PROF. ELLWANGER: Citational justice endures as anti-woke sentiment grows

Adam Ellwanger is a professor of English at the University of Houston - Downtown. His primary areas of expertise are rhetoric and critical theory. He writes political and cultural commentary for outlets like Human Events, Quillette, American Greatness, The American Conservative, New Discourses, Minding the Campus, and many more.

Over the last year, commentators have noted that the tide seems to be turning against wokeness. Evidence of this trend can be observed in many areas of American life. This holds true even in our universities – where the institutional commitment to radical progressivism is arguably strongest. Reporting from Campus Reform shows that red-state legislatures have found some success in reining in the worst of the woke excesses. But outside states like Texas, Florida, and Idaho, academia remains resolutely devoted to the radical ideologies that metastasized in 2020.

The latest example comes from Boston University, where a researcher recently made public the school library’s invitation to pursue “citational justice.” On X, anthropologist Luke Glowacki posted screenshots of a message from the librarian that invited faculty to take a “citational justice pledge,” vowing to commit to “intentionally uplifting and centering the scholarship of individuals, who because of our systems and the legacy of historical systems, have not been centered in publishing and research. This includes authors who are Black, Indigenous, persons of color, of varied abilities, and part of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.”

The average citizen who isn’t familiar with campus politics could be forgiven for having no idea what this librarian is talking about. “Citational justice” is an idea that has flourished over the last five years or so. Simply put, it asserts that scholars who belong to minority groups are being further oppressed in academic journals because their research gets cited less in new scholarship than it “should” be.

[RELATED: PROF. ELLWANGER: Academic Freedom Alliance wrongly defends student agitators]

Like so many other woke initiatives in academia, this is total nonsense. First and foremost, no scholar is entitled to citation. The advocates for citational justice are well-aware of this: indeed, it is precisely this fact that they hope to change. Whether other scholars cite your research depends on many things. The main determining factor is whether other researchers find your published work useful and relevant to their own inquiry. There are other factors, like which publication your research appeared in, when it was published, and how accessible it is to other scholars.

But one thing that most certainly does not determine whether your work is cited is your personal identity, whether related to your race, sex, sexual orientation, or nation of origin.

Not only that, but there is little to no evidence that minority researchers are being “under-cited” in comparison to their proportion of the faculty, or their numbers in society at large. But even if there was evidence to back up the claim that scholarship produced by minorities is cited less, it is preposterous to suggest that this is due to prejudice, bias, or discrimination.

When researchers submit new articles to a journal for publication consideration, it is exceedingly rare that editors request any demographic information from the author. And in cases where they do, it is undoubtedly to provide minority researchers with an advantage: since 2020, many editors are falling all over themselves to publish scholarship from members of “underrepresented” groups.

[RELATED: University of Memphis shutters DEI offices following state law]

Effectively, the supporters of “citational justice” argue that affirmative action can’t simply be limited to college admissions and faculty hiring – it must extend to helping the beneficiaries of affirmative action advance their careers within the academy. Like so many radical academic policies, the push for “citational justice” is animated by a fetish for equal outcomes and special rights for favored groups. For all of history, the reach of a scholar’s research was determined by purely meritocratic means: if it was good, useful, timely, and original, it would get cited. 

The advocates of “citational justice” hate meritocracy and imagine discrimination as the inevitable reason for any disparate outcomes among groups. In response, they seek to conjure up a new “right” to be cited – not based on the quality of one’s research, but (as usual) upon the basis of a claim to historical victimhood.

Despite recent victories in the news, there is much work left to be done in the fight to reclaim our universities for the causes of sanity and academic excellence.