Introduction
Academic citations are a means to make possible the joint search for truth by a far-flung community of scholars. A citation is partly a means of self-discipline—a requirement that the scholar prove to himself, as much as to his audience, that he is not speaking arbitrarily, but that his arguments are grounded both in primary sources and in the arguments and discoveries of his professional colleagues. But it is a self-discipline that also recognizes the value of his fellow searchers-after-truth, whom the scholar acknowledges to his peers and to future scholars.
Charles Bazerman puts it nicely, that while citations do not eliminate scholarly competition, which acts as a spur to the search for truth, they integrate it into a scholarly community. Citations are an essential component of joint inquiry into truth, by scholars who are devoted to their own inquiries and who feel affection and duty toward their fellow inquirers. Academic professionalization can be proverbially rigid, especially the ritualistic comment that you need to familiarize yourself with the literature, but the purpose is to acquaint a novice practitioner with the work of the community devoted to inquiry into a particular subject matter.
Citations also have become a leading measure of academic value and hence of hiring, tenure, promotion, and all the worldly goods of academics. Eugene Garfield made possible this state of affairs by devising the “impact factor” metric, based on citations, as a measure of an article’s value. The computer revolution also made it possible to quantify impact factor with some degree of accuracy and hence to use it in determining the relative merit of academics. Impact factor metrics affect the sciences more than the humanities, but they afflict both.
Radical activists now seek to undermine traditional academic citation practices by imposing citational justice as an imperative for individual scholars and for professional journals. Citational justice generally includes three categories: citational fairness (the contention that biases have reduced the number of footnotes granted to members of certain identity groups), distributive justice (“equity” by identity group, applied to footnotes), and retributive justice (the notion that people who offend progressive sensibilities should not be footnoted).
Radical activists partly seek citational justice from sheer self-interest—to shift the distribution of hiring, tenure, promotion, and all the worldly goods of academics from a basis on individual merit to a basis in identity-group membership. They also seek citational justice because of their ideological belief that knowledge is power, adhering to the knowledge creators, rather than the crystallization of the search for truth. The desire for citational justice is bound up with an assumption that there is citational power to determine the categories of knowledge, as well as all the consequent effects to impose power. Citation in this scheme is only a tool in the search for power.
The model Citations Nondiscrimination Act prevents administrators and professors from engaging in the discriminatory practice of citational justice. The Act requires each public university to establish an ethics policy explicitly prohibiting citational justice and similar discriminatory practices, prohibits administrators and faculty from publishing in journals the encourage or require citational justice, and establishes that the consequence for breaking the Act will be dismissal from employment. It also requires the Board of Regents to establish an Office of Citational Integrity to enforce the Act.
We have made the sanction for engaging in this discriminatory practice simple and severe precisely because footnoting is so complicated and individual a practice. We do not expect that any law can prevent all silent discrimination by radical academics. These sanctions, however, should at least work to prevent the open embrace of discrimination by radical activists and academic journals.
The federal government can and should complement the Citations Nondiscrimination Act by regulations and statutes that permanently disqualify from federal funding any individual who engages in citational justice and similar discriminatory practices.
Model Legislative Text
- The Legislature finds and declares that it is the policy of the State of {Name} to promote ethics in the practice of academic citation and to combat discriminatory practices including citational justice, citational diversity, conscientious engagement applied to citation, and any other such practice that manipulates academic citations for political or ideological purposes.
2. The {Board of Regents} of the {State} public university system, each institution of higher education that receives state funding, and each school, office, and department within each institution of higher education that receives state funding, shall establish a scholarly ethics policy that prohibits discriminatory practices including citational justice, citational diversity, conscientious engagement applied to citation, and any other such practice that manipulates academic citations for political or ideological purposes.
3. The {Board of Regents} of the {State} public university system and each institution of higher education that receives state funding shall enact a policy that any administrator or faculty member found to have engaged in discriminatory practices including citational justice, citational diversity, conscientious engagement applied to citation, and any other such practice that manipulates academic citations for political or ideological purposes, shall have their employment terminated immediately.
4. The Attorney General shall develop, maintain, and post on his or her Internet Web site a current list of professional publications including academic journals, that, after January 1, 20XX, have policies that encourage or require discriminatory practices including citational justice, citational diversity, conscientious engagement applied to citation, and any other such practice that manipulates academic citations for political or ideological purposes.
5. The {Board of Regents} of the {State} public university system and each institution of higher education that receives state funding shall enact a policy that any administrator or faculty member found to have published after January 1, 20XX in a professional publication, including all professional publications catalogued in Subsection 4,that encourages or requires discriminatory practices including citational justice, citational diversity, conscientious engagement applied to citation, and any other such practice that manipulates academic citations for political or ideological purposes, shall have their employment terminated immediately.
6. The {Board of Regents} of the {State} public university system shall establish an Office of Citational Integrity. The Office of Citational Integrity shall be responsible to the {Board of Regents} for executing all responsibilities in Subsection 3 and Subsection 5.
7. If any provision of this chapter, or the application of any provision to any person or circumstance, is held to be invalid, the remainder of this chapter and the application of its provisions to any other person or circumstance shall not be affected thereby.
Section B [“Severability”]
If any provision of this chapter, or the application of any provision to any person or circumstance, is held to be invalid, the remainder of this chapter and the application of its provisions to any other person or circumstance shall not be affected thereby.
The National Association of Scholars, in consultation with other supporters and friends of the Civics Alliance, drafted these model bills to translate into legislative language the principles in the Civics Alliance’s Civics Curriculum Statement & Open Letter. Just as these bills have been drafted with the expectation that different states will modify them as they see fit, they also have been drafted with the expectation that not every supporter of the Civics Alliance will endorse these bills or every part of them. Individual Civics Alliance signatories and supporters should not be assumed to have endorsed these bills, unless they say so explicitly.