🍎your Scholarly Digest 29th May, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the mindful scholar

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Hi Scholar,

Have you given much thought to what will happen to your body after you die? The philosopher Jeremy Bentham (who died almost exactly 192 years ago on June 6th) left explicit instructions for his skeleton to be preserved, dressed in one of his suits and seated in the chair he usually sat in while writing. Even in death he did not want to be taken away from his work: if that’s not a true scholar, we don’t who is. If you’re in London and morbidly curious the auto-icon has been on display at University College London since 1850.

On a separate note, we have a favour to ask. If you really, genuinely enjoy reading the Letters we send, and know of other scholars who would enjoy reading it too, will you send it their way? It would mean the world to us if our work was able to find a broader community of readers like yourself.

So, if you know someone else (we assume you do since you’re likely at an academic institution) who enjoys nerdy things like knowledge, research, and science, then please do share our work with them. You can share it by either forwarding this email or sending them a link to our website) We thank you in advance!

BRAIN FOOD

Curiouser and Curiouser

Curiosity is one of those ingredients so essential to a scholarly life that we hardly ever notice it.

In this regard, curiosity as a component of a scholar’s work is much like rigor. We know it must be present but we do not pay much attention, or look closely, at the nature of our personal curiosity. For this week's Brain Food, which is in a slightly different format than usual, we invite you to consider it.

This mini-essay was inspired by two journal articles (here and here) which theorize on the nature of curiosity. However, we don't intend to discuss the intricate details of these models and critically examine what the authors say curiosity "is". That would require a fuller review of the literature beyond these two articles which we have not done. Instead, these articles offer us a set of questions, a playground, which we can use to take a closer look at what drives our curiosity and the subtle, distinct flavours that constitute its nature in us. The objective dear Scholar, is not to know theories of curiosity but to know thyself.

Early theories of curiosity proposed that information seeking behaviour was driven by a desire to reduce uncertainty and the anxiety that accompanies not knowing. This (rather bleak) theory was advanced by suggesting that curiosity is also a response to boredom and helps maintain an "optimal" level of arousal - a state that falls between boredom and overstimulation. Scholarship building on these initial ideas then proposed a scale for the type of information we seek (sensory novelty vs knowledge) and the way we seek information (focused vs exploratory), recognizing different categories of curiosity in different contexts. More recently, curiosity has been described as an "appetitive behaviour" that is driven by "wanting" (on par with desires such as hunger or thirst).

Following this, knowledge acquisition is the pleasurable reward we "like" to get when satisfying our curiosity.

We are not overly concerned with how "correct" these theories are: it was not the technical details that caught our attention. It was the familiarity of what they describe.

One may stumble across something that piques our curiosity or one may seek to have their curiosity aroused. We are just as likely to be curious for pleasure as to avoid uncertainty. Sometimes the need to know is less pleasure and more compulsion but that does not diminish the desire. Curiosity can feel like play and flow freely, but it may equally be focused on the narrow goal of filling a knowledge gap.

We do not often pay attention to what our curiosity is made of, but perhaps we should. Curiosity is essential to the work a Scholar does, it is possibly even why they work.

The aim of examining the finer textures of your individual curiosity is not to categorize it, but to feel, to notice, how it shapes your scholarly life.

NEWS

Make Academia Great Again (Just Not in the USA)

Universities in Hong Kong have extended full scholarships and unconditional offers to international students studying at Harvard University, as the showdown between the richest university in the world and The White House continues to escalate. 

Last week, Harvard had their right to enrol international students revoked, with existing international students told to transfer to a different university, or risk losing their visa. In response, Harvard filed for a temporary restraining order against the US government which was granted by a judge, allowing enrolment of international students to continue. A hearing is scheduled for later today, May 29th, where Harvard will argue for the restraining order to be extended. 

Harvard is far from the only US university to face pressure from the Trump Administration: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern, University of Pennsylvania and Princeton have all either had funding suspended or threatened. But Harvard is special for two reasons: first, the amount of funding at stake, $9 billion, is larger than the others, and second, Harvard has not complied with the White Houses’ demands. 

27% of Harvard’s student population are foreign students, who usually pay full tuition. For the current academic year that amounts to more than 7,000 students paying nearly $87,000 each - meaning the university could take a $600 million hit. The cost of long term damage done to student confidence in the university, and the USA more broadly, will likely be far higher. 

RESOURCE

Vintage Critical Thinking

Robert Ennis spent his entire career conceptualizing and teaching critical thinking. This week's Resource is one of his earlier works on the subject titled “A Concept of Critical Thinking” where he proposed 12 aspects of critical thinking. 

It’s vintage research (published in 1962), so we’re not sharing it with you so you can memorise the 12 aspects of critical thought according to Ennis. What makes it worth your time is the way Ennis models critical thinking through the examples he uses to clarify each point. Each aspect is illustrated with exercises in critical thinking (trust us, it gave our brains a serious workout). The clarifications (with exercises) start on page 6 of the PDF, but consider reading the whole thing.   

For example, Ennis gives the following statement which has a flaw in its logic. Can you spot the flaw?

No? Give it a read then.

Yes? Clever you. Can you solve the rest?

OPPORTUNITIES

Funded PhDs, Postdocs and Academic Job Openings

• PhD and Postdoc Positions @ Ghent University, Belgium: PhDs: click here / Postdocs: click here

• PhD and Postdoctoral Positions @ Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden: click here

• Postdocs, Research Assistantships and Faculty Positions @ George Washington University, USA: click here

• PhD Positions @ University of Liverpool, UK: click here

KEEPING IT REAL

A Reminder to Talk Nicely About the Giant Plagiarism Machine™

This (obviously) made up email is guaranteed to make you smile if you can spare 2 minutes to read it. First thing to mention is that this email was supposedly sent out to employees in a corporation, so you might be wondering how relevant it is for scholars. Well the CEO made some strong points in favour of talking nicely about the Giant Plagiarism Machine, so we felt it would be wrong to deprive you of them. After all, the Giant Plagiarism Machine is at work even in our scholarly domains. Their point about the profit potential of outsourcing our thinking to the Giant Plagiarism Machine deserves a special mention.

We should should also say that we don’t agree that the machine in question is entirely a Giant Plagiarism Machine if used responsibly (but that doesn’t mean this spoof isn’t funny).

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