IMAGINE THIS SCENARIO. Olivia Ramirez, a college senior, visits her school’s Career Development Center. She is unsure what to expect, but one discovery startles her. Application forms for large corporations routinely include this clause: “If you belong to a protected group, you have the right to equal pay. You also have the option of waiving this right. Check the box to indicate whether you wish to waive this right.”

As a Latina, Olivia knows that she is doubly protected. “Why should I have to waive my right to equal pay?” she asks the career counselor.

“You do not have to. It is an option.”

“And if I reject that option, will they reject me? How many people don’t waive their right?”

“As far as I know, virtually everyone waives it.”

Olivia wonders how this practice can go uncriticized at a college that oozes protests for everything from endangered piping plovers to the use of “girl” for any female human over 15. But she expects that it would be pointless to argue with the counselor. She thanks him for his time and walks out onto the quad where an Earth Day banner is urging, “Save the Earth before it is too late.”

This tale may seem preposterous. Isn’t it obvious that such a waiver system would undermine the right to equal pay? Companies don’t really do this, do they?

Actually, they don’t. But colleges and universities do something similar.

When I was a graduate student in the activist 1970s, a new law managed to penetrate my militantly apolitical outlook. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA) gave postsecondary students the right to see their education records, which frequently include letters of recommendation. I was thrilled to think that students could finally learn what was in those letters and which ones, if any, contained inappropriate remarks about such matters as personal appearance and political persuasion.

It has not turned out that way. Colleges and universities have taken advantage of a loophole in FERPA. They use a waiver system that parallels the imaginary system Olivia encountered and gives students the option of waiving the right to see their letters. Recipients of the letters can see whether students have waived this right. Students are routinely advised to do so on the grounds that otherwise, their letters of recommendation will not be taken seriously.

How compelling is this advice? As a professor, I have read thousands of letters of recommendation. I cannot recall a single case where an applicant failed to “choose” the waiver “option.” The waiver option drives out all other options. In effect, it nullifies students’ right to see their letters of recommendation.

America’s colleges and universities are alternately extolled and reviled as bastions of liberalism. Why are they so illiberal about students’ right to see their letters of recommendation? A common rationale is that a recommender might not be candid if he thought that students would see what he wrote about them.

Recommenders, however, are usually teachers. Our educational system relies on the assumption that teachers will be candid when grading students. Knowing that students see their grades does not keep screening committees from taking those grades seriously. The same could be true of letters of recommendation under a system requiring teachers to be as open with students about those letters as about grades. Of course, this sort of system might prevent letters from mentioning such matters as whether a student smokes or has an egalitarian marriage, both of which I have actually seen discussed in letters of recommendation. That would be all to the good.

Rather than exploiting a loophole that undermines students’ rights, colleges and universities should stop “offering” the waiver “option.” In the meantime, recommenders can do what I have always done. Give all students copies of the letters that you write about them, even if they waive their right to see them.

This issue is hardly as glamorous as saving the Earth. But it involves a wrong that colleges and universities themselves have created and that they themselves can end.

Felicia Nimue Ackerman, a monthly contributor, is a professor of philosophy at Brown University.