It may all boil down to a lack of the requisite skill by some of our colleagues back home, and the many cases of reference letters without substance were mostly unintentional, as Moses so charitably put it. All you need to do is look at references within the Nigerian high education system. The stock phrases Moses mentioned – hardworking, humble, dutiful, solid – are the staple. Those are either what Nigerian admissions committees are looking for in their candidates or reference letters perhaps don't really mean much anyway. No disrespect is meant by stating that some of our colleagues back home may need to learn the skill, as many of us and others elsewhere have had to do, of writing reference and other kinds of letters for international audiences.
I continue to learn and improve on writing my CV up till today. I know many senior colleagues who continue to attend skills building workshop. I have had a 70-year-old professor of geography take my 2nd year history class because he felt he lacked some skills that the course would give him. I keep attending workshops to learn new teaching and learning skills and there is hardly any one of them that I attend where I do not learn something new, the absence of which knowledge would set me at a disadvantage were I to compete with those who do have the skills. It is not to insult our colleagues to say that they need to upgrade in some areas – internet use, responding to emails, procuring and using videos/ images in the classroom (where the facilities exist for them) etc. Some of the problems can be put down to the general institutional shortfalls that characterize our hi ed system, though others can easily be attributed to individual negligence.
Workshops, conferences, handbooks, youtube, vimeo and other materials that provide some platforms to acquire these skills should be made available to help out.
The shameful inability of Nigerian universities to make transcripts of academic records easily available, even if you pay a million naira, remains just that – shameful. Not just for the government (doesn't look like we have governments that can feel shame) but especially for the Vice-chancellors. Were I in a position today to make a university VC appointment, one of the terms of employment would be that within one year in the university, the appointee must have in place a system able to issue transcripts and other documents electronically (universities would make lots of money from this anyway) or be replaced by another person. Its been a scandal for so long its almost no longer scandalous!
_________________________
Femi J. Kolapo
Sent: Sunday, February 25, 2018 12:34:05 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Our Terrible Recommendation Academic Culture
Does this commentary represent, perhaps unintentionally, a sweeping generalization? Does this pattern of conduct apply across-the-board to all or a majority of the federal, state and private universities that are based in Nigeria? Amongst Nigeria-based academics, is this a common practice or is it a pattern of conduct limited to some frustrated academic practitioners within Nigeria's academic world? What I know, for sure from experience, is that graduates of Nigerian universities tend to experience difficulty with procurement of their transcripts. I feel it necessary to say as well that in my own decades of teaching and performing academic administrative functions here in the USA, I have received and read both ebullient and lukewarm letters of recommendation from both foreign-based and US-based academic practitioners for both students seeking admission and job-seeking academics. In any case, I humbly submit that we ought to exercise some caution and restrain the language that we deploy in our portrayals to the outside world of Nigeria's academic institutions and academic practitioners. In short, let's avoid sweeping generations.
--
This, below, is a Facebook post I made yesterday. It has gone viral and sparked discussion and a healthy debate on a pervasive problem.
Let's discuss how Nigerians unintentionally--or as a compatriot told me recently, intentionally--sabotage other Nigerians' chances of upward socioeconomic and educational mobility.
A talented Nigerian student/graduate is applying to a graduate program in Euro-America and asks her current or former lecturers to write her the required recommendation letters. Some of the lecturers don't even bother to write the letter. The applicant has to chase them down and plead. Sometimes they have to travel from one part of the country to the other to plead in person as phone calls, texts, and emails don't work with the lecturers.
It's as though the lecturers don't want to support the applicant's foreign educational aspirations. It's part of their job, but lecturers act as if they're doing their current and former students a favor by writing these letters. Many applicants have missed critical application deadlines because of this attitude.
The ones who agree to write the letter take the most cavalier attitude to it. They write unusably perfunctory nonsense such as "Ms so and so was a student in our department; she was a well behaved student; she worked hard and performed well in her classes; she has a good character and is very respectful; she is humble and God fearing; her academic record is okay."
Far from helping the applicant's chances, this type of letter actually damages and puts her at a disadvantage in relation to her fellow applicants. I should know, since I've served on both graduate admissions and fellowship and grant committees many times.
Where to begin? First of all such a letter says nothing, absolutely nothing, about the applicant's intellectual abilities, unique academic skills, or the specificities of their academic record. It is too general to be useful. It does not offer any insight into the lecturer's academic/intellectual relationship with the applicant, so why should we take the letter writer seriously as someone who can vouch for the applicant?
There is no mention of classes the applicant took with the lecturer, how they did in such classes, how they stood out, what they did to impress the lecturer, why the lecturer believes the applicant would thrive and blossom in the graduate program, etc.
There is no praise, no enthusiasm--only bland, lukewarm, generic comments. It's better not to write a recommendation than to write one that does not endorse the applicant or highlight her intellectual promise and quality.
Then there is the issue of brevity. Some of these letters that I've seen are one paragraph or at most two--too sketchy to offer any substantive glimpse into the applicant's abilities or give one a sense of the applicant's unique talents and intellectual drive. You can't say anything compelling about an applicant in two or or three sentences.
Finally, there is the annoyingly meaningless deployment of Nigerian idiosyncrasies and cliches. When a Nigerian lecturer writes "hardworking," the North American evaluators of the applicant's materials read it as "mediocre." When the evaluators see a word such as "solid," they don't think it indicates excellence, as it might in Nigeria. In popular and even professional Nigerian usage, "okay" means good. Not so in the North American educational parlance. It does not mean good. Rather, it denotes bad or mediocre. Saying someone is "okay" indicates reservation, that the letter writer is holding back outright praise because the applicant does not deserve it.
And nobody wants to know or cares about the applicant's personal character, so commenting on how well behaved or respectful she is is an unhelpful digression at best and at worst a damaging indication that you have nothing substantive or glowing to say about her academic abilities and intellectual talent. What has the applicant being "kind" got to do with her ability to undertake graduate work, cope with its rigors, and do well?
The phrase"God fearing" and the word "humble" are staples of Nigerian academic recommendation letters. They are red flags like no others because they simply don't belong in an academic reference letter. Our tendency to religionize every aspect of our lives and explain everything in religious idioms is now infecting our academic enterprise. Religious references presuppose that everyone shares that frame of reference, which is quite presumptuous and thus off-putting. As for being "humble," humility is not, in and of itself, a treasured academic quality or an indicator of academic talent. Unless humility is being advanced to balance out superlatives used to describe an applicant's exceptional intellectual talents, it is a meaningless quality to underline in an academic reference letter.
I don't know whether it is laziness on the part of the lecturers or a lack of awareness about Western higher educational conventions. I suppose it's a mix of the two.
Whatever it is, these lecturers are destroying the chances and prospects of talented Nigerian applicants, who lose out of opportunities because their former or current teachers write non-recommendation recommendation letters on their behalf.
I've lived and worked in America long enough to know that, in making admission and other decisions, no evaluator will ignore a sketchy, general, and lukewarm endorsement from a person who purportedly knows and has taught and mentored the applicant--the recommender. If the recommending lecturer doesn't sound so enthusiastic about the applicant, why should I? That's the general attitude.
Ignorance of what is expected in the letter is no excuse. I've even seen such a letter which was written by a Nigeria-based lecturer who studied in the US and is thus aware of how critical recommendation letters are and how they should be written. This lends credence to the theory that some of this could be intentional sabotage on the part of some recommending lecturers.
It is sometimes so sad and frustrating for folks like me to read recommendation letters from North American professors saying that such and such applicant is a reincarnation of Albert Einstein and Jacques Derrida in one flesh and then to read a meaningless three-sentence recommendation letter from a Nigerian lecturer about a Nigerian applicant you know is much more talented than the North American applicant whose abilities and talents are being advanced in highfalutin, exaggerated terms.
The interesting thing is that I read recommendation letters written by academics in other countries for other international applicants and they conform for the most part to the North American convention of high praise and substantive commentary on the applicant, her accomplishments, and her ongoing work.
We're shortchanging ourselves and putting ourselves at a disadvantage in a globalized, hyper-competitive world.
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