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Well, my particular instantiation of this vexing double vision Rick talks about would be made a lot less complicated if I thought that the the student in question had failed to perform adequately in my class. In fact, he's not a half-bad writer. I don't think that, in terms of the little corner of the curriculum entrusted to me, he lacks the writing skills necessary for either position. If he'd written a thesis, it would pass. What he lacks, in my opinion, is character. I suppose that recommendation letters constitue an occasion where it's appropriate to comment on someone's character, but I feel uneasy about that. Maybe that's because of all those years of grading students' papers, many of which took points of view with which I didn't agree, and feeling that, nonetheless, I needed to be objective in evaluating them; but I feel unfomfortable saying to myself, okay, this guy can write, but I don't like who he is and what he stands for as a person, so I'm going to deny him entrance to a position that he wants, a position that _I_ don't want to see occupied by persons like him. Where do we draw the line on those sorts of issues? How many years ago was it (if it's in the past at all) that people got refused letters of recommendation for law school because they were _against_ racism or sexism or hompohobia? At what point do I err in making those judgements? Ought I to refuse to write letters for people whose politics are more conservative than mine in other ways? What if the highly erudite, principled young man in my class this semester -- who's also a member of the NRA and is writing on the evils of gun control -- were to ask me for a letter? Can or should I say, no, sorry, don't like your politics? I'm the gatekeeper; I'll make it as narrow a passage as I like? There are other issues embedded here, too. The gun-control guy is less disturbing to me precisely because he is so polite and well-spoken and thoughtful; he presents himself well within the context of the university classroom; he knows the discourse, the expected behavior. He's also white. The homophobic student, on the other hand, doesn't seem to know the unwritten rules so well . . . but then again, he's Arabic-American. I wonder if he's playing by the same rules. If he were more sophisticated, would he be able to pass his homophobia off in ways that were more acceptable to me? Am I, finally, judging character or socialization or academic skills? Can these be separated? Well, you may be saying that race and academic background don't constitute just grounds for excusing homphobia, and I'd by and large agree. For me, to borrow the words of my Dean, homophobia is (one of) the filth(s) at the center of the mind, the presence of which suggests to me that that person cannot be expected to act ethically in other circumstances. I'm not going to write the student in question a letter. I'm not going to do it, knowing full well that the reason I'm not going to do it has absolutely nothing to do with his academic performance (there are reasons there I could fall back on, but they're not really the reasons I'm deciding this), that my reasons have to do with my particular value system, my sense of what is right & ethical in the world, my own idiosyncratic sense of justice. My justice, my values, are enough like others' here so that nobody's going to squabble with me, I don't think -- but I can't help being profoundly uneasy at the way that values, academic performance, and discourse communities all have become intertwined and implicated in this decision. I don't think this is avoidable, but it sure gives me pause. Marcy (Damn. This _was_ about OJ. Sorry.) Marcy Bauman Writing Program University of Michigan-Dearborn 4901 Evergreen Rd. Dearborn, MI 48128 email: [log in to unmask]