A senior philosopher elsewhere writes:
It's the season to write graduate and professional school applications for undergraduates. As always, the letter has to be uploaded separately for each institution applied to. I just did this for a student who applied for 12 programs (probably about typical), and I spent more than an hour engaged in such enriching activities as repeatedly typing in my address, and repeatedly answering the "in what capacity have you known the applicant?" question. (Thank you -- I'd never thought to address this question in a letter.). To add to the fun, the Harvard and Duke platforms crashed 3 times each, so I was able to engage in the joyous exercise 4 extra times.
If one writes for multiple students a season, the tedium, of course, aggregates. Surely there are better uses of faculty -- or anyone's -- labor. And this labor is of course in addition to actual writing of the letter, which can, depending on circumstances, run to several hours a student.
The "collegenet" platform is of little help, since one has to enter and upload individually for each institution.
Supporting students in developing their careers is, obviously, one of the most meaningful parts of our job.
Enduring hours of grating, and avoidable, tedium is not.
I recognize there are many much worse things wrong with the world.
But this particular life-turd, it seems to me, is easily flushed.
Could some of these well-heeled educational institutions pool their resources, and develop a universal platform enabling one upload per student, and stop neeedlessly squandering labor hours?
Law schools at least run a centralized process through the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC), so one submits just one letter for the applicant to LSAC, which in turn distributes the materials to the schools. (I am told medical schools use a similar approach.) But PhD programs, and not just in philosophy, do tend to require that the letter be submitted through their individual portal, which is an idiotic waste of time. Is there some analogue to LSAC for graduate programs that could do something similar (for a fee, of course)? Any other ideas?
