What do I do if I cannot give a good reference to my PhD student?

Question

I've seen several questions from students about bad supervisor references but this is on the other side.

I have a PhD student whose priority during their PhD was family (had two children in 3 years) and social life. They are smart but simply did the minimum for the PhD. We had a talk some time ago and they were clear that their target was the minimum requirements set by the school and nothing more. Which is fine by me, since that what they want.

They've now asked me to write a reference letter for a very prestigious ECR fellowship. I personally know many members of the committee. The reference guidelines ask me to address the candidate's ability to work well under pressure, attract funding, take initiative, work independently, etc.

I am conflicted. My options as I see are:

1. I write a statement of facts. Worked in the group from X to Y, published N papers, etc. However, this will basically signal that I cannot support their candidacy since I don't address the specific guidelines.
2. I tell the student I cannot give a support letter. However, given they haven't worked with any other professor or group, it will leave them in bad place.

Any other options?

Update: Some more information based on questions/comments below.

• The student was clear after the first year of their PhD (pre-COVID) that they want to do the minimum. For example, the requirement set by the university is to have "publishable" work and not to have published. So, the student did not want to go through the publication process except for "easy" conferences (2). All of my other PhDs until now have had 1 journal accepted and at least 1 submitted by the submission date.
• The fact that they focus on family is the positive aspect for me. E.g., if they did the minimum because they were lazy, I wouldn't have problem to say I don't provide a reference letter. I don't know how many hours they actually put since I don't keep monitor (also, last 9 months have been remotely due to COVID).
• I don't believe I can truthfully say that they comply with what I'm asked to comment on. E.g., good organizational skills: they have missed multiple deadlines, missed meetings, missed report submissions for their own funding which has a fixed yearly date (!). The excuse is always family or technical problems, but for the 3 years of joint work, I cannot truthfully say they have good organizational skills. I'll not extend to other aspects, but similar picture.

Answer 1

I'd think you should have a candid discussion with the student about what they think you should write.

Yes, (as in another reasonable answer here), university administrations will never tell you you'd done enough, nor will funding agencies, nor even will departments when it comes time for salary raise consideration. Right, so one should avoid being driven by external approval, in some regards.

At the same time, the/one ideal of academic function is self-direction, and taking lots of initiative, regardless of bureaucratic pushes. Not "sacrificing family life", necessarily. But, also, not necessarily forgetting about everything after a 40-hour work-week, either. Much more amorphous. (Fortunately, my own family is fairly indulgent of my endless distraction [sic] by math stuff... partly, because I do manage to pay attention to them and participate, in a complicated way of integrating family-and-math.)

As a sort of diagnostic, you could ask the student to "persuade you", on a professional level. If they can give cogent reasons that everyone benefits from their choices about life/work balance, then it's a winning situation. If their notion of "balance" is more of a negative about the work part, you can/should point out that they are failing to offer a good exchange for such fellowships... and much other funding.

Btw, for my own PhD students, I certainly do not try to micro-manage their schedules or time allotted. If they say that they don't have time to do something for a day or two, I believe them. If they say that a family vacation will take them away from work for some days, I believe them and it's fine. Fortunately (for me and for them) no one has ever said to me that they definitely wanted to aim to limit their interaction with the mathematics, somehow thinking that "thinking about math" is in conflict with "being a good parent/partner/friend". I myself honestly do not see this supposed distinction as genuine.

Perhaps you can provoke your student to think a little about a less naive conception of "work-life balance", and then ask them why they think you should write a (helpful/supportive) letter for them?

EDIT: In addition to myriad other complicating issues, we should definitely note that (at least) the NSF currently cares about "broader impacts" and such. It's not literally about work/life balance, but is about impacts of one's work outside one's office/classroom and so on.

Answer 2

A student who did the minimum during their PhD has very little chance of getting a prestigious fellowship. In the sciences, you must have publications to get prestigious fellowships; a student who did the minimum will not. Your role as a mentor is to guide students to attempt things they might succeed in. Tell the student they will not succeed in this application. Tell them to compare their record to past successful applicants.

You should not write the letter. It will not help the student and it can hurt your reputation. But you should have told the student that they would not get a letter for prestigious fellowships when you discussed their goals for completing their PhD.

Answer 3

My reading of your question is that you don't think that you can actually recommend the student to your colleagues. It is a separate discussion whether we think that the student was right or wrong prioritizing family, so I'm simply going to address the question of the recommendation, devoid of whatever reason you might have for not wanting to recommend them.

The problem ultimately comes down to where your allegiance lies or should lie. You're stuck between your professional ethics to only write letters that are truthful, and your personal allegiance to your former student. That is an uncomfortable position to be in, but one every faculty knows. My take is that your professional ethics provide the overriding objective for the same reason as we would expect a professional engineer to not sign off on a bridge design they know is faulty, even if their employer is generously paying them (or even if the CEO of the company is the spouse of the engineer). What respect would we, as a profession, command if we had no ethics?

So, then, how do you find a way to do the professionally right thing in a confidential way? The usual approach is to write a letter that is short and says nothing. We have all seen such letters and we know what they mean.

Now, that is ethically correct but personally not satisfying. The solution to that is probably to have a candid conversation with the student about the fact that you cannot unconditionally recommend them for the position and that they might be better off asking someone else for a letter. I've had to have these conversations, and they're not pleasant, but students in this situation generally know that they might not be the best qualified ones, and respect the ethical argument.

Answer 4

I'm on the side of the PhD student here.

I'm tenured faculty. I too continuously have to battle with university management to ensure that I can free up enough time to also have a family life outside of the university. This is not an attempt to do the bare minimum, but if you don't fight back against management's natural impulses, you end up with an 80-hour working week, and that is incompatible with a family life.

Having children is a human right, also for a PhD student. If one of my students has two children during their PhD, good on them! There should be appropriate governmental remuneration to allow for this happenstance. If there isn't, this is the fault of the corresponding government, not the PhD student. This may not necessarily align with my primary research objectives, but it is a fact of life that is implicit in dealing with human beings, especially those of PhD student age.

Right now, you have the option to choose on which side of the debate you want to be. Do you want to propagate the opinion that an academic career is incompatible with a private life? Then write the student a cold, factual letter or none at all (basically the two options you outline). Do you want to support a healthy work-life balance for junior people on the academic career ladder? Then do better. The choice is yours.

Answer 5

I think there are multiple different strands to this issue, and it is helpful to try and disentangle them and think about each separately.

1. Ignoring any matters of 'how they got here', where does the student stand today?

What does their portfolio of achievements look like (results, papers, presentations, service to the community, external recognition, etc...). How does this compare to other students at this point in their careers? This may be something you can usefully discuss with other colleagues in your institution for a somewhat 'external' opinion. Is the candidate's CV realistically competitive for the fellowship? What positive things could you write in a reference?

2. What is the student's attitude to research?

Because of the way your original question was phrased, much of the discussion here has hinged on the reasonableness of students prioritising family. However, it sounds to me as though this is a red herring. The real issue is an apparent lack of engagement with the realities of academic life, e.g. a stated unwillingness to try and publish any papers. This is at best only loosely-connected to circumstances in the student's personal life.

I think it is reasonable to take this attitude into account when writing a reference. In any job, there are people who do the minimum required for their paycheck. There is nothing inherently wrong with that as an approach -- and their work may be entirely competent -- but it is generally accepted that the people who get promoted are (or at least, should be) those who perform above the baseline.

3. What conversation should you have with the student? What should you write?

You probably need to be frank with the student about (a) your answers to the above questions, and (b) what you are, and are not, able to write in their support. There are surely some positive things you can say, even if there are other areas where your silence might be deafening.

In reality, it seems to me that you may be overthinking your dilemma as regards this fellowship. If students typically have 1-2 papers by the time they graduate, excellent students probably have more. Is anyone going to look twice at your students' application?

The more concerning issue is that the student appears to have ambitions that are not matched by their current profile. This is perhaps a more useful focus of discussion: what does the student really want? Where do they want to be in 5 years? How do they see themselves in comparison to their peers? This may be an uncomfortable conversation to have - but personally I'd rather be told if I'm wasting my time and energy pursuing something not (currently) realistic.

Answer 6

I really don't understand what the question is here.

The student has openly said they only want to do the bare minimum of work.

They have indeed only done the bare minimum.

They are now either sufficiently stupid, or sufficiently brass-necked, to ask you to write a recommendation letter for them.

Just write a statement of the facts (as in paragraphs 2 and 3) and let them take the consequences of their own lifestyle choice.

Answer 7

Get the student to bullet-point their positive qualities and pass the list to you. If it is accurate you can put it in your own style and write it in good conscience

Give them the guidelines! Ask them to give concrete justifications and instances for each positive point they make about themselves.

If there is any inaccuracy then you can say that you are not convinced - could they provide more evidence.

When the student has provided you with their ideal set of bullet points and you have ascertained that every part of it is true, then you can write the letter in good conscience. It will be up to ECR to decide whether this is sufficient.

Example

• I have demonstrated my organisational skills by successful pursuing my studies whilst simultaneously bringing up a family of n children.

• I made the following contributions at the following conferences ...

• I have always maintained a good relationship with my supervisor.

• I satisfy the following requirements of the post because ...

• Etc.

Answer 8

In my past experience several of my endorsers asked me to send them a draft, in order to spare them the trouble of recollecting all the details.

You could ask him to do the same and then have a frank, true-to-the-facts, face-to-face discussion on the statements contained in it. So you can position yourself in spoken words first, and then move on to the final version, which you sign, without compromising your standards.

If the candidate has a fair sense of self and fair recollections, you get a helping hand, at no embarrassment. If he is attempting to drop names (yours), it will be easy for you to recall the milestones of your shared work experience and bring the necessary nuances into the draft, without further justification at the point of editing.

There could be better candidates with a poor supervisor who then get a reference biased downwards. If he gets a reference biased upwards, the system of reference letters ends up twice as unfair upon producing both false positives and false negatives. Lower sensitivity, lower specificity. So your concerns are justified. The prestige of the grant and reviewers is a secondary consideration here.

My two cents.

Answer 9

It seems to me both options 1 and 2 that you propose are perfectly ethical, and both also leave your student in a bad place.

If you're looking for a third option, I'm not sure one exists this late in the game.

You probably should have told the PhD student earlier that their choices about doing the bare minimum would hurt them specifically in this kind of way later down the road. Part of your job as an advisor is to give advice. Just because a student expresses choices doesn't mean those choices are informed. This is especially true for folks underrepresented in academia, and someone with children in a PhD program is a minority any way you slice it (people with children in the common PhD age range have less contact with academia than average, and PhD students, particularly women, are unlikely to have children and the complexities that arise around this).

Also the comment about organization may be perfectly valid, but it does give me some pause. Academia tends to be accommodating to disorganized people (think the absent-minded professor trope). It's traditionally women who are penalized for being disorganized, and men who are forgiven, so if your PhD student is a woman I would rethink a lot of this language for any recommendation you write her (the prompt isn't helping much here, but we can still work to undo bias). What other talents and skills did this student show? Being smart is pretty vague.

Answer 10

Before you write anything you should talk to the ex-student. And speak very clearly and frankly. Acknowledge his/her intelligence and consistent commitment within the limits of the priorities that were set at the beginning of the programme. But make it clear that you can't write in the terms necessary to win this fellowship (e.g. 'excellent', 'outstanding', 'dedicated', 'avid team player', 'very obliging colleague', etc) of someone whose commitment level was always indexed to an acceptable standard plus a bit more. To write otherwise in a letter would be untrue and unfair to the selection panel for the fellowship.

I would advise that you do NOT allude in any way to the amoral argument, i.e. that, if you did recommend someone for the fellowship and they disappointed their new employer, your bum-steer would be held against you by that institution. Any such reference would likely make you sound like an influence peddler rather than the independent-minded and ethical professional that you should be - and that we trust you really are.

So, in fairness to the student, he/she is entitled to a reference for any job that needs testimony of his/her abilities during the PhD programme. But make it clear that your reference must fairly reflect the limits as well as the strengths of his/her past commitment - and for this particular appointment your reference is unlikely to help in him/her being selected.

EDIT

The OP has not mentioned this explicitly but it may well be the fact that few current vacancies exist for new PhDs in certain fields and this man/woman with 2 children has to put food on the table. This would create an inhibition on the ex-supervisor's part in "laying down the law" to the PhD: it might be presented to other staff-members as overly harsh or insensitive to the PhD's human responsibilities. Academics are often sensitive to how their opinions and actions are perceived, however reasonable or correct such opinions or actions may be. This elite fellowship may be one of the few available in this particular field right now and a job is a job . . .

I'd like to say otherwise but I think this possible situation is all the more reason for a frank exchange, one-on-one (no spouses or colleagues allowed in, all behind locked doors with no casual entrants able to bust in) in the supervisor's university office. I think a phone call would be a two-against-one as the PhD's spouse may be nearby and this would encourage playing the offended party when disappointed. None of us has the right in any sense to preferential consideration for a job based on our family responsibilities - no legal right, no moral right. The PhD made a choice at the start of the programme. Now he/she has to man/woman up to the consequences of their limited commitment. Going back to their supervisor and tacitly (sort of asking with their eyes rather than uttering the shameful words) expecting consideration of their parental necessities when drafting a reference for a fellowship beyond their merit is plain beyond the line. And a supervisor so asked has to be unambiguous in the response. And in the reasons why.

I would advise you to rehearse your lines before meeting the PhD. It makes it easier to say them on the day. We are all with you in spirit.

Answer 11

You had a talk with the candidate when the candidate clearly stated about their desire to meet the bare minimum. You can have a similar talk now along the lines - ‘The bare minimum doers cannot be recommended by me for this scholarship since it has a very high bar.’

The fact that the candidate may not get a good recommendation from you is not really a matter of discussion today. It got implicitly decided long back when you had the first discussion where the candidate decided to meet the bare minimum.

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Caveat:

It is possible that while the scholarship sets a very high bar but does not really follow up with it. In that case there may be people who have also done bare minimum just like your student but they will get the scholarship because their guide is not as strict about the rules. If that’s the situation, then it is up to you to decide whether you want to conform to common standards or you want to stick to your guns.