Become a member of Scholar Square, our online digital community where we put our ethos into practice - and get access to all editions of The Scholarly Letter for free.

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to receive weekly letters rooted in curiosity and connection.
 
Know someone who will enjoy The Scholarly Letter? Forward it to them.

All previous editions of The Letter are available on our website.

Online Thumbnail Credits: National Gallery of Art Open Access Collection

Hi Scholar,

Today’s issue may feel a little heavy. Our columns speak about pressure, frustration, the struggles of trying to think, create, and inquire within the current academic system. 

But everything we write comes from a place of hope – and perhaps even optimism for the work we all believe in.

So before you begin, we wanted to share this with you:

Production, producers, and productivity are core neoliberal commitments whose all-consuming effect is the configuration of individuals as economic beings. Far from operating merely as a macro-regime governing states and institutions, neoliberalism has infiltrated the micropractices of everyday life. Within neoliberal higher education, marked by an obsession with measurement, productivity, and atomization, the figure of the academic now resembles what Foucault described as homo economicus.

The academic as homo economicus is committed to producing research that either directly generates revenue or, at the very least, yields measurable outputs of productivity. Their academic freedom is displaced by academic management, such that the only freedom they have available to them is the freedom to reproduce the status quo. Disruption from the homo economicus academic may be tolerated, but only if it can be monetised. Researchers must not only produce knowledge but also market themselves and their work.

Under these conditions, what recourse remains for the academic within the neoliberal university? How might one resist the figure of the homo economicus – the productive, self-optimising researcher?

Ryan Evely Gildersleeve proposes the possibility of becoming academicus otiosus: the lazy academic.

/

Scholar, if you raised your eyebrows at the obscene proposal of laziness as a potential path for resisting the neoliberal university, we wouldn’t be surprised. 

After all, laziness carries largely negative connotations. It is more often than not associated with idleness, leisureliness, and sloth. As Gildersleeve explains, the label has been used to stigmatise members of the working class who rely on social welfare; reinforce deficit narratives about communities of colour in the United States; depict women as less capable; and pathologise the bodies of overweight individuals.

In our contemporary culture of self-improvement, laziness is likewise treated as pejorative. This is because free time is no longer understood as time for doing nothing. Instead, we’ve come to frame it as an opportunity for optimising ourselves – i.e. additional time to contribute to the production of our ‘selves’. Going to the gym, taking extra courses, or pursuing side hustles are all presented as forms of self-improvement aligned with an ethic of constant productivity. Those who choose not to instrumentalise their free time are relegated to the despised category of the lazy.

However, the idea of laziness can also be viewed through a positive lens. Pointing to the example of Black domestic workers in the United States who were unable to participate in organised protest, Gildersleeve notes that they engaged in work avoidance as a strategy of everyday resistance. By slowing their pace, extending tasks, or performing only the minimum required to keep their jobs, they confronted dominant power structures while retaining their employment. In this context, lazy action becomes a form of diagnostic power – a micropolitical disruption that reconfigures relations of domination.

Building on the analysis of lazy practices, Gildersleeve identifies four versions of laziness.

First, political laziness resembles such everyday resistance. Rather than demanding the Right to Work, it asserts the ‘Right to be Lazy’. Centering labour, he argues, carries the risk of reinscribing the very cartographies of servitude from which emancipatory movements have sought to escape. Labour does not necessarily always produce freedom; instead, it can further entrench individuals within the circuits of production and consumption.

Second, practical laziness, informed by Berg and Seeber’s Slow Professor Manifesto, calls for a reorganisation of academic time. The argument is less about finding time as it is about cultivating conditions for timelessness: the experience of losing oneself in thinking, writing, or creating. This challenges the neoliberal fragmentation of time into measurable productivity units (writing one hour a day, protecting a weekly writing slot) and instead emphasises collegiality, community, and a slowing of hyperproductivity.

Third, artistic laziness rejects instrumentality altogether. It has no predetermined aim, outcome, or linear trajectory. Laziness here is

Fourth, philosophical laziness represents a rejection of the neoliberal imperative to measure human value in economic terms. The accelerating demands for publications, grants, and outputs is telling of how thoroughly neoliberalism governs academic time. Drawing on Lazzarato, Gildersleeve argues that subjectivity requires not acceleration but rupture: an idle time that suspends the apparatuses of production and opens space for alternative ways of being.

What, then, do these four versions of laziness make possible for confronting neoliberalism?

Taken together, these four versions of laziness might just make it possible to renew the individual academic’s relationship to time, value, subjectivity, and knowledge. By interrupting the temporal discipline of acceleration, laziness creates moments of suspension. In doing so, it challenges the moral equation between productivity and worth, offering an alternative foundation for academic value itself. In the context of research, laziness opens space for forms of inquiry that are exploratory, non-instrumental, and generative rather than output-driven. 

Altogether, it makes possible the (re)formation of a different kind of academic subject: one which is organised around thinking, becoming, and experimentation.

At its core, neoliberalism persistently forces all research into the same late capitalist, market-shaped box. It flattens research into commodity-delivering enterprise, and transforms researchers into economic producers and simultaneously produced economies. Before one even thinks of doing new and interesting research, the processes and practices of how research is done is presented in streamlined and optimised manuals, leaving little to no room for experimentation, play, and creativity. Adopting lazy action makes possible a micro-politics of refusal: it creates tiny ruptures within everyday academic practice through which alternative intellectual possibilities for inquiry can emerge.

It is in this sense that we urge you, Scholar, to approach laziness as enabling an ethic of lazy inquiry which is capable of resisting the university organised around economic productivity. Moving beyond the compulsion to produce might just allow the development of new research practices, new modes of attention, and new forms of knowledge that cannot easily be captured within neoliberal metrics. 

The question, however, is not so much whether lazy action can thoroughly dismantle the neoliberal regime in academia but rather that lazy actions resist capture altogether precisely because they cannot be commodified by the academic institution. 

In January 2026, a PhD student in China was awarded their doctorate in civil engineering for the creation of reinforced steel blocks that fit together like pieces of Lego. The invention itself is impressive - and already supporting a bridge crossing the Yangtze river - but regular readers will not be surprised to hear that we are less concerned with the invention itself. Rather, our discussion today concerns the circumstances surrounding this doctorate and what they reveal about changing values in scholarship. 

No written thesis was required. This PhD was awarded on the basis of the invention alone.

In the coming years, an increasing number of Chinese doctoral students - for now, only in engineering-adjacent fields - will earn their PhDs through the invention of new products, techniques and equipment. Such students will be jointly supervised by an academic with theoretical expertise (employed by a university) and an engineer with practical experience (employed in industry). This marked shift in China’s educational policy provides us a timely opportunity to engage with the debate of theoretical vs applied research, which appears to be gaining momentum with each passing year.

In his book The Gifts of Athena, Joel Mokyr distinguishes between two types of knowledge: “what” knowledge (scientific insight, theory, explanation) and “how” knowledge (engineering solutions, products, techniques).  

The central argument of the book is that sustained technological progress (i.e. “how” knowledge) requires a solid, expanding, foundation of “what” knowledge. In other words, creating and improving new techniques and products requires an understanding of why they work. This is not to say that theory must always precede practice - the history of science is filled with examples of techniques developed before people knew why they worked. However, in such cases, technological progression could not be sustained. Without an understanding of “what”, the question of “how” becomes increasingly difficult to address. At this point in time, this publication is inclined to agree with Mokyr’s argument that practical advancements alone are not enough to ensure long term technological innovation. 

What then are we to make of this shift in Chinese higher education policy? At first glance, it seems unlikely that a handful of “practical PhDs”, awarded mainly to engineering students, pose a meaningful threat to the strength of our collective “what” knowledge. However, one can’t help but wonder whether such awards - being awarded for technical solutions - should be considered ‘PhDs’ in the first place. 

The concern is not about the value of applied knowledge, which is self-evident. The risk lies in treating contributions to “how” knowledge as interchangeable with contributions to “what” knowledge. Such a shift would gradually tilt support toward technical application and away from fundamental inquiry - anecdotal experience may suggest this is already happening. The gains may be immediate. But over time, the technological progress we now take for granted would begin to falter, as it has at many points in human history.

For this week’s resource, we wanted to share The Para-Academic Handbook: A Toolkit for Making–Learning–Creating–Acting. Para-academics are those who are

With the growing adjunctification of academic labour, the term para-academic has become increasingly relevant for describing those who are not fully inside the university, but neither entirely outside or against it. At the same time, there are scholars who – frustrated by limited opportunities to research, create learning experiences, or even sustain a basic livelihood within the university – are taking matters into their own hands. They are building alternative spaces to do what drew them to academia in the first place: to write, research, learn, think, and create spaces for others to do the same.

We share this book in case you, too, are feeling the frustrations of the academy and are searching for ways to continue doing the work you care about. 

As the editors write:

In 1802 a riot broke out among medical students at Göttingen University in Germany. The source of the (evidently violent) disagreement between the two sides was the validity of a popular physician’s theory of medicine. Modern academics can only dream of inciting such passion in their younger colleagues.

The physician in question was named John Brown, who proposed that all illness - regardless of symptoms - could be attributed to either over-excitement or under-excitement of an individual's nervous system. Brownian medicine attempted to establish and prove fundamental first principles of biology, in much the same way that Isaac Newton’s treatise on classical mechanics had proven laws of physics. The principle of excitability, John Brown believed, was a strong candidate for such a first principle.  

To treat cases of over-stimulation, Brown prescribed treatments such as vegetarian food and watery drinks. For patients whose illness was rooted in under-stimulation, heavily seasoned food, and opium and alcohol (in combination!) were administered. Brownian medicine became extremely popular among the general public, despite the harm it must have obviously caused. Brown was, perhaps unfairly, accused by his contemporaries of having killed more people than the Napoleonic Wars and the French Revolution combined - amounting to roughly six million deaths, many of whom, one can only assume, were diagnosed as suffering from severe under-stimulation.

The curious case of John Brown is an example from the history of science of a technique based on weak fundamental knowledge, a cautionary tale if you wi

The curious case of John Brown is an example from the history of science of a technique based on weak fundamental knowledge; a cautionary tale, if you will, and one that speaks directly to the discussion under the News Analysis column above. When viewed across the distance of a few hundred years, it is also a strangely interesting, and slightly amusing, story.

We care about what you think and would love to hear from you. Hit reply or drop a comment and tell us what you like (or don't) about The Scholarly Letter.