How to politely reject a request for a letter of recommendation for a professor

Question

I am a student.

I received a request for a letter of recommendation to a professor for some award. I know for a fact that my letter will be directly used in the application for the award. [I have since graduated from this institution.] I haven't interacted with this particular person in about 3-4 years, and feel that I couldn't write the strongest one, since my interactions with this person were not much outside of classwork (two classes).

It looks like someone else is requesting these letters; how do I politely reject the request? I am particularly not interested in burning any bridges, since I may consider getting a career in academia in the future, but I haven't asked this particular professor for any recommendations (nor do I plan to do so in the future).

Update: I have decided to write the letter. Appreciate all of the feedback here.

Answer 1

If you want to decline to write, then it would be reasonable to reply to the person who requested the letter, saying something like: "My interactions with Professor X were three to four years ago and involved very little interaction with him beyond attendance at two of his classes. So I do not consider myself to be in a position to provide useful information for award Y."

Answer 2

The most polite way to decline, in this case, is to just not respond at all. As a student, you have no obligation to write letters for faculty members. So, if you don't want to write a letter, simply do not respond to the request. It is common for people to request letters from former students for awards or tenure applications, but it is also common for students to not respond, so nobody will think it is unusual. They are unlikely to harass you if you don't respond.

On the other hand, if you have anything you'd like to recount about the professor, you should consider responding. Even if you do not feel you could write the strongest letter, for many situations the mere presence of student responses is considered. Having had two classes with the professor, you can likely say something about his or her teaching, interaction with students, etc. I can say that I was very flattered by the fact that students did choose to respond when letters were requested for me in the past. But the decision is yours, of course.

Answer 3

It's possible that you're not in a position to judge whether your letter would be the strongest one. Perhaps they are specifically looking for a letter from a student who's taken classes for him, and they don't have all that many good options to choose from.

I would suggest that you write back that you are not sure that you would be the best person to write such a letter of recommendations [because of the reasons you described here], but that if they would still like you to write one, you would be happy to write a supportive letter. (Of course this answer assumes you liked the classes you took from him and that you would indeed write a positive letter!)

In summary: try to give a good idea of what kind of letter you would be writing, and let them decide if it's the kind of letter they would like to include in their application.

Answer 4

You should write the letter. Most likely an administrator wants to know what you think of the professor's teaching. Having taken two classes with the professor, you may know better than anyone else how the professor teaches.

Answer 5

It's entirely possible that you were picked because you had only a class or two with this professor. Sometimes that's how things work.

I was once helping to run an evaluation for a professor who was up for tenure. This is a MAJOR deal which takes months of effort; your whole publication record is carefully examined, as are all of your course evaluations, etc. Letters of evaluation are solicited from other professionals in the field, from co-workers, from students, etc. We went through class enrollment records and deliberately picked more than one kind of student: some who had worked very closely with the professor, and some who had had only a class or two with him.

One student wrote back and said, "I don't think I'm the right person to write this evaluation, because I had only one class with Dr. Smith." We had to write back and explain: no, dear, that's actually exactly why we picked you.