But here’s something you may not have thought of: We professors sometimes need letters of recommendation, too. I’m not talking in the first place about reports on tenure dossiers, which arrive with a thud at the start of the summer and have to be distilled into five pages of livelihood-making or -breaking prose by the end, since those up for tenure do not have the luxury of soliciting letters from people they know to be sympathetic to their work. No, I’m referring to good old-fashioned recommendations that we ask our own old revered teachers for, hat in hand, and beg from our peers.
The usual reason members of the faculty require recommendations is, again, possibly something you’ve never considered: We apply for fellowships just as you do. True, one of the remarkable benefits of a good academic job, something I view as more valuable than a high base salary, is that professors get paid leaves as part of the package. But not all leaves are created equal. Some last longer and are better-funded than others, and what determines this is typically whether one or another outside organization deems one’s application worthy of a laurel wreath and filthy lucre. In a drill that every freshman who has been admitted to Princeton has already gone a good long way toward mastering, we write laudatory prose about ourselves that we hope doesn’t sound too self-congratulatory, all the while praying that those who submit letters on our behalf will choose to say that we’re the best they’ve taught in their 30 years on the faculty. Some prestigious foundations and think tanks receive so many applications for (increasingly scarce) resources that coming out a winner is even less statistically likely than, well, getting in to Princeton.
If you are an undergraduate here, it’s because your application won over Janet Rapelye and her team at the Office of Admission. But who presides over faculty fellowships? The simple answer is that we professors are, so to speak, our own Janet Rapelyes, regularly sitting in judgment on our peers. Everyone knows that the college admissions “game” is a dirty business in many ways (which is not to cast aspersions on Dean Rapelye, for whom I have great affection and respect, not least for letting in the brainy, zany students who populate my freshman seminars), but it may not have occurred to you that winning academic fellowships is not straightforwardly about academic excellence. Coming up with a widely acceptable definition of “excellence” is, of course, very hard, but even so, fellowships turn out to be won and lost on the basis of all sorts of things, as a sobering new book that I read over the summer makes clear: Michele Lamont’s “How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment.”
Lamont, a professor of sociology at Harvard (and before that Princeton), was granted permission to go behind what is normally a firmly closed door and learn, through direct observation of panels at work and interviews with panelists shortly after their consequential deliberations, how colleagues team up to pick the winners of high-status multidisciplinary awards in the humanities and social sciences. (It would be interesting to know more about the hard sciences.) Her conclusions about the consequences of fault lines between and within different academic disciplines, of strategic voting and horse-trading, and of a pluralistic view of “diversity” will make all of us who have ever won a big fellowship realize that we didn’t prevail thanks to brilliance alone — or even brilliance at all — and should make all of us who serve on such panels think very carefully about what exactly we are doing and how we go about doing it.
Well, it’s time for me to get back to writing letters for you. And if anyone reading this column is writing letters for me, do your best, please!
Joshua Katz is a professor in the Department of Classics and a Forbes faculty adviser. He can be reached at jtkatz@princeton.edu.
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