On Academic Pain, Pleasure and Strong FOKs

The para-academic works for and with others to sustain the very simple (but somehow now very rebellious) idea that thinking and learning are worthy activities with multiple values beyond the scope of any capital-driven market, and which exceed quantification in economic terms.

June 12, 2025

🍎your Scholarly Digest 12th June, 2025

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Hi Scholar,

In thinking about who we – The Scholarly Letter – are and what we do through this project, we recently stumbled upon a term that feels strangely close to home: para-academic.

The prefix para- means beside, beyond, alongside of. So, the para-academic is someone who stands with the academic but is not quite the same, someone who refuses to be captured by the logics of the corporate university. The para-academic works for and with others to 

“sustain the very simple (but somehow now very rebellious) idea that thinking and learning are worthy activities with multiple values beyond the scope of any capital-driven market, and which exceed quantification in economic terms.”

The Scholarly Letter is still young. And in Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf writes of the advantages of being young: it allows you to build something on your own terms, to resist the old ideals and inherited status quo. That’s where our hope lies – that this project might grow into a space that is beside, alongside, apart from, and beyond the university. A space that can keep asking the questions academia no longer knows how to ask – or no longer dares to.

So we just wanted to take this space, in this week’s Digest, to say: we see The Scholarly Letter as a para-academic organization. One committed not to giving answers, but to asking better questions about what it means to be a scholar, and how we might conduct ourselves in a scholarly manner.

BRAIN FOOD

No Pleasure Without Pain: On Fetishism and Academic Desire

Scholar, we must preface this week's Brain Food by saying that we struggled with how to discuss what follows in a way that would seem "appropriate". The article in question seeks to understand why universities, and the academics and administrators who work in them, are so obsessed with journal ranking lists. The conceptual lens the author employs is that of sexual fetishization. It may seem vulgar at first glance, but there is something accurate, even poetic, about examining academia's obsession with journal ranking lists in this way. Ultimately this article changed the way we see our relationship to the scholarly world - which is what Brain Food is all about. 

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