I have a stack of books hidden beside a bookshelf, neatly stacked, out of sight, hopefully out of mind. They are my “bad men” books, a growing pile, filled with authors like Daniel Handler, Junot Diaz, and Sherman Alexie. Men accused of assaulting or abusing women in some way. Books I’ve owned for years, written by “bad men” that I haven’t yet been able to part with. Then there are academics that I am confused by, like Judith Butler and Joan Scott, who signed a letter in support of Avital Ronell. I haven’t hidden those books, but I am still considering where they belong, if they belong on my shelf, in my head, in my heart. Some books were easy and went right into the donation pile, along with my Chuck Bass poster. But these hurt, not because I couldn’t believe the brave women and men who came forward, but because it means that my reading and writing and thinking was intimately shaped by people who have abused and assaulted women. Who have defended abuses of power, if nothing else. But what are we, as scholars and readers and lovers of learning, to do when influential authors and actors are discredited?
I’m not here to defend these men (and sometimes women) or argue that their art or academic work speaks on it’s own. I find Brian Leiter’s recent argument in the Chronicle, that you cannot be a serious and responsible scholar, without engaging with the work of bad people jarring and untrue. How many women of color, working class people, and people of “lesser” pedigree are skipped over in favor of citing those familiar and elite? I cannot separate art from the artist, academic work from the academic, writing from the acts done in the name of its creation. Some of these books, Oscar Wao and Part Time Indian and A Series of Unfortunate Events, were foundational to my own writing and my own thinking. I read them as an adolescent, the time when, more than any other time, the books we read fuse into our consciousness. I’ve cited and worked with the academic books of known aggressors, books that have helped frame my own thesis. And the work of Butler and Scott are integral to my continuing intellectual development.
I loved some of these books and though I cannot measure their influence, I know that I cannot delete their impact from my brain. I can donate the books, or burn them, but that wouldn’t mean the words haven’t shaped me. Though I have never loved academic books in the way that I loved Oscar Wao and Part Time Indian, the intellectual influence of people accused of sexual assault or other misuses of power is clear in my academic writing and thinking. I can take out obvious references and quotes, but I can’t get them out of my brain, I can’t exorcise these demons, no matter how much I want to. It’s even fuzzier when there was no such event, just a signature on a letter or a brief comment of support by someone I respect and have learned from.
I don’t want the words of men who were violent or sexist inscribed inside of my head, informing my writing, even now, as I seek to expel them. I cannot erase the ways in which they shaped my interest in memoir, in voice, in race and class and language and the power of young adult literature. I cannot change that my conceptions of history and academia and theory were shaped by powerful academics who sometimes abuse their power. So I banish them to a corner, erase them from my footnotes, at once acknowledging the ways in which they shaped me and protesting it. What else can I do?
There is power in citation, and in who we choose not to cite. But we cannot choose to unread.
15 Thoughts on this Post
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Thanks for this post, Holly. That last line is everything.
I’m not an academic, though I have a PhD. (I have occasionally, depending on the social context and setting, answered the question “what do you do?” with the sentence “I’m a failed academic.”)
With that as preface, I respectfully disagree with the notion that citation practices should be adjusted to take into account scholars’ or writers’ personal characters and/or actions. Although I would not couch the argument in exactly the terms Leiter does in his Chronicle piece, I think he comes down in the right place on this issue.
Just as, to quote the OP, “we cannot choose to unread,” I think we should not choose to ignore something we otherwise would have cited because the author has been accused of, or has admitted to, misconduct. I think, to mix a couple of hackneyed expressions, that that’s a slippery slope into a rabbit hole and once you start on it, I’m afraid of where it might lead.
Now this is a different question from whether existing citation practices in a particular field are too narrow and ignore relevant scholarship. I’ve seen some discussion of evidence, for instance, that articles in international-relations journals under-cite relevant scholarship by female authors. That’s a problem whose solution probably involves broadening the overall scope of citation, but occasionally it might involve citing a relatively ignored woman author for a point instead of a frequently cited male one, not in the name of some factitious balance but to bring unjustly neglected or ignored scholarship into more prominence.
But I don’t think one should stop citing X simply because X is or was not a good person in some important respect(s). Reasonable people of course can disagree on this, and I respect Holly Genovese’s different view.
I guess for me it just seems like personal character is connected to scholarship, right? And isn’t citation a form of condoning the work of a scholar? I don’t my work shaped by those who have done bad things, honestly.
“…isn’t citation a form of condoning the work of a scholar?”
I suppose it can be when one is agreeing with the cited work, but sometimes one cites in another context, either neutrally or to disagree. For instance, suppose one is arguing that the “consensus school” of mid-20th century U.S. historians was wrong about x, y, or z. And suppose, hypothetically, that a major representative of that school had been accused of some personal misconduct. Since you’re citing to disagree anyway, I don’t see why you would avoid citing a particular work by the person in question, unless the very appearance of the name in the footnote or endnote somehow seems to you to convey approval — which in my opinion it doesn’t, not necessarily. I guess I don’t see citation mainly or always as a matter of signaling approval, either of the work or the author. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.
I’m certainly willing to grant the general point that life and thought are connected at some level. Whether, and the degree to which, the work (its assumptions, arguments, and so on) gets infected, so to speak, by the personal transgressions may vary from case to case. In Fliegelman’s case (I did read the widely circulated piece by one of his former students) I could definitely understand not wanting to cite him (I have not read his work). But I would think a case-by-case approach makes more sense than a blanket “rule.”
I think I commented about this somewhere when the Jay Fliegelman case was being widely discussed. To continue to cite Fliegelman because of his “insights” is to assume that his insights were not in any way shaped by his character as an academic — by his predatory behavior, by his bullying, by his apparent ethos of becoming fascinated by and then seeking to quash junior women scholars’ brilliance. If Jay Fliegelman’s thought is in fact so foundational to scholars of the Revolutionary period or of the Early Republic that he must be cited, perhaps what needs to happen instead is a re-examination of the axiomatic assumptions of scholarship during that period. (Spoiler alert: Fliegelman is not all that.)
What if we stop pretending or assuming that “the scholar” successfully sets aside everything about his personality, his character, his biases, his preferences, his prejudices, and instead begin to consider the necessarily intimate relationship between life and thought? What if instead of assuming that the scholar and “the work” are separate, we begin with the assumption that the one will inevitably be shaped by, bear, and promulgate the failings (or the virtues) of the other, by commission or omission.
That would make our citation practices a lot less automatic, turning them from a “purely” intellectual into an ethical practice.
God forbid that academe should bother itself with ethics. What would happen to the careers of the bullies then?
Ask me if I give a damn.
Afterthought: there’s the further complication or consideration that the bad personal behavior of some scholars likely will never be revealed or made public, and those scholars presumably would continue to be cited, while the work of those scholars whose bad behavior is known would not be cited. Which seems perhaps a little strange, for lack of a better word.
Anyway, I take the failure, so far, of working historians, except for L.D., to comment on this post to indicate that (1) they agree with the approach suggested or (2) they don’t care much one way or the other, or (3) they are too busy finishing conference papers, grading midterms, etc., or (4) they aren’t reading this blog. Or some combination of the above.
Louis, I think it’s mostly 3 and 4, along with something you haven’t mentioned — a distaste for the fact that such a conversation is even happening. There’s a backchannel, always, and there’s always someone huffing and grumbling about something going on at the blog — sometimes grumbling along with the flow of the conversation, sometimes grumbling against it. I think the last time a conversation similar to this unfolded, it broke the record for comments on a thread. (Though, to be fair, Jesse Lemisch — God rest his soul — was involved, so the style of conversation became very pugilistic very quickly.) But my surmise is that there’s a bit of handwringing among the eminences grises (and some not so grise) at “the direction the discipline is going if this approach becomes the standard,” or some such notion. “Political correctness comes to intellectual history,” etc, etc, etc. To which I would say, “Fellas, relax. Seriously.”
Besides, those of us who are long-timers here at the blog have staked our positions on this issue before — though, as you may have noticed, mine has changed somewhat.
But note — nobody is suggesting people shouldn’t cite arguments that cut against the grain of where we stand as ethical human beings. There are all kinds of arguments that must be dealt with. But it’s generally possible to find more than one person’s work advancing a general position or holding a particular idea as central. So, when we have a choice, why cite the work of the known predatory creep when we can cite someone else?
And there’s always the option of the illuminating footnote. The little author bio at the end of Brian Leiter’s Chronicle piece reads thusly: Brian Leiter is a professor of jurisprudence and director of the Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values at the University of Chicago.. Well, that’s nice. What it didn’t include, but what is absolutely relevant to the argument that Letter is making, is that Leiter was pretty much forced to step down from his philosophy department ratings site/system because of repeated instances of bullying and abusive behavior directed at graduate students and junior scholars in the discipline, particularly women. So Leiter’s piece wasn’t some view-from-nowhere or view-from-a-distance discussion of a “troubling trend” in scholarship that he was able to observe with something like objectivity — it was a polemic against the kind of censure he himself has rightly experienced.
So, if I needed to cite Leiter’s piece, or some of the asinine statements he issued to defend it on Twitter, where he accused anyone who disagreed with him of confessing to scholarly malpractice, I’d make sure my footnote included the relevant information missing from that Chronicle bio.
Fantastic point, L.D.
Another solution: If the citation of an accused/guilty eminent scholar feels necessary or unavoidable, append the footnote with the caveat:
“[So-and-so] is a known, verified harasser. This may have affected or structured their argument, or the popularity of that argument, as follows …[in such-and-such fashion].”
This has the beauty of outing the offender and displaying one’s effort to make an argument about relevance. – TL
Well I will jump in, but what I would contribute has already been stated beautifully by Holly and L.D. I might add that this issue of giving up on the notion of “the scholar” as separate from their work has more added benefits than simply empowering bullies and abusers — it also makes thinkable the possibility of an academic community not tainted by bullshit and dishonesty, and one where the ethical responsibilities of those who purport to be on the side of the oppressed do not begin and end with their written work, but include — and in fact value just as much — the ways they express their solidarity in everyday life and real-time political struggles.
I want to be clear that I am not imagining a community without conflict. On the contrary, I think a lot of our problems are caused by not facing conflict out in the open. But I am talking about a community that takes its values seriously, and says, “we can do better.”
er, I meant dis-empowering bullies and abusers, obviously.
Readers,
This morning I received an email from Brian Leiter, mentioned in my comment above. I am copying/pasting the email in full below, with active hyperlinks.
-LDB
——————————-
Dear Prof. Burnett,
A reader of your blog and mine alerted me to the following comment you posted regarding the by-line on my recent CHE piece:
https://s-usih.org/2018/10/metoo-and-the-politics-of-citation/#comment-52456
“What it didn’t include, but what is absolutely relevant to the argument that Letter is making, is that Leiter was pretty much forced to step down from his philosophy department ratings site/system because of repeated instances of bullying and abusive behavior directed at graduate students and junior scholars in the discipline, particularly women. So Leiter’s piece wasn’t some view-from-nowhere or view-from-a-distance discussion of a “troubling trend” in scholarship that he was able to observe with something like objectivity — it was a polemic against the kind of censure he himself has rightly experienced.”
This is false. The petition aimed at getting me to step down from the 2014-15 philosophy ranking—from which I did not step down—concerned my response to being attacked by Carrie Jenkins, a full professor and Canada Research Chair holder, at the University of British Columbia. There were no allegations concerning junior faculty or graduate students. If you want to be informed about what transpired—including Jenkins’s harassment of me–you might start here and following the various links:
https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2017/12/what-really-happened-three-years-ago-fall-2014-a-recap.html
I trust you will remove this false statement of fact promptly. And perhaps you might just engage with the substance of my argument, rather than resort to an outrageous ad hominem attack based on false information.
Very truly yours,
Brian Leiter
Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence
Director, Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values
University of Chicago
1111 E. 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Phone: (773) 702-0953
Fax: (773) 702-0730
Homepage: http://www.brianleiter.net
Here’s a different view of the issue in question from Daily Nous.
Leiter to Step Down from PGR / The New Consensus
Paragraph five of this post lists a number of female junior scholars harassed by Leiter, and the post explains that Leiter also abused a more senior woman scholar who objected to this sort of behavior in the discipline of philosophy. The post details the process by which Leiter stepped down from editing his rankings report. Lots of inside baseball, but for those who missed the drama the first time around, there’s your handy explainer.
Also, shoutout to our loyal reader for this handy real-life illustration of how the backchannel works. Glad to buy you a drink at the conference!
I’m reminded of the long-running battle in Japanese history – heavily marxist for generations – between the more radical Rono-ha who believed that workers’ revolution was possible and the less radical Koza-ha (“ha” means ‘faction’, literally ‘wing’) who believed that a bourgeois democratic revolution needed to happen first, in which the factions so rarely cited each other it was like two separate historiographies (though they were frequently actively critiquing each other’s conclusions, in a form of academic subtweeting).
This goes on all the time: cliques and cadres in all fields form semi-closed citation ecosystems based on academic lineages, interests, or hierarchies.
Citations are not automatic nor is there some sort of “right to be cited” that, once earned, never fades away.
Thanks for this excellent post, Holly.
I’ve just been writing a review of a new book by Peter Stearns on the history of shame, and your post brought it to mind. One thing Peter points out is that we should look at the present moment as a resurgence of interest in using shame as a mechanism of social regulation. I think Peter and I probably disagree about whether that’s a good thing (he’s more pessimistic about it than I am), but his basic point is, I think, pretty interesting. One way to look at this citation debate is as a question of shame, or of social policing more generally. Many of these writers have done things that aren’t crimes and probably shouldn’t be crimes, but that also shouldn’t be tolerated in academia. Citation boycotts are potentially a way to enforce new professional norms through social opprobrium, in situations where criminal charges aren’t possible or wouldn’t make sense.
I’m on record as having called previously for social boycotting of faculty with a history of odious professional behavior — not inviting them to conferences or to serve on panels, not including them in edited collections, etc. I’m a bit more on the fence when it comes to citations, in part because I think, in some cases, bad people can still do useful work that helps others (even though we should be aware that their problematic attitudes will probably seep into their work). But it’s certainly a thought-provoking argument, and one worthy of consideration; I really don’t know how I feel about it, but I can certainly support individual scholars making their own choices.