Administrative follies

I received the following email yesterday:

-----Original Message-----
From: flwships@umich.edu [mailto:flwships@umich.edu]
Sent: Thursday, December 03, 2009 5:00 PM
To: econjeff@umich.edu
Subject: Letter of Recommendation Request

Thank you for agreeing to submit a Rackham Administered Fellowship, Scholarship and Grants - Rackham Graduate Student Research Grants letter of recommendation for applicant [the applicant's name has not yet been entered on the application].

For your convenience, please click the link below to access the applicant's online letter of recommendation form:

[snip]

When I click through, the student's name is still not revealed.

I am working on figuring out the point of notifying a faculty member that they need to fill out a recommendation for a student whose name is not revealed to them.

Probably this is one of those deep bureaucratic mysteries that being an economist makes it impossible to understand.