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).