Letters of Recommendation as Covid Carework and Self-Care
Jeanne Marie Rose
Keywords: letters of recommendation, antiracism
Categories: Bearing the Weight of Racism through Anti-Racist Work and (Cross-)Racial Solidarity; Teaching as Carework, Teaching as Dangerous Work
My March 2020 Spring Break began with two things on my mind: completing my CCCC presentation in time to deliver it in Milwaukee the following week and wondering whether the conference would even take place. In keeping with the conference theme of “Considering Our Commonplaces,” I was scheduled to participate in a “Fictional Commonplaces” panel about using literature to rethink pedagogies of reading, writing, and student mentoring. My talk was to focus on Julie Schumacher’s epistolary novel Dear Committee Members, which consists of more than 60 letters of recommendation (LORs) chronicling creative writing professor Jason “Jay” Fitger’s work at Payne University. As Jay tells his department chair, “The LOR has become a rampant absurdity, usurping the place of the quick consultation and the two-minute phone call—not to mention the teaching and research that faculty were supposedly hired to perform” (Schumacher, 2015, pp. 8-9). I planned to use the novel to consider the commonplaces associated with the LOR genre.
I had habitually greeted LORs with a mixed response. Sometimes delighted to document students’ innovative thinking, I was equally prone to silent grumbling about time spent on unappreciative candidates. It’s no surprise that academic advice literature sounds a cautionary note about LORs. Remarking on her former students’ success, Sharon Crowley notes, “relationships such as these do come with one long string attached: requests for letters of recommendation” (Baliff, Davis, & Mountford, 2008, pp. 139-140). Professor Mommy authors Rachel Connelly and Kristin Ghodsee (2011) warn, “if you get a reputation on campus as someone who will write letters for weaker students, then year after year you will have a barrage of seniors hammering down your door” (p. 140). A recent Chronicle piece points to the “undue and uncredited burden [of recommendation letters] on strong classroom teachers” (Foster, Millsop, & Reed, 2019). I intended for my CCCC presentation to complicate these commonplaces by acknowledging the concrete material returns that LORs can yield for their writers. As Jay Fitger puts it, “if [his student Darren Browles] can finish this accursed book and sell it, I can use his success to argue for the continuance—or reinstatement—of our graduate program” (Schumacher, 2015, p. 90). Based on Jay’s remarks, my talk would suggest that our LORs extract capital from our students, whose achievements are often proxies for our own, and critique the genre’s social and economic relations.
CCCC was inevitably canceled, but the need for LORs was not. I wrote 12-15 LORs during the 2020-2021 academic year, for scholarships, internships, transfer applications, writing contests, service awards, and more. The number was double what I’d write in an ordinary year. In the context of Covid-19, I viewed the LORs not as the utilitarian transactions described above, but as carework through writing, a means of tending to students surrounded by uncertainty. Through these letters, I could provide nurturing, recognize growth, offer time, and preserve pedagogical relationships that felt increasingly tenuous on Zoom and in socially-distanced classrooms. LORs became my way to honor my students’ aspirations, to amplify their voices in some small way. A recommendation might help a student get a scholarship needed to remain enrolled in college, enable a creative writer to secure funding for their YA novel about sexual assault, or draw attention to a nursing major’s vaccine activism in the local Latinx community. I perceived the letters as human connections in an estranged reality.
Looking at students’ application materials became a routine—and complicated—part of my carework. What started as simple requests to ensure my own LORs were consistent with students’ self-representations became feedback cycles about students’ application documents. When I encountered application essays that didn’t seem competitive—and, understandably, they often did not—I felt responsible for helping students to rethink their rhetorical situations. Most of these exchanges took place via email. Despite my efforts to avoid directive feedback, the electronic medium spurred me to insert anchored comments and occasionally use “Track Changes” to model suggestions, practices I would otherwise avoid. I feared appropriating students’ voices. I also worried about casting myself as editor and proofreader. As one student wrote, “I'm really struggling with that one sentence that was highlighted. Let me know if what I did solved the problem or if you have a better solution (and if you have any other edits to make before I submit it).” Comments like these would leave me wondering if I was compromising students’ agency. Negotiating the boundaries of the recommender relationship also required me to realize that my ongoing input wasn’t always desired. As I wrote in one email, “I feel like you're in a position to have a competitive application. The first essay is shaping up really well. The others need work to get to that level. If you have the energy to do add'l [sic] revisions, let’s make time to talk [by Zoom]. If you aren't in that place or you'd rather go it alone, I respect that, too.” The student never replied.
While I was convinced my efforts centered around student advocacy, my pandemic LORs inevitably resonated with Margaret Ferguson’s (2012) claim that recommendations “contribute significantly to their creators’ sense of self-worth” (p. 955). When I sat down to write a LOR or review an application packet, I felt like a professor with a real job, not a stay-at-home mom Zooming in her yoga pants while feeding her second-grader Cheez-Its for lunch. If my newly digitized teaching left me reeling from what I didn’t know, my LORs’ Word docs were armor against the brave new media. It didn’t hurt that their deadlines allowed me to hole up in my home office and lock the door, my rapid-fire keystrokes warning my family not to intrude. Even if no one but a contest organizer or admissions officer read these letters, writing them was an act of remembering who I was. In mining previous courses, interactions, and student projects for content, I could persuade myself that my largely remote teaching was but a blip in a history of meaningful in-person exchange. I could again feel like the teacher who, as a colleague once put it, “tirelessly knows her students.”
In retrospect, I’m mindful of the white privilege infusing my Covid recommendation writing: the safety of working from home, the luxury of a closed door, the narcissistic teacher-hero construction and the psychic capital I derived from it. My carework reflected the ethos Asao Inoue attributes to white language habits. Every time I wrote a recommendation assessing students’ writing, I participated in a genre designed to evaluate students’ adherence to “elite, [w]hite, masculine habits of language [that] are the standards of correctness and appropriateness, of ‘clarity,’ of the ‘logical’” (Inoue, 2021). And every time I encouraged students to rework an application to meet the rhetorical situation, I reinforced “the dominant rhetorical moves that are considered appropriate or preferred in [that] context” (Inoue, 2021). Framing LORs as an antiracist practice will require a considerable revision of the genre and the white supremacist networks it inhabits.
Much like a contagious virus, writing reveals our bonds and connections, our vulnerabilities and mistakes. My Covid LORs turned a spotlight on the genre’s complexities. Never neutral, the LOR remains transactional and economic, entangled with white privilege and social hierarchies. It’s a marker of teachers’ relationships with their students and themselves and the messy worlds we inhabit. Jay Fitger’s solution to the LOR is to eliminate it: when establishing a fellowship in memory of Darren Browles, who never did finish his book, Jay insists upon reading students’ anonymous statements in lieu of recommendations (Schumacher, 2015, p. 171). I’m not ready to go that far. This past summer, I had two more requests for letters. I denied the first. Seven years felt like too long to say anything relevant, let alone genuine. I eagerly wrote the second, asking for student feedback on a draft. In addition to disrupting the standard practice of requiring students to waive access to their LORs, this exchange made the process itself collaborative. “What you wrote matched up well with what I wrote in the application,” the student noted in an email. “I think this letter even fills in a couple of blanks I really couldn’t touch on as much as I wanted to in my application essays.”
While I’ve only had a few opportunities to share LORs with students so far, I’ve come to realize that LORs will need this kind of transparency to constitute meaningful care. Routinely discussing letters with their subjects could allow for greater dialogue, collaboration, and empathy on all sides. It could also participate in decentering academia’s culture of white individualism. Moving forward, I plan to approach LORs as combined carework and self-care, as a simultaneous affirmation and critique of my pedagogical values. I aspire to treat LORs as an extension of my best teacherly self—one who encourages collaborative writing while respecting boundaries and comfort zones; one who fosters dialogue about language’s power to construct and represent, to include and exclude; one who strives to interrogate her own practices as she encourages students to assess their own. Reimagining the LOR as a space for transformative carework and self-care in these ways, I believe, can reinvigorate the genre’s potential to do ameliorative work in the world.
References
Ballif, M., Davis, D., & Mountford, R. (2008). Women’s ways of making it in rhetoric and composition. Routledge.
Connelly, R., & Ghodsee, K. (2011). Professor mommy: Finding work-family balance in academia. Rowman & Littlefield.
Ferguson, M. (2012). The letter of recommendation as strange work. PMLA [Special Issue: Work], 127(4), 954-962. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23489102
Foster, C., Millsop, R., & Reed, D. (2019, October 13). The heavy, unseen labor of writing reference letters. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Heavy-Unseen-Labor-of/247300
Inoue, A. (2021, July 3). Blogbook—The habits of white language (HOWL). Asao B. Inoue's Infrequent Words. http://asaobinoue.blogspot.com/2021/07/blogbook-habits-of-white-language-howl.html
Schumacher, J. (2015). Dear committee members: A novel. Anchor Books.
Bio
Jeanne Marie Rose is an Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, Berks. She teaches courses in first-year composition, rhetoric and professional writing, and American literature, and her research focuses on writing pedagogy. Her work has appeared in Peitho, Present Tense, Pedagogy, and other journals.