this is such an important point. The moment I got tenure I was asked to write tenure letters for half a dozen people who—shocker—needed letters from (more) people who saw their work on gender/race/class and tech for the important contribution it was and could speak to that.https://twitter.com/ehh_ptr/status/1279021861448429570 …
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just to add: I was shocked & overwhelmed at how many I was asked to write immediately after getting tenure. I was also afraid screwing up people’s careers accidentally bc it was my 1st time—I asked colleagues how best to write them. Wish this tacit knowledge were more explicit.
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See the thing w/writing letters immediately after getting tenure is that you haven’t yet had a chance to evaluate someone else’s tenure case yet so you haven’t seen *what tenure letters look like* or how yr colleagues respond positively/negatively to certain ways they’re written
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The politics of recommendation letters are already a mess, so I had a lot of concerns re:navigating the politics of tenure letters with little/no direct experience. Esp. when writing letters for people in my field but outside my discipline. Disciplinary gatekeeping is so specific
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The main thing I learned that carried across fields was how important it was to show the broader (across fields, natl/international) impact of someone’s work backed by specific examples.
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BUT you had to be careful not to make it sound like they were too “popular” an author/thinker because that could be used against them as evidence they were not “serious” or “scholarly” enough
You can guess which scholars were most at risk of that accusation.
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