Being a quietly pedantic sort of person, I was wondering how one might test the proposition that your advisor's stardom will magically open all doors. (Given what the job market looks like, and where most t-t jobs are...) . Unfortunately, I don't have access to the full dissertation database, which seems to have been swallowed by ProQuest, but if you were a person of similarly quiet pedantic habits, you could check by a) sorting by advisor and b) doing a Google search for every one of their students. As always, this does have the usual problems, like advisors known one way professionally and another, well, electronically (e.g., J. Hillis Miller shows up in the ProQuest free database as Joseph H. Miller).
The American letter of reference is a notoriously bizarre genre, because of course you are not supposed to say anything negative about one's student. (Also notoriously, letters from the UK and the Continent, perhaps sensibly enough, do not adhere to this protocol. Tales of the accidentally disastrous results are legion.) Search committees are therefore faced with a shower of praise for each and every applicant, making it difficult to quantify if a good letter of reference does much of anything either way for the candidate. For committees, coming across explicit criticism is such a rare occurrence that the effect is like badly stubbing your toe on the old computer you neglected to put in the basement that morning. As it happens, you may well want to know that something is wrong--except when the "wrong" doesn't actually exist, arises from a personality clash, or is otherwise nonexistent/trivial/quite possibly intended to retaliate against the student/etc. What to do?
I suppose one experiment--aside from jettisoning letters altogether--would be to single-blind applications: during the phase leading up to interviews, reveal the applicant's university and referees to HR, but not to the search committee. (You'd have to hide the university too, as otherwise there would be almost no way to anonymize the advisor.) Obviously, this requires an honor system to have any chance of working at all (no Googling!), and probably some extra vetting on HR's part; moreover, it would be impossible to keep up the mask by the time you reached the interview phase. However, it would be instructive to see if the initial sorting played out any differently...
Comments