Yesterday, while transporting the sprogs to Science Scouts aquatic training maneuvers, I caught a few minutes of a City Arts & Lectures interview with Lewis Black. In the part of the interview I heard, Black discussed his efforts (over the course of eight years) to make it as a playwright, and he revealed a couple ways in which that career path might not be so different from that of the scientist:
1. How government grants might not work the way you want them to.
Black shared his view that the National Endowment for the Arts grants to support playwrights, while well-intentioned, probably resulted in a number of dramatists who were very good at writing grant proposals but not nearly so good at writing plays. On the theory that the grants were intended to bring good new plays into existence, this outcome is problematic.
So, lots of scientists will tell you that they spend way more time than they want to writing grant proposals. (Certainly, hardly anyone gets all excited about science as a kid because it’s a career that will let you spend lots of time grant-writing.) Should we be worried that money designated to support important scientific research might be going to the people who are really good at writing grant proposals rather than to the people who might be the best at conducting scientific research?
If so, how do you fix the system? In other words, how do you work out who has the most potential to produce excellent research beyond just leaning on what you can discern from the grant proposal?
Or, is there a good argument that the grant proposal is a proxy for some other essential skill (besides grat-writing skill) that a scientist requires to be able to conduct important scientific research to its completion?
2. Letters of “recommendation”.
In the same interview, Lewis Black talked about applying for all manner of grants and commissions as a playwright. Having gone to Yale University’s Drama program, he naturally asked his professors for letters of recommendation. Eight years on, still using these same letters, he learned from one of his professors that this professor’s “recommendation” of him said, in essence, this guy will never be a playwright.
Now, I’ve heard of people doing this kind of thing in other fields, including scientific fields. My question is, what’s up with the people who, when asked to write letters of recommendation, make with the poison pen? Isn’t there something at least misleading, if not outright dishonest, in letting a student believe that your letter on his or her behalf will help his or her career when it is more likely to torpedo it? Isn’t it proper to inform the person requesting the letter when the letter will be negative?
Yes, I know that one result of this kind of “courtesy” is that everyone’s letters have only good things to say, and that selection committees must then make distinctions among the most awesomely awesome and those of merely average awesomeness. But surely there is some better route to uninflated letters of recommendation than the unexpected stab in the back.
What do people actually do when someone requests a recommendation and the potential recommender knows he or she can not write a positive letter? What ought potential letter writers to do in this situation?
Letters of recommendation: they serve, I believe, mostly as a pons asinorum; it sorts out the people that are so inept or abrasive that they can’t get anyone to vouch for them. I honestly believe that in most cases the letters are never read – their existence (perhaps authenticated by a phone call) conveys all relevant information.
In Sweden you don’t use letters as a rule, but give out a couple of names (with phone numbers) for people that are prepared to vouch for you, in a work or personal capacity. I have been a reference for some people and gotten phone calls a few times from prospective employers. They mostly want to make sure that I’m who the applicant said I was, that I do seem to actually know the person, and that the individual applying for a job is the same person I know (I’ve had one employer ask me to describe the person to them).
As for grants, I have no idea. In an ideal world, I guess you’d give anybody qualified (PhD, perhaps) who wanted it the resources for part-time research regardless of subject or quality of outcome. Just ask for a statement on what the money went to and the results, if any, over the past year as a precondition for more money the next. That plan may have some financing issues, though.
Actually, if you are a PhD student in Sweden you need a letter of recommendation from your professor for everything, including applying for funding. This is completely pointless, because the professor never has time to write the letter so you have to write it yourself (which feels very strange) and then your professor just signs it. This is even the officially recommended way of doing it! So I never quite could understand the point of letters of recommendation…
1. Absolutely. Good grant proposal writing is at best weakly correlated to good research. But “it is the worst system except for all the others”…
2. I’ll always refuse to write a recommendation if it will be negative, and if the student asks I’ll tell them why. If the recommendation will be iffy (`I don’t know this student very well, but she did well in my course…’), I will accompany it with a warning to the student that she might be able to get a more positive letter from someone else. I thought this was universal standard practice. Maybe I should finagle a peek at my reference letters, being on the market this year…
*Whisper back: Psst. Don’t stare. It’s uncool.*
I forgot the obligatory foreign exchange kid with the triangular head from eastern European hinterlands. The drama of awkward interactions with the other foreign exchange student from south Asia is worth a vignette of its own.