The new Times "Ethicst" shows her dark side.
Randy Cohen’s replacement as “The Ethicist” in the New York Times Magazine, Ariel Kaminer, had a flawless maiden flight last week, but crashes and burns on her first question this week. As was too often true of Cohen, she messes up in the area of honesty and legal ethics.
The inquirer, an applicant for law school, had asked a former professor to write a recommendation. The professor, an apparent creep, said she was too busy—Honestly: writing recommendations for students applying to graduate students is part of her job, and how long does it take?—but if that if the student would write it, she would gladly “edit as needed” and submit it under her own name. Ariel’s inquirer felt uncomfortable writing her own letter of recommendation, but did not “wish to jeopardize my chances of being accepted into my top-choice school by being overly conscientious.” Ariel’s question to answer: is it ethical to draft the letter?
Ariel says yes, and lines up a lot of bad arguments in support. The right answer, however, is “No!” Here are Ariel’s points:
1. “What if she asked you to just e-mail her some notes? In effect that’s what she has done.”
No, it is not. This is deception. The student is facilitating the professor’s falsely sending a student-written endorsement as a professor’s honest recommendation.
2.”Many companies that engage in an annual-review process invite their employees to write self-evaluations, which can serve as a learning tool for reflective workers but also a crib sheet for forgetful managers.”
Terrible analogy. Presumably the manager in a company knows who wrote the evaluation, and is not trying to fool the personnel office. Presumably the company knows which managers do this. Nobody is being deceived in the example. There is no deception involved if the process is for a manager to ratify a self-written evaluation, and there are incentives in such a case for the employee to be honest and self-critical—after all, the manager is still going to be the supervisor. In the student’s case, however, the professor has no recourse if the self-evaluation is invalid, other than to re-write it, and she has already said that she is “too busy”to do. She could also not send it, but the ethical analysis has to assume that the letter is written to be sent.
3. “Perhaps you’re worried that the professor won’t follow through on her promise to “edit as needed.” She could, theoretically, send your words on to the school as her own, but that would not be your fault, any more than if you handed her a blank page and she filled it with a bunch of made-up platitudes”
Arrghh! Utter rationalization. The student has every reason to believe that professor won’t make it her own; of course it would be the student’s fault for aiding and abetting a fraud on the school. It’s true that many lawyers help their criminal clients scam innocent people and businesses using Ariel’s cynical reasoning: “Well, I don’t know that they rare using my services to break the law, and if they are, it’s not my fault.” We need fewer such lawyers, not more.
Then “The New, Not-So-Improved Ethicist”, in the popular phrase of the day, “doubles down,’ writing,
“So go ahead, sing your praises. And don’t forget to include It never hurts, not even in law school.”
Sure, go ahead: begin your relationship with a profession that insists on integrity and honesty with a lie, and then rub the school’s face in it by calling yourself “ethically conscientious” as your own little private joke on them. But beware. Though “The Ethicist II,” doesn’t seem to realize it, law schools take honesty and forthrightness very seriously. It’s unlikely, but you may be sinking your legal career before it commences.
Here is what I would tell the student: If you are willing to send a note to the school saying that the professor asked you to draft your own recommendation and you have no idea if she edited it as promised, then go ahead. If you aren’t willing to do that, why? My guess: because you know the law school would regard that recommendation as worthless, and discount it. Therefore, you are trying to get admitted to an elite school by using a credential that will only help your case if you deceive the school about its true or likely nature.
Unethical.
Better luck next week, Ariel.
Ethics Alarms 
Argghh! Who approved this columnist as an ethicist? Doesn’t it say something important about the “ethical ethos” at the NYT? One might presume that one who hires an “ethicist” ought to be knowledgeable about the necessary criteria to make such an appointment, wouldn’t you think? As with the culture of corruption at any company, institution or organization, what happens below the CEO is an expression of what happens at the level of the CEO, or at least in the higher ranks of management. Whither wilt thou go with this line of reasoning, oh, thoughtful scribe?
Exactly.
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All I can do is shake my head.
Yes, Franco, this one does not bode well at all.
If the professor says he is too busy to write the letter, he may be right. Right before deadlines, many students ask for letters all at once. Universities keep raising the number of courses and hours taught/week, and are also asking for more pointless assessment. All this adds up to a limited amount of time to write recommendations on a tight deadline. I have received requests for med school recommendation letters at 1 PM that were due at the med school at 5 PM (with no address, fax, or e-mail address either). This is difficult when you have a 4-hour long lab 1-5 PM that day. I write a unique letter for each person, I don’t have form letters. It takes me between 1 and 2 hours to write a good letter and send it.
When I was an undergraduate, professors would routinely decline to write a letter unless the deadline was at least a month away because they had dozens to hundreds of requests. Imagine you taught 600 students/semester organic chemistry. In September, you could easily get 100 requests for med school letters that were due by October 1 or earlier. The reply from the professor that they didn’t have time might have been genuine. Their apparent solution however, was horrible.
To ask a student to write their own letter would make for a very good and interesting assignment, but would not be a good practice for an actual letter. There is too much temptation to send the letter through with minor edits if you are already crunched for time. Although you think that the industry practice of “write your own evaluation” doesn’t result in the self-evaluation going forward to superiors, you would be wrong. My brother received some very good raises for a couple of years because of this. His boss had all the employees write their own evaluation. Everyone else tried to be fair and balanced. He suspected this was going straight to the top and he decided they didn’t need to know his weaknesses. He took a blatant self-promotion approach and his raise was roughly 3 times everyone else’s raise.
1) I almost went into the time issue. A prof at least has an obligation to make students who may be depending on her understand that lead time is essential.
2) This is why I detest all situations where you know that you could cheat, shouldn’t, but that those who do will have an advantage over you. they are inherently unethical. If a self-review isn’t going to be competently reviewed by a manager, it is as bad as the professor’s solution…one more reason it was a lousy justification by “The Ethicist.”
I like your suggestion of sending a separate letter to the admissions office with what occurred. You’d be balancing “I couldn’t find enough people to write about me, so I had to settle for a possible fool” with “LOOK HOW ETHICAL I AM!”
I’ll say this…at Georgetown Law, when I worked there, that tactic would have been extremely effective.
That’s my immediate thought. I don’t really pay attention to companies that give good service, but if someone screws up and then tries to fix it, I sing their praises. I’ve occasionally wondered if a company should do this on purpose to try to build a loyal clientele.
If there isn’t research on what is essentially reverse priming, there should be. It’s counterintuitive, but seems to pop up in interesting ways, like how to make a friend (ask them for a favor).
How can anyone really trust someone who has the nerve to call themselves a professional “ethicist” and take money for it? You, for example, express your opinion on the ethics of one subject or another and invite comments… as an unpaid blogger. This leads to an exchange of opinions and healthy re-evaluations among all parties. This is, in fact, what the First Amendment was all about! This women though, like her predecessor, sets herself up as an authority in a newspaper and, therefore, carries the weight of that publication’s name behind her virtual dictates. Where’s the interchange? One might well ask this woman… who ordained you?
Well, especially since she’s not an ethicist by any stretch of the imagination…she just got the column. I, in fact, AM a full-time paid ethicist, who comes to the designation through more than a decade’s study of legal ethics and the developing standards over that time, and studies in leadership and character. (I don’t want her job, believe me.) If you make your money writing about ethics, then you are an ethicist; she just happens to be one of the less qualified ones.
Yipe! Stuck my foot in mouth that time! But my salient point, Jack, is that you invite an interchange of ideas. You can speak with authority due to your background and the fact that you have a website and a core of posters who respect your opinions based on the quality of your evaluations. You not only invite dissent, but have the integrity to honestly concede a point. That, I suggest, is a crucial element of character that separates a true intellectual from the professional bloviator. My apologies for having framed my argument so poorly.