If You Want a Letter of Reference

Every semester I am asked to produce letters of reference for current and former students. Because of the unusually large volume of these requests, and because the work (if one is to produce a worthwhile letter) is highly labor-intensive, I have had to devise a set of guidelines for those submitting a request for such a letter. Please follow all of these guidelines carefully; unfortunately I am not able to make exceptions to any of them.

1. CONFIDENTIALITY. In today's tortuous legal environment, the writer (and indeed the reader) of a letter of reference is in a delicate and sometimes difficult position. In the eventuality that the candidate is successful -- i.e. if s/he is accepted to h/er graduate program, or is offered and accepts the job for which s/he has applied -- the Family Educational Rights And Privacy Act, and/or the Freedom Of Information/Privacy Act, grant h/er the right to read any dossier materials for which s/he has not (explicitly and in writing) waived the right to see it. What this means, in practical terms -- and please follow me carefully here -- is that the reader of letters of reference must assume, if there is no signed waiver attached, that the writer has written with the assumption that the candidate will be reading the letter. In some cases, of course, this fact (or assumption) may substantively affect the content of such letters. In other cases, it could have no real affect on the writer at all. But the key variable, in this equation, is the reader: if the reader assumes, or even fears, that the writer has not been totally frank -- has disguised h/er real opinions or hedged in any way -- then the letter will, for all intents and purposes, end up in the wastebasket.
Because letters that are not considered confidential are a waste of everyone's time, I refuse to write them. That is, if I am going to write a letter of reference, I want it to mean something to the reader. Consequently, I will not write you a letter of reference without first receiving a waiver from you. You are certainly within your legal right, as stipulated by the acts mentioned above, to refuse such a waiver; but for the reasons I have outlined above -- that is to say, for your sake, and not because I do not trust you -- I am unwilling to write letters of reference except in cases where my reader can safely assume that I have written in complete confidence (with all that that word means).
If your application materials do not include a place where you can select 'I waive' or 'I do not waive,' I will supply you with a cover sheet for this purpose. You will need to sign this before I begin the writing process, so check and see whether the papers from the institution to which you are applying deals with this issue. If they do, go ahead and sign the waiver. If they do not, let me know this and I will provide the cover sheet.
In keeping with a high level of confidentiality, I also do not give letters in signed/sealed envelopes back to students to mail with their applications, even when the application documents ask for this. There is no graduate or professional school in the country that will not be willing to receive a letter of reference for you directly from me, by US Mail. So please furnish me with a stamped, addressed envelope in which I can mail my letter directly to the institution or program to which you are applying. Again, I make no exception to this requirement, so please do not ask me to do so.

2. POSITIVE EVALUATION. Please do not assume that my requiring a waiver from you means I intend to write a negative letter about you! On the contrary, if I do not feel I can write you a strongly positive recommendation, I will advise you of that fact in advance, and counsel you to seek another referee. If I agree to write on your behalf, you can assume that my letter will be positive.
By the same token, I may feel that I do not know you well enough to write you a strong letter. Or it may simply be that you and I have been out of touch for so long that I feel any letter from me would look 'stale' (or might suggest to a reader that you were hard-up for referees -- never a good sign when you are a candidate for anything). In such cases I may also decline to write on your behalf. In either of these cases, please do not take my declining to write as a negative evaluation of you. On the contrary, you should take it purely as an indication of my good will toward you, and my desire to contribute (even if, in such case, by omission) to your overall success.
From my own viewpoint, one of the main factors entailed here is my professional integrity. I intend to insure that my word continues to count for something: that is, I want my colleagues (or indeed any reader of such letters) to be able to trust that I mean what I say. That is why I take all of this so seriously. My standards may seem exceedingly stringent to you -- but if that is so, then I am well pleased, because that very stringency contributes significantly to the weight of my evaluations.

3. REQUISITE MATERIALS. Because I try whenever possible to write genuinely substantive letters, not just superficially positive squibs, I will require certain materials from you. If you are an undergraduate or graduate student at Purdue, or a recent graduate, I will need all of the following: