🍎your Scholarly Digest 12 February, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the informed scholar

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Image Credits: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

Hey Scholar, here's what we have for you this week:

• PhD, Postdoctoral, and Research Positions 🇬🇧 🇳🇱 🇺🇸 🇸🇪;

• Tools and design principles for artistically challenged scholars;

• Truth and Justice walk into a University;

• A PhD student sits in a really big chair;

plus some extras, because we know you like a well-stocked reading list.

P.S. As promised, The Letter looks a little different this week. More than that, you’re one of just 20 scholars receiving this edition from its new home on the Internet.

We’ll spare you the technical details, but we’re moving to a new platform—and we need a little help from you. If you could hit reply to this email, it’ll make sure The Letter keeps landing in your inbox instead of disappearing into the void.

We know you always read The Letter (and we love you for that). It’s for you that we spend hours each week putting this together. So if you’re up for it, just send us a quick response—even a single word like scholar will do. It would mean the world to us.

Thank you so much for reading.

OPPORTUNITIES

💼Funded PhDs, Postdocs and academic job openings

• Postdoc, Research & Academic Positions @ University of Cambridge, UK: click here

• PhD Positions @ Ultrecht University, Netherlands: click here

• Postdoc Funding @ Harvard University, USA: click here

• PhD Positions @ Lund University, Sweden: click here

  If the idea of making your PhD application is daunting, here's a detailed guide to help you through the entire process👇

RESOURCES

🎨Scientific Figures for The Artistically Challenged 

“A picture is worth a thousand words"—and in scientific communication, that couldn’t be more true. Figures, illustrations, and visualizations don’t just complement your research; they help translate complex, abstract concepts into something clear and approachable for your readers (picture books aren't just for kids). A well-designed figure can often communicate what paragraphs of text cannot. But if you’re one of those scholars who consider themselves artistically challenged, we’ve found this article which breaks down essential design principles and tools to help you create clear, compelling visuals for your research.

📖“If you read books, you should write in them”

As a scholar, there’s no doubt you’re reading books but are you making the most of it? Whether you already annotate books or have never marked a page, it’s worth watching this short video which introduces a simple yet effective annotation method to help you engage more deeply with your reading. It’s easy to follow and might change the way you interact with your texts in less than 2 minutes.  

If you’ve stumbled across a resource that’s been super helpful to you as a scholar, reply to this email and send it to us so we can share it with 3000+ scholars! We don’t believe in gatekeeping around here. 

BRAIN FOOD

🏛️Truth and Justice Walk into a University… 

When you think about the role of the university, what comes to mind? For us, it's a place where knowledge is produced—where we seek to understand ourselves better and share that understanding through education. But when we really thought about it, we realized it doesn’t stop there. Universities also facilitate societal change and transformation, for knowledge must have ‘impact.’

 This question came to mind after watching Professor Jonathan Haidt’s lecture, Two Incompatible Sacred Values in American Universities, where he pits truth-seeking and social justice against each other. He argues that universities must prioritize truth, warning that adopting social justice as a primary value risks losing both, as it tends to privilege one kind of analysis over others and, in doing so, creates inadequate understandings of the world. His argument is compelling—if not for the assumption it rests on: the binary separation between truth and justice. Are they truly separable? Knowledge has always driven social change, and ‘truth’ is never neutral—historically shaped by power structures that privilege certain perspectives. Can we really deny that universities are as much ‘social’ institutions as they are ‘intellectual’? Is the separation between them not artificial? Either way, Haidt’s lecture made us think, and while it’s difficult to disagree with him entirely, we remain unconvinced that truth and justice can—or should—be separated. But what about you? Watch the lecture and let us know. 

🖥️The Living History (& Surprising Diversity) of Computer-Generated Text

A computer and a pencil are not so different from each other: they are tools for working with text. Since LLMs exploded into existence, whether a piece of text is “computer generated” or not has suddenly become very a big deal, especially in the context of research and scholarship. Computers have, however, been generating text in collaboration with human scholars for more than 70 years. This article by Professor Nick Monfort gives a short but absurdly beautiful history of computer generated text; text co-produced by computers and people, it turns out, has a long track record of being original and creative. At this point in time computer generated text is seen by many as a threat to scientific literature, a kind of pollutant that stains our corpus of pure human generated text that came before it. This article reminds us of the potential for computers to be our creative partners, not rivals, and that this human-nonhuman collaboration has been expanding the possibilities of scholarship for decades. 

NEWS

⚠️Cambridge PhD Student’s Work Plagiarised by Thesis Advisor

An internal investigation at Cambridge University found that a senior research fellow plagiarized the work of a doctoral student they were supervising, publishing it in a journal article without giving credit (apologies for linking to the Daily Mail, it was either that or the entire 34 page ruling from the tribunal). The student filed a complaint in 2020 but, frustrated by the slow investigation, left the University and took the case to an employment tribunal, alleging favoritism toward the senior academic due to age and seniority. The tribunal dismissed the age discrimination claim but evidence submitted during the hearing revealed that Cambridge University's internal investigation (which took 4 years to complete) did agree that plagiarism had taken place (see page 15, paragraph 62 of the ruling if you have nothing better to do).

This is also the second time in the last few years a faculty member at the world's 3rd oldest University has plagiarised the work of a student but not resigned. 

🎓So, you wanna be a Professor? 

An analysis of what determines success in academia has found that what a person achieves during their Postdoc is more important than their PhD (and that 41% of Postdocs end up leaving academia). Those who stay are mobile, both intellectually and geographically: they’re more likely to have changed their research topic and moved to a different country than where they did their PhD (and also had a hit paper, but that’s less surprising).  

KEEPING IT REAL

Some may have seen an abnormally big chair, but @phdstudentamanda saw an opportunity.  

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