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Image Credits: National Gallery of Art, Open Access Collection

— Written by Reece Barlow

Passing through academic online spaces one cannot help but get the sense that academia is in crisis. As one drifts through forums on Reddit, Facebook groups, X/Twitter posts, Instagram Reels, or news outlets with an academic beat, the complaints, critiques and hot takes shared there slowly blend together into a clear message: the academia of today is broken, perhaps even dying.

Perhaps, given that critique is an integral part of the job, we should not be surprised that academics so frequently turn their critical gaze to the environment and institutions they work within. Moreover, it is also true that there are, in fact, many practices, norms and systems within academia that are worthy of critique. It feels increasingly impossible to navigate the enormous body of scholarly literature - some of it a little uneven in quality - which, in 2026, is growing at an average of 18,000 articles per day! The reputations of journals are often treated as proxies for the quality of the research they publish and have an outsized effect on decisions made by university hiring committees. An early-career researcher may find their work evaluated by a senior academic whose reputation rests, at least in part, on ideas their paper seeks to challenge. The trajectory of a PhD student's career is likely to be determined as much by the reputation of their supervisor as their own personal merit.

All of these norms, and the frictions they cause, are worthy of examination. Some sit uneasily in a profession which, in its ideal state, should be a dispassionate meritocracy where the fruits of intellectual labor speak for themselves. Consequently, academics do not shy away from calling for the institutions they work within to be reformed, often attributing these problems to the marketisation and commodification of knowledge under neoliberalism and late-stage capitalism. However, none of the problems outlined above, I suspect, threaten the continued existence of academia itself. They may frustrate us, distort incentives, or occasionally reward the wrong people, but they are not signs that academia is collapsing. Readers familiar with previously published work in The Scholarly Letter may be surprised by that statement. After all, I have contributed my fair share of scathing critique against the broken academy within the pages of this newsletter. However, my position has softened somewhat. I no longer believe the experiences outlined above are unique to those who read, think and write within - or alongside - the contemporary academy. In fact, Scholars shared the same pains, the same frustrations and anxieties, long before the academy we so love to hate had fully formed.