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Thursday, June 19.1975
University Dally Kansan
5
Lawyers not alone playing Buckley amendment game
By STAN STENERSEN
Kansan Staff Reporter
This is the second part of a two-part article.
If you think the Buckley amendment is only a lawyer's and an administrator's game, you're wrong. Students and faculty can play, too.
If you plan to enter graduate or professional school or to get a job through some of the placement services at the University, you're in the game already. Likewise, if a faculty member plans to write an undergraduate foundation for a student, he is playing, too.
The objective is this: to assemble the most impressive set of recommendations for admission to graduate school or for a research file at a University placement bureau.
Under the Buckley amendment, here are the rules:
1) You may ask any recommendations placed in your file after Jan. 1, 1975, unless you specify that the file is for a prospective employer. 2) You may control which prospective employers will be able to see your file. They will not be able to look in your file without your permission unless you specifically specify that they are looking at it.
Despite these simple rules, a considerable number of straits also required. Consider three states.
If you retain your right to see your recommendations, you can see what professors write about you and perhaps get feedback on how they are using the recommendations are going to another school, you might not be able to see them before they're sent, but professors who would write bad references might refuse to refer them later. Either way will help your chances.
But professors keep saying that only frank and candid recommendations are considered carefully by employers or graduate committees. If a professor knows
FOCUS
you can read his letter, perhaps he will play it safe and write a bland letter that does you no good. Perhaps showing some of your warts wouldn't be so bad, Hmmm.
According to Herold Regier, director of the Education Placement Bureau (EPB), students should consider their choices under the Buckley amendment carefully.
Regier said that if a student restricted access to his file at the EPB, he would screen out unwanted employers but might also lose a chance for a job. He explained why this was important in training artifacts of about 2,400 registrants for elementary, secondary, and college teaching positions, often received unscheduled or last minute job notices. If a candidate elected to maintain control of his file, Regier said, the EPB couldn't release it, but files of qualified candidates who their right to control could be released.
Regier said his office received about 50 such notices a year. As if to illustrate the point, during the interview he received a telephone call requesting a list of candidates to fill a sudden opening for a school principal.
A student should also think carefully before deciding whether to retain or waive access to his recommendations, Regier said, because prospective employers may put more faith in confidential recommendations.
"Only time will tell how people will react to it," he said. "But let's say that there are 20 candidates for a position in English and that some candidates waive their right while others retain it. There's an uncertainty in my mind as to what effect that will have. It might put those people on unequal grounds."
Regier said that six professors at the University had told him they would write recommendations only if candidates waived their right to see them. Some of them told him nonconfidential letters were meaningless, he said, while others said they
even feared the harassment of a possible suit, alleging that a negative reference deprived a person of his opportunity to earn a living.
One professor made his decision after talking with an attorney. Reiler said.
University Attorney Michael Davis said that although such a suit could be brought, judgment against a professor for an honest letter was unlikely.
"Label and slander, yes, but not an honest negative recommendation." Davis said.
Regier said he thought the Buckley amendment meant he, cause writers of a book like "The Concert" would be
"I would expect more refusals for "anybody who was questionable," he said.
"The writer will duck writing the reference or hedge in some way."
Other faculty members who were interviewed agreed with Regier. Most said he wanted more selection in writing recommendations.
Margaret Arnold, assistant professor of English, said that although she usually didn't write totally negative letters of criticism, she usually not write them at all in the future.
At the same time, she said, she had attested that the amendment would not affect her rights.
"I don't want to water down what I say," she said.
Another professor, who asked not to be identified, said that he would also avoid negative letters but that the amendment would affect very little the substance of the rest of his letters. He already tells students what he will write in their letters he will say.
The amendment will probably have little
"There are so many vaucous recommendations that this won't make any difference," he said. "As a reader, you just don't have some recommendations more than others."
But William Griffith, professor of history,
disagree. The amendment will create
effect on the general quality of recommendations, which is often already poor.
more watered down recommendations, he said, and "will do to recommendations what I understand the influx of higher grades has done to academic records."
Griffith said the amendment would have an adverse effect on the best students, whose recommendations would now appear in print and then compared with those of other students.
Although the amendment would guard
against blackbailing a student, Griffith县 hearing of any such accidents his department has
"We have to weigh the results" he said,
"in order to equal to the potential injustice caused."
Debate about the effects of the Buckley amendment is likely to continue for some time. Meanwhile, let us open the box and the puppets, for our play is just beginning.
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