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— Written by San Choudhury

Something has been nagging at me as I’ve been thinking about how to fund my own journey as an independent scholar. After finishing my PhD last year, I knew I didn’t want to remain betrothed to academia. I was searching for a kind of freedom to pursue inquiry that, for me at least, the university could no longer provide. Even before I’d finished my PhD, I had already begun drifting towards what I recently described in an essay published in Science Communication as the work of the scholar-creator. Broadly speaking, this is a form of science communication; not necessarily communicating scientific findings on social media platforms, but communicating science itself: how research is done, what the process looks like, and what it means to think like a scholar. 

I certainly hadn't planned on becoming a scholar-creator. Back then, it wasn't uncommon to come across PhD bloggers on various social media platforms. Many people used them as public diaries, documenting the highs and lows of doctoral life. My account began in much the same way, although it perhaps leaned a little more towards creativity from the outset. I'd always enjoyed experimenting with different forms of media – writing, photography, video, music. At first, the account was simply an excuse for my partner and me to spend weekends making something together while documenting my PhD journey. Gradually, however, the content began to head in a different direction. We found ourselves spending less time documenting the PhD experience and more time thinking about how to explain research itself: how to conduct a literature review, how to develop research questions, how to navigate academic writing, what tools might help researchers, and how scholarship actually happens.

Around the same time that I was beginning to create this kind of scholar-creator content – or perhaps just a year earlier – I had also started working as a teaching assistant and later as a lecturer at my university. It wasn't too long before I noticed the parallels between what I was doing inside the university and what I was doing online. In both cases, I was trying to help people learn. For my teaching contract, I designed lectures, prepared slides, planned seminars, developed teaching materials, and spent a lot of time thinking about how best to explain difficult ideas. Outside the university, I found myself doing uncannily similar work. However, instead of lectures, I was creating reels, carousels, stories, writing guides, and educational posts about academic research, graduate school, and the practice of scholarship itself.

There was a difference between the two, of course. But it was less to do with the work itself, than the matter of reach. In many ways, the teaching I was doing on Instagram felt more rewarding than the teaching I was doing inside the lecture hall. I cannot know for sure that it transformed people's lives, but I knew it was reaching people who actively wanted to learn. Every post might have reached thousands of students, researchers, or learners from around the world. By contrast, I often found myself standing in front of relatively empty lecture halls and seminar rooms, hoping to encourage participation from students who, understandably, had many competing demands on their attention.

Over time, I was beginning to wonder whether some of my most meaningful educational work was happening outside the university altogether.

For the longest time, I had believed that becoming an academic was the way to serve the public good. Yet that conviction was slowly being chipped away as I experienced how much more directly I could engage with the public by creating educational content online.

At the university – particularly within publicly funded institutions – we often think of ourselves as public servants. We produce knowledge, teach students, publish research, supervise dissertations, and contribute, however modestly, to society's collective understanding. At least in principle, the work of teaching and research is undertaken for the benefit of the wider public. What increasingly unsettled me, however, was the indirectness of that relationship. Yes, universities receive public funding; students pay tuition fees; governments allocate research funding raised through taxation. The university is undoubtedly connected to the public, but the connection is mediated through a long chain of institutions and intermediaries. Even the students sitting in my classroom represented a relatively privileged group: those able to access higher education and afford, in many cases, substantial tuition fees, or at least the burdens of paying back loans later on. 

The educational work I was doing online felt fundamentally different. Although social media relationships are undeniably shaped by parasocial dynamics, they also felt surprisingly reciprocal. The questions people asked shaped what I wrote about next; comments often became posts; direct messages were turned into videos; followers suggested topics I had never considered discussing. Rather than simply putting information out there in a unidirectional manner, the work was starting to feel like a process of co-creation between myself and the people I was hoping to serve. For the first time, my relationship with "the public" felt genuinely public.

Even as I write this letter about public scholarship, I find myself participating in the very model I am trying to describe. I have written this essay because there are readers who have chosen to support this work, and in doing so have made it possible for me to continue asking these questions.

Dewey argued that the role of expert knowledge is not to govern society independently of the public, but to improve the quality of public discussion. As he writes, "the essential need... is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion." I have increasingly come to feel that this is precisely what I am trying to do. By writing publicly – and, perhaps more importantly, writing directly for a public rather than through institutional intermediaries – I feel able to contribute to that ongoing conversation. The relationship feels immediate: readers respond, they challenge ideas, suggest new questions, and encourage me to pursue lines of inquiry I may otherwise have abandoned. 

What I shall also not fail to mention is the financial relationship underpinning all of this.

The people who read this newsletter are also the people who make it possible for me to write it. They are, in a very real sense, patrons of this scholarship. They support my work not through taxation, university budgets, research councils, or institutional grants, but directly. If the writing is valuable to them, they continue supporting it. If it is not, they simply stop. The more I have reflected on this arrangement, the more I have come to think whether what I am doing is, in some ways, a more direct form of public scholarship than the work I had previously done inside the university.

I suppose this is ultimately what I mean when I talk about public scholarship. It is not simply scholarship that is done for the public or communicated to the public, but scholarship supported by the public themselves. A public that chooses what kinds of ideas it wishes to support, what kinds of questions deserve attention, and what kinds of intellectual work it wants to see continue.

In many ways, this arrangement is not entirely new: it resembles, in important respects, how intellectual work was supported before the rise of the modern university. During the Enlightenment, many authors depended directly upon their readers. One common practice was the subscription model. Before a work was completed, writers would announce a proposed work and invite prospective readers to subscribe in advance. Those subscriptions helped finance the writing itself, with subscribers receiving a copy once the work was published. Intellectual work was therefore financed through a very direct relationship between author and public. Not only did readers simply consume ideas after it had been produced, instead they made their production possible from the very onset. 

This is not to say that this model was without problems. As more authors came to rely upon individual patronage and subscriptions, many grew uneasy about the dependence such arrangements created. If one's livelihood depended upon satisfying readers – or wealthy patrons – there was a sense that it was difficult to claim intellectual independence. The fear was that authors might begin writing not what they believed to be true, but what they believed their audiences wished to hear.

And so, it was against this backdrop that a different, yet perhaps to us, a rather familiar ideal began to emerge. 

Instead of depending directly upon patrons or subscribers, increasing numbers of intellectuals sought positions within academies and state-supported institutions. These appointments promised an ideal that individual patronage could not: a degree of financial security and, at least in principle, intellectual independence. In this manner, authors, writers, thinkers, and intellectuals came to see themselves as servants of the public good. Through their relationship with the state, they imagined themselves as independent representatives of public opinion, working on behalf of society as a whole rather than particular individuals. This transformation helped shape the very model of scholarship that most of us find ourselves in today. Universities came to occupy a privileged position as institutions dedicated to the public good, while scholars increasingly understood themselves as public servants whose teaching and research ultimately benefited society.

But as Enlightenment thinkers themselves gradually realised, dependence upon the state was not entirely free from its own constraints. However independent scholars hoped to become, their proximity to political institutions inevitably raised questions about autonomy, authority, and whose interests scholarship ultimately served. 

Two centuries on, we find ourselves confronting much the same question. 

The model of public scholarship that dominates today remains largely one in which scholars serve the public indirectly through publicly funded universities. Governments collect taxes, universities distribute resources, scholars produce knowledge, and society is expected to benefit. It is a model built upon mediation whereby the relationship between scholar and public remains real, but it is rarely direct.

This brings me back to the work of the scholar-creator. The more I have reflected on my own journey over the past few years, the more I have come to feel that what I am doing bears a striking resemblance to this older model of public patronage. Subscribers, members of communities, and readers choose to support my work directly. In doing so, they make possible the activities that have traditionally been associated with scholarship: researching, writing, teaching, communicating, and creating knowledge for others. It has given me a form of independence that I struggled to find within the university.

That is not to say it is a perfect form of independence. Far from it. I still find myself wondering how people will discover my work, whether anyone will read it, and whether enough people will choose to support it for me to continue. I do not think that dependence has disappeared altogether, only that it has simply taken on a different form.

But I wonder if this ‘reformation’ of dependence is precisely the point. The eighteenth century abandoned direct patronage because it appeared to compromise the independence of the scholar. The university offered an alternative, placing scholars in the service of the public through the mediation of the state. For a long time, this seemed the better arrangement. Today, however, our technological and social infrastructures look very different. The internet has made it possible for scholars to reach readers directly, to build communities around ideas, and to continue their intellectual work through the voluntary support of those who value it. We are no longer confined to the institutional choices available two centuries ago.

Perhaps, then, public scholarship deserves to be thought about differently.

Perhaps also the question should no longer be whether scholarship should be supported by patrons or by the state, but how scholars might cultivate relationships with the public that preserve both intellectual independence and public accountability.

I do not know whether individual patronage is the future of scholarship. Nor do I think it should replace universities, whose contributions to research, teaching, and society remain indispensable. But I do wonder whether, after two centuries of thinking about public scholarship primarily through publicly funded institutions, it may be time to rediscover the possibility of scholarship supported directly by the public it hopes to serve.

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