Rhetorical Hiccups: Disability Disclosure in Letters of Recommendation

Abstract

This article positions letters of recommendation as important and troubling indicators of faculty beliefs about diversity and access in higher education. I focus on the disclosure of disability, both by examining the history of disclosing stigmatized difference and by analyzing five letters of recommendation for an aspiring graduate student with a traumatic brain injury. I suggest that faculty must revise their letter-writing practices and engage in a type of rhetorical forecasting that questions well-intentioned disclosures of difference and imagines how various letters form a composite sketch of a candidate.

Notes

¹Thanks to Nara for her materials, interview, and feedback on drafts, which made this project possible. Thanks also to RR reviewers Julie Jung and Stephen Bernhardt for their invaluable feedback.

²This lack of textual analysis may be a result of IRB prohibitions. To avoid this, I requested materials directly from recommendees, who typically have rights to their files.

³Though useful in some respects, Colarelli et al. come to some dubious, if not sexist, conclusions.

⁴IRB allowed me to consider materials in admissions files (including LRs). (As the files belonged to the research participants, I did not prohibit them from readings their LRs if they opted to. I was under no instruction to keep the LRs private.) It is understandable that some readers may wish to see the letters and do their own analyses. However, I have opted to preserve letter-writers' anonymity by not including the full text of the letters (though letter-writers would likely recognize their own writing). I also want to avoid condemning or glorifying these particular letters, as they are well-meant and intended only as examples from which we can learn.

⁵For discussion of disability in admissions essays, see my previous work (Vidali).

⁶Samuel Juni refers to the right to review letters as “a nonexistent option” and suggests that LRs are necessarily partial as part of an “advocacy portfolio” (1386; also see Ault). Stephen Ceci and Douglas Peters suggest that because letter-writers in their (small) study inflated nonconfidential letters nearly an entire category, the benefits of such letters might outweigh letter-reader distaste for nonconfidential letters.

⁷The article also asserts that “students who traditionally score low on standardized tests may benefit from the opportunity for evaluators to provide additional information about them in a way that is valid and systematic,” though they do not credit ETS with designing these standardized tests (16).