A L S O_ T O D A Y Comics Ruben Bolling: The education of Louis T A B L E_ T A L K Is America's education system fundamentally flawed? Discuss ways to fix it in the Education area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Confessions of Harper's serf By Marc Herman The secrets learned from a Harper's internship (09/23/98) From screaming babies to screaming college students By Camille Paglia "The Nurture Assumption": A rambling, anecdotal memoir (09/23/98) Ufology By Christina Valhouli Aliens invade the ivory tower (09/22/98) Sacred rites of an acid house By Isaac Zaur Beyond the bad food and the bad poetry, a tribe of students seek life's mysteries in a collective hallucination (09/21/98) Recess A one-stop playground for weekend frivolity and fun (09/18/98) BROWSE THE IVORY TOWER ARCHIVE

BY TYLER THORESON | Universities offer them to tenured professors as polite inducements to find work elsewhere; employers hold them up as bargaining chips in labor disputes between faculty and parents in wealthy school districts; and the academics who must read and write them have also made them into a running joke. No one who has glimpsed behind the curtain and seen the machinations of academia can take them completely seriously. Despite being under casual attack from all sides, the letter of recommendation survives. The cockroach of exaggeration refuses to die. Which isn't to say that personal references haven't always been rife with outrageous claims. Back in 1941, long before he dreamed up the religion that would become so dear to the Hollywood elite, L. Ron Hubbard got a Washington state representative and family friend to sign a blank piece of Legislature letterhead so the young Scientologist could write a letter recommending himself to the U.S. Navy. "This will introduce one of the most brilliant men I have ever known: Captain L. Ron Hubbard," the missive barked, lauding Hubbard for having written "many millions of words and some fourteen movies," for his contributions to the field of "minerological [sic] knowledge" and taking care to note his "considerable influence in the Caribbean and Alaska." It worked; Hubbard was accepted to the Navy. Once enlisted, he bombarded his superiors and congressmen with bright ideas, among them a plan for a bulked-up air corps, and was later able to take credit for inventing the Air Force. Nowadays, a young L. Ron likely wouldn't need to write the thing himself, because everybody knows a puffed up letter of recommendation is often just a humble request away. "Nobody is ever just pretty good or even in the top 20 percent: Every student earns superlatives. Every one of them is one of the best," writes Yale law professor and bestselling author Stephen L. Carter in his 1996 book "Integrity," which devotes several pages to dissecting the banal tangle of accolades that often passes for a personal reference. "Recommendation letters are written in language in which there are only a few gradations: brilliant, one of the best, or the best." While a clerk for Thurgood Marshall in the early '80s, Carter came across two letters from a prominent law professor calling two different students the brightest in the same law-school class. "As this was obviously impossible, the only rational option was to discount both letters entirely," he writes. Bummer, to be sure. But in most cases, sifting through the outrageous claims is, while far from enjoyable, entirely possible. For one thing, "There are ways to indicate that somebody's personality is sub-optimal," says Duke's director of undergraduate admissions, Christoph Guttentag. When a candidate is said to "lead by example," one could easily interpret that to mean he's an asocial geek with an aversion to rule-breaking. No positive recommendation can be trusted without an anecdote or two, which Guttentag calls the "golden key" to letters of recommendation. "The least useful recommendation I ever received," he says, "was one sentence, and it said, 'This transcript speaks for itself.'" N E X T_ P A G E .|. Knowing how to read the letters