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It has recently come to my attention that a renowned scholar in my field whose academic journals have been highly influential in my area of research has recently been charged with child pornography. Is it possible to separate the scholar from their work? And will my thesis research, in turn, be judged for referencing the work?

smci
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Brittany DeMone
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5 Answers5

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Of course it is appropriate. Why not? They did relevant work, so you have to cite them. With citing, you do your duty -- you are in no way saying you "like" the cited persons.

Of course, I am assuming that their research is sound and is not somehow influenced by the child pornography. It was a different case if there were problems with the research.

On the other hand, not citing them could get you into big (or small) trouble.

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I think that in almost every field you can separate the work from the person who did it. Many people in the history of science and mathematics, at least, have turned out to have "feet of clay." You aren't tainted because you use someone's work.

The only exception I can think of is if the charge of misconduct is somehow related to the research - unlikely.

The Unabomber was a prize-winning mathematician before he turned evil. His mathematical work doesn't disappear from history.

Buffy
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I agree completely with guest2's answer. I'll add this: The author has only been charged. He/She hasn't been convicted.

Presumption of innocence - i.e. the idea that people are innocent until proven guilty - is one of the most sacred principles of the criminal justice system. Even if someone disapproves of you citing a child pornographer, they can't really fault you for doing so before the author is convicted.

Allure
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  • While this is a good point (and it's important to point out that it is not the OP's role to act as a judge), note that the original question said they were "arrested" and somebody different then the OP changed this to "charged". –  Feb 17 '19 at 08:03
  • @guest2 "Arrested" isn't "convicted" either, too. – Allure Feb 17 '19 at 11:20
  • Isn't "proven guilty in the eyes of the law" a prerequisite for "being arrested" in most countries? –  Feb 17 '19 at 15:18
  • @guest2 no, you can be arrested without being charged, let alone found guilty - see e.g. https://www.legalmomentum.org/sites/default/files/reports/answeringcrquestions.pdf question 1. – Allure Feb 17 '19 at 21:07
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    maybe you're thinking of "probable cause", which I believe in the US is a requirement both for being arrested and for being charged with a crime. – A Simple Algorithm Feb 18 '19 at 00:25
  • Okay ,sorry! I thought "arrested" would mean "being in prison after a trial". Not a native English speaker. –  Feb 18 '19 at 15:51
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To add another perspective to this, you even knowing of this author’s (alleged) crimes is a great coincidence:

  • A considerable amount of criminals is never caught. In particular for ownership of child pornography, I would expect the dark figures to be so high that I have likely cited somebody guilty of it.

  • In many countries, e.g., Germany, privacy laws or at least codices of press, police, etc. forbid publishing the name of a criminal for protection of their rights, allowing rehabilitation, etc. Names are usually made public only if the person in question is in public spotlight anyway (e.g., in this case of a member of parliament) or the case itself is of extraordinary public or historic interest (such as this one, and even there, it took a while). So, you probably only know about the crimes of the author in question because they were in a country with another attitude to privacy, were considered in the public spotlight anyway, or information leaked out somehow.

  • You either had to investigate this author or this was a widely available knowledge in your field, which is also something you cannot assume to happen in every case – at least I do not investigate whether there is some public criminal track record of every person I cite.

So, what makes that specific author different from authors whose crimes you never get to know?

And even if we presume that something is different, what should the scientific community do about it? Reiterate the author’s entire work and publish it again, so it can be cited? Is every convicted criminal’s work free game for plagiarism? (This becomes particularly absurd in fields like pure math, where a paper can be fully self-contained.)

The only exception from all of this I can see is if the author’s research can be expected to be biased due to pedophilia. But then it’s upon the scientific community or the respective journals to judge this and retract or annotate the respective publications.

Wrzlprmft
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Others calling this an "ad hominem fallacy" or saying you must "separate the scholar from their work" are wrong. In a system where citation is the currency that fuels careers, you can't separate them; any resolution of this dilemma must acknowledge and attempt to mitigate the fact that the author cited does usually benefit from citations. This is particularly true in cases where the author is still alive and still has a career, but in the case of hateful ideologies (e.g. Nazi works), there is also the aspect of citation benefiting the ideology that lives on past the author.

Now, how do you do that? It's hard, and academia doesn't have good solutions right now. Fixing the whole academic publishing system and citation economy is related, but not really something you can wait on. From an academic integrity standpoing, you do have an obligation to accurately cite work you used, were influenced by, or built on. But if this person is a "renowned scholar" and "highly influential" in his area of research, there's also a good chance that he's going to get off with a slap on the wrist, partly due to the justice system and academic community considering him "too big to fail" or considering the "value of his work" too important to jeopardize by ostracizing him.

Sadly, I don't have any good answers for how to fix this or even avoid being complicit in it. But I do think it's worth saying that the people who are telling you it's not an issue are morally bankrupt.

On a related note, the Unabomber was once cited with a footnote "Better known for other work."

R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE
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    Sorry, but THE ACADEMIC COMMUNITY IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE IDIOTIC CITATION-AS-CURRENCY SITUATION (if anything, we are working hard to fix it), so there is no reason why we should throw our backs out just to work around it. RTs are not endorsements; citations are not applause. – darij grinberg Feb 16 '19 at 16:28
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    You might want to add to your answer WHY exactly people calling this „ad hominem“ are wrong, and WHY one can not (in opposite to: should not) separate scholar and work. – jvb Feb 16 '19 at 16:33
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    "But I do think it's worth saying that the people who are telling you it's not an issue are morally bankrupt."

    Disagreeing with you on moral issues doesn't mean other people are morally bankrupt, and it is a bad idea to jump from a disagreement on a moral or ethical issue to making such conclusions about a lack of morality in others.

     – JoshuaZ Feb 16 '19 at 16:49
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    @darijgrinberg: You don't get to decide if they're endorsements or applause; the system/the market does, and it's decided that they are. – R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE Feb 16 '19 at 16:55
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    @JoshuaZ: Telling someone who's conscience is telling them there is a real moral dilemma here that it's not real and they can just ignore it is what I call "moral bankruptcy". Whether or what you should do about it is a valid question, but dismissing the OP's concern is not. – R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE Feb 16 '19 at 17:21
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    @R..: You don't get to decide if someone is morally bankrupt either :P – darij grinberg Feb 16 '19 at 17:32
  • @R.. First of all, none of the replies asserted that it isn't "real" - they made specific arguments about why it shouldn't be a concern. Second, if someone does have a moral concern and one doesn't think it is substantial, are you arguing that one shouldn't tell them that when they are specifically asking about what is or not appropriate? – JoshuaZ Feb 16 '19 at 18:48
  • Re "in the case of hateful ideologies", hateful to whom? There are all sorts of ideologies I personally dislike, from communism to fundamentalist religion to sports fandom. Should my opinion of these relieve me of the obligation to cite relevant work? – jamesqf Feb 16 '19 at 18:49
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    @darijgrinberg I'd love to know exactly how the academic community is not responsible for citations being highly valued within the academic community. – Elizabeth Henning Feb 16 '19 at 19:57
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    @ElizabethHenning: Administration and administrative pressure, as well as publishers' pushing of citation-based ratings is. You may count them into the academic community, in which case we are misreading each other's language. – darij grinberg Feb 16 '19 at 19:59
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    @darijgrinberg So you're saying that citations play no part in your own evaluation of someone's work? Or how strong they are as a job candidate? – Elizabeth Henning Feb 16 '19 at 20:01
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    I have not had the occasion to evaluate job candidates, but citations of their papers would not play a significant part in my evaluation on their work. The only cases where I see them possibly be useful is when you are evaluating someone outside of your subfield; however your vote doesn't count for much in that cases (I would recluse myself from mathematically evaluating an analyst, for example). Personal qualities, as far as anything is known about them, figure separately in an evaluation; there is little chance that a proven(!) child abuser (the OP isn't great at distinguishing arrest ... – darij grinberg Feb 16 '19 at 20:20
  • ... from conviction) would get through a hiring process at a job that involves teaching anyway. – darij grinberg Feb 16 '19 at 20:20
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    "Currency" is only useful if you're allowed to open a bank account. And no, citing Bieberbach for his work in complex analysis and citing Kneser for his development of normal surface theory do not give credence or support to their virulent anti-Semitism. – JeffE Feb 16 '19 at 20:23
  • In mathematics, are we supposed to completely abandon the study of the dynamics of complex variables, because anything we do in that field would be building on the work of Ludwig Bieberbach, who was a virulently anti-semitic Nazi? Of course not. Hopefully, the academic system or the courts will punish the offending scientist, while his work remains available to future science. – Peter Shor Feb 17 '19 at 12:42
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    @PeterShor: No, and I told readers I don't have any good answer for how to fix it. My answer is that there is a real moral issue here, one of what is morally appropriate, and that we as individuals and communities should be seeking ways to mitigate the harm of giving prestige and attention to individuals (and in some cases ideologies) who will use that to harm others and escape consequences for that harm. – R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE Feb 17 '19 at 14:37
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    @JeffE The present situation doesn't involve dead Nazis, it involves someone who has very recently been charged with a repulsive crime. And the issue isn't endorsement of child pornography, it's not wanting to treat a child pornographer as a colleague. A lot of the point of #metoostem is stop looking the other way when scumbags do "good work" and consider how much other damage they might be doing. – Elizabeth Henning Feb 18 '19 at 02:53
  • @ElizabethHenning I agree. I have been meaning to write an answer here including something about the differences it makes when the person is still an active academic, but I have not been able to formulate anything properly. I still agree with the general answers though that one cannot avoid citing the person, when it comes to providing an accurate account of where ideas originated. But for example the possibility of meeting this person at a conference is something that might require preparation. – Tobias Kildetoft Feb 18 '19 at 07:40
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    I think it's worth having a conversation about whether academic citation protocols should evolve to admit citing that an idea was known from past work by others, without citing the particular work or authors, when the authors of the paper making the citation have consciously chosen not to do so. A community where you have to accept and credit people who have done and continue to do awful things is inherently toxic and exclusive of people who can't do so either because of their conscience or their own need for personal safety (including against reliving similar trauma) from such people. – R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE Feb 18 '19 at 22:49
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    @ElizabethHenning The answer explicitly referenced Nazis. And of course we don't want child pornographers as colleagues; that's why we fire them and throw them in prison. (Hence my comment about bank accounts.) Not citing their work is not just an inappropriate response because it distorts history, but because it's insufficient. – JeffE Feb 20 '19 at 11:55