The brazen “equity” movement insists that we focus on groups rather than individuals and that groups (especially those deemed to be “marginalized”) must be treated fairly. Thus, we have strident demands for more admission of minority students and the hiring of more minority faculty. Filling quotas — not seeking out quality — is the paramount concern.
In today’s Martin Center article, David Randall of the National Association of Scholars writes about another way “equity” is undermining standards, namely “citational justice.”
He begins, “The latest fresh hell is citational justice. Which is quotas for footnotes. Now we’re supposed to track the group identity of the authors we cite and make sure there are lots of blacks, women, and People from the Global South among them. There are already articles, workshops, library guides, and position statements on the subject. There isn’t yet an Office of Citational Justice, but a professional bureaucracy will doubtless soon supplement the mandated do-it-yourself efforts.”
So, if you are writing an academic article about some aspect of economics and want to avoid trouble with the citational-justice crowd, you need to be sure to cite plenty of writers from those target groups. If you don’t, you may not get your work published. What if there aren’t “enough” such people to cite who have anything to contribute to your argument? Then, write something else.
Randall nails the truth here:
Citation is an imperfect proxy for quality, and it has created a permanent incentive for scholars to game the system by maximizing their citations. Nevertheless, it has become a basic measure, since the impersonal and quantifiable is easier to apply and justify than any qualitative assessment of merit. The citational justice advocates are certainly correct that citations have become the royal road to success in academia. The argument that any individual deserves this good because of identity group membership is as specious here as anywhere else, but the Woke grifters know their own interests.
Yes indeed — the academic world is being overrun by grifters.
Solution? Randall argues in favor of separating research from teaching. The great majority of academic research is mere page-filling for the sake of getting published, so let’s pay faculty to teach and let organizations that want to research things pay for research they find beneficial.