letters of hers. I trust [them] and her intellect. She’s not going to
pump a candidate up, and she’s also not going to deflate a candi-
date because they have some kind of [conflict]...She’ssome-
body who has intellectual integrity.^9Similarly, a philosopher says that he assigned significant weight to
a letter by the Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen because
“He knows how to judge brilliance. He’s had a lot of very brilliant
people around him in his life.” The same is said about another Nobel
laureate, the Berkeley economist George Akerloff. To the extent that
applicants located in more prestigious universities have greater ac-
cess to well-known and well-connected letter writers, these appli-
cants will likely be advantaged by those evaluators who put consider-
able weight on letters.^10
Some panelists believe that letters are important in their “signal-
ing” role, independent of their specific content.^11 Indeed, letters con-
vey prestige, or a measure of quality, by association—the famous
halo effect.^12 As one political scientist says, “I make judgments based
on my knowledge of how distinguished the writer is, but I pay very
little attention to what the writer actually says, because it’s very hard
to discriminate among the letters.” The signaling effect of letters can
be so strong as to override other factors. A philosopher provided this
cautionary tale about a graduate student in his department: “We had
to write his dissertation for him, but the description I had given on it
was so good, he had twelve interviews. No one looked at him again
after the interview. Since then, I’ve tried to be careful [to better align
the letter with the accomplishments].” One political scientist says
that because she “wants a clean sense of things,” she makes up her
mind solely on the basis of the proposal. She uses letters to revise her
evaluation or as supporting evidence. Another panelist avoids read-
ing the names of the letter writers until he has read the entire dossier,
so as to equalize the playing field.
Recognizing Various Kinds of Excellence / 165