Let's imagine a "friend," a professor in a PhD granting department, who has to write letters of recommendation for her talented PhD students on the market. (No, it's not autobiography. My own students are a few years removed from the market.) Unlike most of her peers she really likes writing detailed letters; she enjoys helping her students and has come to believe that detailed letters are helpful to hiring departments. Now my friends happens to know that two of "her" students are in a serious relationship. Her initial strategy is to keep such personal matters quiet. (Unlike me she dislikes gossiping.) But it occurs to her that hiring departments might find such information useful; the information might, of course, be used to disqualify her students from short-lists, but she reasons that mentioning the (existence and academic virtues of the) other partner also might make her students more interesting as a package to some departments; these might, say, be able to use one search to fill a lot of needs at once (an argument that worked nicely with their ambitious, but cost-sensitive Dean in discussions of her own department's most recent search). Recruitment is expensive, of course, and couples do tend to stay around.
But my friend is also sensitive to the fact that one of her coupled students is really the philosophically weaker of the couple {let's call this mate, "the upwardly mobile mater"}; so mention of the relationship might help the upwardly mobile mater, but maybe hurt the upwardly mobile mater's mate. (To complicate matters the couple has just submitted their joint paper to a journal.) Even leaving aside privacy considerations, would it be ethical to help the career of the upwardly moble mater, and hinder the career of the mate of the upwardly mobile mater? Should any of this information be revealed in a letter of recommendation? Ethics aside, would it be legal to do so in all jurisdictions?
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