From Truth to Justice

Who should universities be just towards?

Justice, like liberty and coercion, is a concept which, for the sake of clarity, ought to be confined to the deliberate treatment of men by other men.

-Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty

George Orwell apparently never said that ‘some ideas are so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them’. But the dubious origins of that very widely cited line do not undermine its truth. And there is something about the low-stakes and consequence-free atmosphere of the modern university that makes academia a particularly rich source of batty ideas. I have heard some true humdingers in my time, from scholars at some of the world’s most prestigious institutions: that gay couples who get married should be criticised for perpetuating heteronormativity; that people in Britain should learn the languages of immigrants rather than immigrants learning English; that the very concept of division of labour is ‘problematic’; that children should presumptively be owned by the state; that the criminal law should be abolished entirely; that (a personal favourite in the stupidity stakes) students should all be given exactly the same degree classification on graduation in order to make the job market more equal; and so on.

I recently encountered a fresh addition to this list: what is called ‘citation justice’ (or, in some places, ‘citational justice’), wherein academics are encouraged to remedy the problem of what might be called ‘citation inequality’ between the sexes, races, and so on by simply putting into their scholarly papers and reading lists more references to the work of women and people from what we nowadays are supposed to call ‘the global majority’.

The University of Birmingham’s rationale tells you everything you need to know:

Take a look at the paper you’re writing, or the texts in your reading lists: how many of these authors are men and/or white? How many women or people of colour have you cited? Are those that you are citing only established authors, or have you made space for new and emerging voices? All of these questions will reflect the extent to which you are representing the diversity of thought and authorship in your field.

Academics, you see, make a lot of references in their work to that of other academics, whether through the ‘Vancouver system’ (i.e. footnotes) or through parenthetical referencing (which is, by the way, the tool of Satan); the notion behind ‘citation justice’ is that since referencing is an important means by which academic profiles are raised, it should be used instrumentally towards the end of boosting the reputations of people from groups which are purportedly proportionally underrepresented in the academy (or else ‘new and emerging voices’, which seems implicitly to mean the same thing).

Academics, then, should ‘[use] the power of citations to address the historical and persistent undercitation of certain groups’ - they should when writing a scholarly paper pay due regard to considerations such as ‘raising awareness of and providing proper acknowledgment’ to scholars who are not white or male, in order to contribute to their greater ‘visibility’. Some journals are now introducing optional ‘citation diversity’ statements for authors accordingly, and there are even software programmes which are apparently able to sift through one’s citations to make sure that one is achieving the correct balance between races, sexes, and so forth.

There are so many reasons why this idea is stupid - for all that I am sure the underlying motives of the people involved are pure - that it becomes impossible to list them all. Many of them will in any case be evident to you, since they fly into one’s brain thick and fast with every second one spends thinking about the concept in an objective way. What I want to focus on here, though, is a particular form of stupidity which connects specifically to the concept of ‘justice’ and what it means, because, as we shall see, this gets us to the very heart of all of the problems we encounter in the modern university.