Way back when the first independence referendum was just a twinkle in Alex Salmond's eye, one of The Herald's editors asked me to get my head around Quebec. How, he asked, did the province - or rather "the nation within Canada" - fare after two big votes on its constitution?

So I did what we reporters do when we we are lost: I asked a colleague in Montreal who I needed to call to get up to speed. "Do you want sovereigntist experts or federalist ones?" he asked, using the Quebec terms for those for and against the nation's independence. "Just 'expert' experts," I replied. "We don't have any of those," he laughed.

More than a quarter of a century after the last of two referendums, Quebeckers, even the clever ones at universities, remain pretty divided on partisan lines.

As Scotland heads for a potential second big vote, we should have a bit of a think about what we expect from our academics and how want them to behave. Why? Because brainy people, social media has revealed, are just as prone to spittle-spraying referendum-related tribalism as the rest of us.

Former Tory minister Michael Gove during last year's Brexit campaign said people had "had enough of experts". Me? I have had enough of experts being angry weirdos on Twitter, Facebook and blogs.

Michael Gove

I have taken to thinking of these often zealous academic hyper-partisans as "the nutty professors". Their common denominator: a reckless disregard for the kind of evidence-based rational thinking we all tend to associated with what we newspaper people tend to call "boffins".

A few of these unhappy souls have made it in to the newspapers. Some may be vulnerable - an academic is as capable as anyone else of showing signs of instability online. So I don't think it would be fair to name check them in the press again. However, I do feel the need to point out that the "nutty professors" are on both sides of the Scottish constitutional divide.

But we should universities do about this? They can have no problem, after all, with academic freedom of expression. And there is nothing wrong with researchers or teachers having views. Back in 2014 there were Academics for Yes and Academics Together. And they both played a not unimportant role in the debate.

The people whose job it is to defend the reputations of Scottish higher learning happily admit - off the record, of course - to monitoring the social media output and public pronouncements of their staff.

Journalists also have an issue here too. Do we discount the views of an expert just because they are - or have been - angrily partisan, perhaps online. Scotland now - thanks to the Centre on Constitutional Change or CCC at Edinburgh - has real intellectual backbone to its debates on independence, devolution and Brexit. Each side, unionists and nationalists, will claim it has the best experts. But even the CCC cannot have all the answers. Because nobody does. I am no PR man. But I have one bit of advice for academics when they venture in to public debates: sure, be partisan, but try not to look too thick doing so.