Philosopher Barbara Herman (UCLA) writes:
As Placement Director, I'm seeing an issue that's of general interest. A number of schools, either because of the structure of Interfolio or their own online application systems, are only accepting three letters of reference for job applicants. They are giving no guidance about whether they are expecting the applicant to include a teaching letter, or want only research letters. Some of these schools respond to inquiries about this state of affairs with surprise and then say they will accept more letters by email. Some others in effect shrug. Very active or well-connected placement directors are able to get more attention for their students. That's good, but hardly fair. Since you reach a great many programs through your blog, I wondered if it might be of use to call attention to this so that schools might work towards being more uniform or at least more informative about their practice.
I'm grateful to Prof. Herman for raising this problem. Comments are open for suggestions or for hiring departments to clarify their policies, as the case may be.
