Ms. Mentor

A Hole in Your Dossier

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Question: What should I do when my mentor, who is also the chair of my dissertation committee, ("Dr. Major") tells me to draft my own letters of recommendation for him to send out? Now that I'm on the job market again (after successful employment as an assistant professor), I decided to omit him as a reference because I believe that writing one's own letters of reference is unethical. Should I say anything when interviewed? And if so, what?

Answer: Well, you might say that you have decided to shoot yourself in the foot -- for that is what you seem to be doing.

But let Ms. Mentor retell your story.

Once upon a time, you vanquished dragons, swam moats, scaled towers, answered riddles, and got your Ph.D. Dr. Major was the one who taught you, shepherded you along, mentored you, and knew the most about your accomplishments. Once you set forth on your job quest, you naturally wanted the support of his mighty letters of recommendation.

And so it came to pass that Dr. Major invited you to draft the letters for him to send. Evidently you did so once, and had a lovely pirouette as an assistant professor. Life was good.

But now you're balking. "I was wrong, oh so wrong, to draft my own letters," you are saying. And so your dossier will not include a letter from your major professor.

And so hiring committees will assume that you have mortally offended Dr. Major. You must have done something indescribably heinous. Perhaps it was plagiarism. Or it could have been sexual harassment, data fudging, embezzlement, pedophilia, nudity, drugs, piracy ... Ms. Mentor's vivid imagination runs wild at the possibilities.

But hiring committees, not having the time to froth and muse, will just toss your application into the reject pile -- for something obviously was rotten in the state of your career. Later on, most hirers won't be able to resist speculating and snickering about you and Dr. Major. They'll be sure that there was one horrendous feud.

(Such things do happen. Lo, some 10 years ago, an Ivy League professor publicly repudiated one of her graduate students who'd been charged with sexual harassment, and then arrested for drunken driving, and then jailed for not paying child support. The professor did not feel that she could attest to his good character.)

You, meanwhile, are attempting to be a good character. But Ms. Mentor urges you to re-examine why you think drafting your own letters is unethical.

Are you thinking "ghost writing"? Not really -- for the final draft is your professor's, not yours.

Are you thinking "fraud"? Well, no, for Dr. Major can certainly rewrite the letters to suit his own style. Most bosses do that.

Or are you protesting: "Dr. Major was too lazy to write these letters himself!"? Well, maybe so, but he was also delegating a task to a trusted new colleague (you). He gave you the opportunity to describe, in glowing detail, all that you've accomplished.

Would Dr. Major, on his own, have known about the new teaching technique you pioneered? Or the journals and conferences clamoring for papers by you? Would he have known about your grant from the local historical society? And your new investigator award from your professional caucus?

Could he quote, in all their glory, the hosannas that your students wrote in their confidential evaluations, which are available only to you?

You, in short, know your merits far better than anyone else does (except perhaps your doting Mom). And you showed Dr. Major how best to brag about you, as the best mentors should.

Your letters are, in fact, the best and brightest collaboration between you and your mentor. You provided the raw material; Dr. Major packaged it as an elegant picture of your many talents.

You are also very lucky, for Ms. Mentor knows that some advisers, left to their own devices, can produce very odd recommendations. "I don't remember who this guy is, but he might be the right warm body for you," wrote one eminent East Coast economist about a student who'd apparently failed to keep in touch. Equally unconvincing was the strange rave from a new literature professor, untrained in the art of recommendations but wildly exuberant about his best graduate student: "He should be Pope!"

But few can top poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti's tribute to the critic John Crowe Ransom, in a Kenyon College Festschrift in 1964: "I have never given his poetry a full, fair reading. Still, I salute him as a fellow phallus-bearer."

Ms. Mentor, in turn, advises you to salute Dr. Major. You need him.

Question: I love you, Ms. Mentor. I love your sage advice and your ability to give pointed answers. Are you single?

Answer: Singular.

SAGE READERS: Ms. Mentor, ever the trend spotter, notes a new one this month -- following December and January's spate of Disavowed Epistles ("Yes, I wrote to you, Ms. Mentor, but I withdraw what I said"). This month Ms. Mentor is hearing from Worried Wives seeking advice for their husbands. When should hubby contact the hiring committee that interviewed him? Should hubby tag along with wifey on her interview trip? How should hubby comport himself?

Ms. Mentor does wish that husbands would speak up for themselves, and hopes she is not seeing a return to the 1950's "little woman" who micromanages and comforts others at the expense of herself. In any case, Ms. Mentor advises those asking about deadlines and hiring procedures to consult other learned worthies on The Chronicle site. Bureaucratic rules do not inspire her to deploy her perfect wisdom, and anything with a simple answer ("within six weeks") bores her. She prefers risks, conundrums, and ironies.

Some sly correspondents, meanwhile, have been writing to Emily Toth in hopes of receiving Ms. Mentor's sage advice, since Ms. Mentor rarely answers letters personally. Readers are advised that writing to E. Toth is no more effective than asking, "What should my husband do?" or saying deviously, "I have this friend who has this problem." Be direct, be assertive, and send your muddles to Ms. Mentor.

As always, Ms. Mentor encourages letters that are unpredictable, gossipy, speculative, and nasty as they need to be. Anonymity is guaranteed, and identifying details are always scrambled.