A L S O_ T O D A Y Comics Ruben Bolling: The education of Louis T A B L E_ T A L K Is America's education system fundamentally flawed? Discuss ways to fix it in the Education area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Confessions of Harper's serf By Marc Herman The secrets learned from a Harper's internship (09/23/98) From screaming babies to screaming college students By Camille Paglia "The Nurture Assumption": A rambling, anecdotal memoir (09/23/98) Ufology By Christina Valhouli Aliens invade the ivory tower (09/22/98) Sacred rites of an acid house By Isaac Zaur Beyond the bad food and the bad poetry, a tribe of students seek life's mysteries in a collective hallucination (09/21/98) Recess A one-stop playground for weekend frivolity and fun (09/18/98) BROWSE THE IVORY TOWER ARCHIVE

RECOMMENDATION WARS | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - When Carter warns (with some hyperbole of his own) that "as we spin toward hyperbole, it is harder and harder to trust (or even to understand) the literal meaning of what we say to each other," he neglects to account for a corresponding increase in savvy among those reading the recommendations. "After you've read 10,000 letters of recommendation you get a sense for the content and the structure of the recommendation, as to whether this is really somebody outstanding or whether a teacher is just participating in some puffery," Guttentag says. "There's always this dialectic," says author and Harvard philosopher Sissela Bok, who discusses the topic of inflated recommendations in her 1978 book "Lying: Moral Choices in Public and Private Life." "The more people try to get around the truth, the more some others who need to know will try to find out." They are recommendation letters, after all. We expect them to be positive, perhaps a bit overenthusiastic at times. Most professors I spoke with said the best means of cutting through the B.S. is to get on the phone. "You get these letters that people feel pressured into writing, whereas over the phone you get good stuff," says William H. Willimon, Dean of the Chapel and professor of homiletics at Duke. "Suddenly this great letter of recommendation just wilts over the phone." "The best thing about a phone call is it's not traceable," agrees Robert Thornton, a professor of economics at Lehigh University. In these litigious times, this can prove to be quite an asset. Disgruntled recommendees are finding it increasingly appropriate to sue the less than thoroughly laudatious boosters for libel and defamation. Thornton was so tired of negotiating the narrow terrain between truth and a cadre of hungry lawyers, he developed the "Lexicon of Intentionally Ambiguous Recommendations (LIAR)." "For somebody who is totally dishonest, you could say something like 'Her true ability is deceiving.' Or for a real boozer you could say, 'His real talent is getting wasted in his current position,'" he suggests. When you're aiming for generic half-heartedness, Thornton recommends: "I cannot recommend this candidate too highly," "I am pleased to say that this candidate is a former colleague of mine" or "I would urge you to waste no time in making this candidate an offer of employment." The collection was published as a book in 1988, and a revised edition has just been published by Almus Editions. A company called Wild Cow Publishing has even put up a Web site that, with a nod to Thornton's book, will help you concoct a "litigation-proof" recommendation. But "LIAR" is meant only as a joke. In reality, when asked for a recommendation from a lackluster candidate, most professors will either politely decline (you still can't sue for that) or let a haze of bland plaudits make their point. "A lot of us are kind of wafflers, and maybe a bit wishy-washy," Thornton laments. For many, particularly high school guidance counselors in well-off, pressure-filled school districts, reluctance to report the complicated truth is a matter of survival. Counselors have found themselves in hot water after failing to recommend a student highly enough, and some are even reportedly taking out liability insurance against the possibility of getting sued. "Counselors say they are eager to prevent such embarrassments and often resort to coded language in their reports suggesting the college telephone them," the New York Times reported last March. Helping students get into college is, after all, a sizable part of a guidance counselor's job. And for those too busy to write their own references, a former counselor from New Jersey named Mary Yates Mack has come up with "The Winning Manual of Recommendations." The booklet contains nearly 100 "ready-to-use" reference letters and is an entertaining mix of catch-all praise (imagine "this transcript speaks for itself" said a hundred different ways) and ultra-specific detail ("_______ has chosen dentistry for a future career. When asked why, he states, 'I enjoy sciences and my ______ is a dentist. I believe I could be a good dentist because I am friendly and enjoy work.'" "She was born in Puerto Rico."). One feels for the unfortunate student whose name is actually penciled in to one of these things. Besides being essentially useless as a means of evaluation, that kind of flat positivity can be reckless. Consider the case of Gina Grant, whose 1995 acceptance to Harvard was retracted when anonymous letters tipped the school off to a fact her guidance counselors neglected: At age 14, in South Carolina, Gina Grant had killed her alcoholic mother. Another kind of reckless praise often happens with what Duke's Willimon calls "the letter to get you out of here." In 1997's Randi W. vs. Muroc Joint Unified School District et al., the California Supreme Court examined a situation in which employers had "failed to use reasonable care in recommending former employees for employment," and held a school district liable for recommending a man who had allegedly been forced to quit after several instances of sexual misconduct. It wasn't long before he started as assistant principal at Livingston Middle School that Robert Gadams set about molesting a 13-year-old girl in his office. During his tenure with two California school districts, Gadams had had a reputation for getting cozy with female students, including making sexual overtures, giving back rubs, even leading a panty raid. Nonetheless, one former colleague was happy to praise Gadams' "genuine concern" for students and his "outstanding rapport" with everyone, concluding, with a double entendre, "I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Mr. Gadams for any position!" "This goes on quite often," Bok says. "The person who's getting rid of the person is so glad to be rid of them that they'll do almost anything, without any regard for the next institution." "The idea that this is a game works for the people who know it's a game, and who know the rules. It's worse for people who innocently blunder into all of this," she adds. "You need to be street smart." SALON | Sept. 24, 1998 Tyler Thoreson is a writer living in New York.