To be an ethical academic is not merely a matter of citing honestly—though honesty in citation keeps us safe from the charge of plagiarism. Ethical scholarship also requires a commitment to honoring the intellectual traditions that precede us. One cites not only to avoid wrongdoing, but also to recognize that one’s thinking rises from foundations laid by others.
On the opening page of Über Psychoanalyse, Freud writes: “I was not involved at the beginning [of psychoanalysis]. I was still a student and busy preparing for my final examination when a Viennese doctor… Dr. Josef Breuer, first employed this procedure on a girl suffering from hysteria (1880–1882).”
This gesture of acknowledgement is a beautiful thread woven through the history of knowledge. It is a reminder that the core of academic ethics is not technical compliance but a cultivated posture of respect for those who came before us.
In Western literature, this ethic of acknowledgement appears not only in formal academic writing but also in everyday cultural expression. Victor, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, narrates through letters the many debts he owes to people who encouraged his scientific passions. We find similar spirits in the letters of RA Kartini from the same century, filled with her candid gratitude toward the thinkers she regarded as her teachers.
In Indonesia, the tradition closest to the epistolary tone of Shelley or Kartini can be found in collections of essays—those by Mahbub Djunaidi, Goenawan Mohamad, MAW Brouwer, Budi Darma, Agus R. Sarjono, and others. Within academic spaces, however, the relationship between a writer (whether lecturer or student) and the tradition behind them has been reduced primarily to a mechanical obligation: citation. What disappears is the emotional awareness that whispers, “I exist because of the traditions behind me.” Thus, in thesis or dissertation defenses, students often cannot explain who the people they cite actually are. Their sources appear abstract, disembodied—knowledge without human beings.
Is this because narrative acknowledgement is not considered part of academic tradition? It is strange how much we borrow from Western traditions, yet we remain barren of the emotional bond those traditions model.
For years I have asked students, “Who is this author you are citing?” Their answers are typically: “I don’t know, I found it in a journal,” or other formal statements that reveal no curiosity about the human behind the text. Ironically, academic authors have been “killed” by a misreading of the slogan “the author is dead.” The phrase, originally a structuralist ideological doctrine, was never meant to apply universally to all scholarly practices.
Does this mean academic writing must contain biographical narratives of every author cited? Not necessarily. But only when we know who we are citing can our academic breath flow from a place of sincerity—even love. As our proverb teaches: “Tak kenal maka tak sayang”—one cannot cherish what one has not bothered to know.
What exactly should we safeguard from tradition? For me, it is the tradition of integrity. Suppose you read an article and discover that its author—perhaps a highly esteemed professor—was involved in a plagiarism scandal. Would you still feel reverence toward that source? If you turn instead toward authors with unquestionable academic integrity, then you affirm that ethical scholarship is, at heart, a commitment to preserving the tradition of integrity itself.
But if you remain indifferent—if you do not care whose ideas you borrow—then you demonstrate a lack of ethics not only toward others but toward yourself.
Many wrongs in the world, including academic wrongs such as plagiarism, endure because we fail to love ourselves enough to maintain our own standards. One has not yet become an academic if one does not know how to recognize the people behind one’s citations. []
