De minimis non curat lex, and you’d think you wouldn’t need a law to deal with how professors footnote. But you’d be wrong. Footnoting matters, and so do the crazed footnoting practices of activist professors and librarians. A law isn’t the perfect way to deal with this madness—it can’t do everything to stop the “citational justice” movement—but it can help. That’s why the National Association of Scholars (NAS) has just published the Citations Nondiscrimination Act, to give citizens a tool to fend off this fresh hell.

Here’s the problem: 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, prioritizing knowledge creators over the crystallization of the search for truth. The desire for “citational justice” is bound up with the assumption that citational power determines the categories of knowledge and, consequently, the effects of its imposition. Citation in this scheme is only a tool for the pursuit of power.

But citations matter for real scholarship. 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.

Citations don’t eliminate scholarly competition, which acts as a spur to the search for truth. Rather, footnotes integrate intellectual rivalry 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 have also become a leading measure of academic value and, hence, of hiring, tenure, promotion, and all the worldly goods of academics. Eugene Garfield made this state of affairs possible 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 the “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.

There’s a real pay-off for getting your footnotes cited—and that’s a big reason the “citational justice” grifters are at work. There are real costs to the genuine scholars, they un-person—to speak nothing of their betrayal of academic ethics. You can find a professional discussion on the web about citation manipulation—”Citation manipulation is when references are used to artificially inflate the impact of an individual, research institute, journal, or subject. Citation manipulation distorts the scholarly record, misleads readers, and undermines trust in research.” One of the participants asked, “How can we distinguish between ‘citational justice’ and citation manipulation?” Of course, you can’t. “Citational justice” is citation manipulation with identity-politics word salad wrapped around it.

And the “citation justice” movement is a real and spreading problem. No end of university libraries and librarians are now affirming “citational justice” as a principle to follow. We cannot tell how many journals informally require it, and how many professors practice it, but all the professors pushing for it must practice what they preach. Something needs to be done.

The NAS’s model takes a first step by barring administrators and faculty from engaging in the discriminatory practice of “citational justice.” The Act requires each public university to adopt an ethics policy explicitly prohibiting such practices, forbids administrators and professors from publishing in journals that promote or mandate them, and establishes dismissal as the penalty for violations. It also directs the Board of Regents to create an Office of Citational Integrity to enforce the Act.

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.

We have made the sanction for engaging in this discriminatory practice simple and severe precisely because footnoting is so complex and individualized. 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.

We’re from the Footnote Police, and you’re under arrest!—It sounds ridiculous. But we face mad activists—by the tens of thousands—pretending to be professors, librarians, and journal editors. They make a mockery of scholarship and of our universities. We don’t need to put the Citation Justice Gang into San Quentin. But if they’re caught red-handed, they shouldn’t be allowed to teach in our public universities.

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