajectory toward superstardom. Those are the easy cases. They are actually an extraordinarily joyful thing to be a part of.

    I should say, though, that even in overwhelmingly positive cases, there can creep in the occasional, but usually isolated note of negativity. And I should also add that at this institution, tenure is not really awarded on the basis of "majority of the outside letters rule." The majority can be wrong for lots of reasons. We rely on departments to sort through the pros and cons of each case, using both their own, independent judgments and also the judgments of outside evaluators — and this even in cases in which the external letters are overwhelmingly positive — to help higher committees weigh the balance of considerations for and against.

    I have seen an even fewer number of cases, mostly at the department level, that are strongly and overwhelmingly negative. I hardly saw any such cases during my years on the appointment and promotions committee. Such cases usually do not make it past the department level here. Plus in a still fewer number of instances when it is clear to the candidate and the department chair and the people in the department the candidate trusts that the candidate has no serious chance (because, say, the candidate has published almost nothing) sometimes a case doesn't even get started. Doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

    Those are the extremes. In the upper extreme a negative letter will get some hearing, but is usually an outlier and is disregarded as the product of a mind with some sort of bone to pick against the relevant candidate. In the lower extreme a negative letter is just one more bit of evidence that tenure is not deserved. What would happen if people were unwilling to say of an overwhelmingly negative case that they viewed it negatively? Perhaps some rather underserving candidates might be more likely to get tenure. And the pipe-line of jobs would be further clogged and it would be harder for deserving people who are earlier in their careers to move into those positions that ought to be vacated and opened up. Not a good thing. We have to be willing to pull the plug when the plug deserves to be plugged.

    What would happen if people refused to comment negatively on otherwise positive cases? The consequences would be a lot less dire, for sure. But sometimes the negative outlier gets it right. The emperor has no clothes. It, of course, takes some courage and a degree of self-confidence to say it. But confidentiality certainly helps such things be said. Admittedly. such swimming against the tide letters don't often carry the day. But sometimes they do — especially if that assessment is shared by enough internal members of the relevant department and/or is subtly echoed in even the positive letters. Since you see only your own letter, you never know if you are going to be construed as the grouchy outlier with a bone to pick or the one who sees clearly that emperor has no clothes. In either case, I think you should give your best considered judgment and let the department and upper committees decide what to make of it on balance.

    Of course, most of the cases fall in between the strongly negative and the overwhelmingly positive. Such cases are always very difficult. They can sometimes be divisive, unfortunately. Here is where most of the false positives and false negatives are generated. These, I think, are the real test of the integrity of the tenure system. It's also where institutional culture plays a huge role — for good for or for ill. Some institutions — like mine — are much more leery of false positive decisions than of false negative decisions. That causes it to turn down more such cases than might be turned down at other institutions. But I have also been at institutions where such cases have a much higher chance of success than here.

    Whatever the institutional culture, It is of the utmost importance that we collectively be able to adjudicate such cases is in a fair-minded, thoughtful and serious way. If we cannot, tenure is, I think, a sham. If we can, tenure is a much more defensible institution.

    A sine qua non of our being able to adjudicate the vast majority of cases that are neither an easy yes nor an easy no depends on our all being willing to give our best, most considered judgments to each case. Again the external letters, negative and positive, are just inputs into a deliberative process. They are not the final determiners. We can try to make that process itself what might be called "goodness preserving." That is, we need to ensure that the decisions that come out of the process are at least as good as the evidence that goes into it. But we also have to ensure that the evidence that the evidence that goes into the process is as good as can be in the first place. If people positively withhold negative evidence, we will surely produce worse decisions — worse for the profession at large — in the long run. We will also slowly undermine the institution of tenure.

    So write those negative letters when you feel one is called for. You will either be one of the crowd and thereby help to give the department and the university confidence that it is doing the right thing in turning a person down or you will be an outlier and your letter will probably be set aside as such, unless, perhaps, you are extraordinarily persuasive in your negativity — in which case, you will save the department and university from a tempting mistake — or your letter will be part of a mixed bag of evidence that forces the department and university to seriously weigh the pros and cons of a case and reach their own all things considered best judgment. If you trust at all in the ability of departments and committees to do that, then you shouldn't hesitate to provide negative evidence. If you do not trust in them in this way, then that's just further evidence that the institution of tenure may not really be defensible.

    Reply
  11. Rebecca Kukla

    Hm, I feel the need to clarify that neither I nor anyone else defended letter inflation – surely once you agree to a review, you should do it completely honestly. I feel like this thread is running together the issue of when to agree to doing a review, and whether to provide an honest assessment once one is committed. Y'all are probably right that I and others ought to be more willing to take on cases that we suspect may well be unpromising, but the two issues should still be kept separate.

    Maybe we also ought to be doing better in this thread of separating tenure reviews from reviews for promotion to full professor. There is clearly less at stake and the 'institution of tenure' is not on the line in the latter.

    Reply
  12. anonymous

    Ralph– Except that in some cases, external letters are the only possible protection against bigotry and other forms of bias & academic evils operating on the inside.
    -Anonymous for this.

    Reply
  13. Chris Tucker

    Jon,

    That's helpful. I take it that you want to endorse something like NBN*: you should never agree to do a tenure review if you *strongly* believe, or are confident, that you will write a negative report. What led me to formulate your thesis as NBN (which features belief, not strong belief) rather than NBN* is that the motivations you give for NBN* also support something close to NBN. For example, if the potential harm I may cause provides me a reason to decline when I am confident that I'll give a negative report, then I will also have reason in cases where I believe but am not confident.

    Biases again: I'm happy to assume for the sake of argument whatever you like about biases. It's still not clear to me that biases support anything like NBN*. If everyone has biases, which includes the department, the administrators, and the external referees, and nobody can be sure whether their biases hurt, help, or are neutral with respect to the candidate, why is the best way of managing those biases to follow NBN*? You could point out that an external letter could do a great deal of harm. Fine, but then the point about biases seems to fall out of the picture and your argument relies solely on the potential harms of a negative letter.

    You are apparently fine with giving a negative verdict after “laboring to explain the work as charitably as possible”–at least if you weren’t confident beforehand that you’d give a negative judgment. But if you are fine with offering a negative verdict in such a case, what is the problem with this: “I agree to write a report that I’m confident will be negative. Nonetheless, I laboriously explain the candidate’s work charitably and make it sound as interesting as I can. And then, as I suspected I would, I conclude that the candidate does not deserve tenure.”

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  14. Chris Tucker

    Ralph,

    I agree with a lot of what you have said. One possible place of disagreement is when you say, "the tenured members of the department in question are *usually* in better position to make the right decision". The tenured members of the department will have all sorts of information that the external evaluator doesn't have, and this might make them more reliable judges concerning whether *all* of the person's credentials together support tenure. But the external evaluators (I assume, though I've never been apart of the process) are asked to make judgments solely on the person's research profile. It's not clear to me that tenured members of the department are *usually* in better position to make the correct decision on this part of the credentials. First, like Jon's initial comment, you apparently ignore the biases that the department may have. Second, and far more importantly, in many departments the tenured people in the department may work in areas that are too far removed from the candidate's area to make a competent judgment concerning the quality of the candidate's work. In big departments, this isn't likely to be a problem. But it's not clear to me that *most* departments are big enough or have the right mix of AOSs to ensure that the tenured faculty members are better judges of the candidate's research quality than are external evaluators.

    Reply
  15. Dan Dennis

    There is naturally a lot of concern for the harm done to candidates who fail to get tenure. However there are a limited (and ever diminishing) number of tenured jobs. If someone gets tenure who does not deserve it, that harms the individual who is worthy of tenure, but for whom there is now no tenured post available. Think of him/her when you decide whether to accept an invitation to write a reference you anticipate will be negative.

    Furthermore refusing to referee cases which you would referee unfavourably, increases the chances of the candidate getting tenure. Imagine a situation where 17 out of 20 potential referees think the candidate unworthy of tenure. Imagine that all those who think the candidate unworthy of tenure refuse to write references. The candidate will get tenure, because eventually the three in favour will be invited. Other things being equal, it is likely that it is wrong that the candidate has gained tenure. Which means (given the point in the first paragraph) that the wrong candidate has been given tenure.

    Giving the wrong candidate tenure is unfair to the candidate who is thereby denied tenure, bad for students, bad for progress in philosophical research, and so on.

    Thus if think it right that only deserving candidates get tenure, you should (other things being equal) write references whether you think your verdict will be positive or not.

    Reply
  16. Christopher Morris

    It is improper for anyone to ask a potential reviewer if they would be willing to write. If it were known that a candidate had approached someone, some universities would ask that the letter be removed.

    In any case, the reviewer who are the candidate's choice are usually listed separately from those chosen by the department.

    Reply
  17. Rebecca Kukla

    I don't know how your second sentence helps me. So they are listed separately, yes. This doesn't tell me if my standards for agreeing should be different.

    As for the first, I think that people talk to one another informally all the time about whether they should put one another on such lists. Whether or not they should do that, my question was about what to do if they do. Mostly the point was just a confession … I can't even imagine having the testicles to indicate to a candidate my willingness to write if I thought my letter would be mostly negative.

    Reply

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