Albert Einstein is as anodyne an example as possible, since everybody concedes he was a pretty bright guy and came up with a theory of relativity of some significance. But what if it turned out that he was some sort of awful lech, leering at young women at parties and, at least once, being accused of engaging in enthusiastically consensual sex with a woman who, the next day, claimed to have had two glasses of peppermint schnapps and been incapable of consent?

Do we ignore the theory of relativity? Do we accept it, but refuse to give Einstein credit for it? Do we simply ignore his awfulness?

A recent essay in The Chronicle by Nikki Usher, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, posed the question starkly: “Do we still keep citing the scholarship of serial harassers and sexists? Within their institutions, they may finally get the fate due to them (or not). But their citational legacy will live on, sometimes even in the form of the pro-forma citations that reviewers expect to see in a manuscript, and ask for if they don’t.”

Notably, the quote references “serial harassers and sexists.” It doesn’t say scholars convicted of harassment, and there is not, as yet, any crime called “sexism,” even if some people seem to claim to know who the perps are. Usher fears these “awful” people of the moment will get to enjoy a legacy of legitimacy for their scholarly accomplishments that will ignore how much the woke despise them. What’s a sensitive scholar to do?

Brian Leiter responds:

What is a scholar to do?

I propose a simple answer: Insofar as you aim to contribute to scholarship in your discipline, cite work that is relevant regardless of the author’s misdeeds. Otherwise you are not doing scholarship but something else.

Without saying so, Leiter raises the specter of the logical fallacy of ad hominem, the person is awful so therefore her ideas are awful and undeserving of recognition.

The English word “discipline” captures the idea better: Universities should be home to all, and only, disciplines — each one teaching and deploying skills and techniques for acquiring knowledge about their subject matter, whether it involves the collapse of the Roman Empire, the nature of black holes, the meaning of Plato’s Republic, the evolution of language, or the role of “genetic hitchhiking” in evolution.

If your focus is the substance rather than the personality, then what difference does it make whether you approve of the person who contributed the substance to the discourse? But then, how do you register your disapproval of the conduct of scholars? Leiter contends that they should be condemned for their sexism and serial harassment, but not “disappeared” from their discipline.

You should not — under any circumstances — adjust your citation practices to punish scholars for bad behavior. You betray both your discipline and the justification for your academic freedom by excising from your teaching and research the work of authors who have behaved unethically. Universities would, in principle, be justified in disciplining you for scholarly malfeasance, subject to appropriate peer assessment.

So you can, and should, be deemed a scholarly pariah for thinking wrongly, speaking wrongly, perhaps even indulging in something that was not merely common, but entirely acceptable to everyone at the time, but decades or centuries later became unacceptable, even if only for a brief period of time when some untenable radical ideas became popular among the academic class, but you should still be cited.

As Leiter is addressing only the citation side of the equation, I suspect he deliberately glosses over the “serial harasser and sexist” side by offering them up to the gods of feelz.

Of course, sexists and sexual harassers also betrayed their scholarly obligations by their citation practices and by driving their victims from the scholarly discipline. Nazis like Heidegger did even worse.

The problem is that it’s hardly “of course,” and hardly “betrayed their scholarly obligations.” If a scholar failed to conduct himself in accordance with the norms of his society at the time, whether by chivalry or simple gentility, he wouldn’t have been accepted into the Academy. Heidegger aside, as he was an actual Nazi and thus well beyond the realm of “sexism,” what male scholar prior to, say the year 2000 didn’t open a door for a woman or pay for dinner on a date as a matter of course?

Today, much of the conduct that was considered normal and expected of ladies and gentlemen has been recharacterized in light of social norms that have taken hold in academia. This isn’t to say that there weren’t scholars whose conduct, at the time, was considered improper, but there were also scholars whose conduct was considered fully appropriate, even laudable. But that was then. This is now. And since now is the only perspective that seems to matter to the unduly passionate, they are awful.

This presents a problem for the foundation of the other side of the equation, the citation of awful people in pursuit of intellectual honesty. If, at this moment in time, awful people must nonetheless be cited for their scholarly contributions because to not do so would be intellectually dishonest, then can the intellectual dishonesty of condemning them in the absence of conviction, of proof, be tolerated? What about condemning them for conduct that was contextually proper but improper only when one adopts presentism as the measure?

Wilhelm von Humboldt crafted the influential ideal of the modern research university in Germany some 200 years ago. In his vision, the university is a place where all, and only, Wissenschaften — “sciences” — find a home. The German Wissenschaften has no connotation of natural science, unlike its English counterpart. A Wissenschaft is any systematic form of inquiry into nature, history, literature, or society marked by rigorous methods that secure the reliability or truth of its findings.

If Wissenschaften applies to their scholarly works, then why not to the forces of condemnation of the scholars who created those scholarly works? Einstein’s theory of relativity earned its place in the constellation of brilliant ideas. Would Einstein, the man, deserve to be subject to the transitory “truth” of the moment’s vague but trendy sex inquisitors, had he engaged in fully acceptable conduct at the time?

Perhaps it’s too much to expect rigorous thought to be applied to everything we do these days, but wouldn’t just a little thought be warranted before condemning scholars to be pariahs based on the awfulness of the moment? After all, it’s academics holding the torches and pitchforks. Is that too much to expect of them?