On Living For Scholarship

Your Scholarly Digest 13th November, 2025

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.

Hi Scholar,

There was something in the air in November 2004. Two of what are now among the world's most popular literature search tools were launched: Scopus on the 10th of November and Google Scholar on the 20th. The launch of these products was an inflection point in how researchers accessed information: there is a good chance that most of you reading this have only ever known a scholarship enabled by the world’s “information at your fingertips”. 

A week before Scopus was released, a press release from Library Technology Guides featured a quote from Elsevier’s Managing Director for ScienceDirect and Bibliographic Databases:

To scholars in 2025, this sentence may a little out of place, given how little time we have today for embracing the unexpected and serendipitous discovery. For us, “relevance” is an attribute reserved for a narrow slice of literature that explicitly relates to one’s specialized research interest. Of course, we access our literature using these same tools that were once about promoting serendipity and accidental discovery. Funny how quickly things can change in 24 years, isn’t it? 

In today’s Digest, we have: 

• Brain Food: Science as a Vocation

• News: Scholarship Found In Translation

• Resource: Curvilinear Rationality in Scientific Writing

• Keeping it Real: The Lens For All That We Can See, But Magnifies The Mystery

BRAIN FOOD

Science as a Vocation

Weber’s classic lecture-turned-essay, “Science as a Vocation”, puts forth an argument that would not be too unfamiliar to regular readers of The Scholarly Letter:

Science, research, and scholarship are not simply ‘jobs’ or ‘professions’ but rather a calling and a devotion.

He draws a distinction between ‘living from science’ and ‘living for science’. By examining the material and institutional conditions under which academic careers in Germany and America took place at the time of writing his essay, he shows how it is nearly impossible to live from science.

In Germany, the early career of a scholar typically began with the unpaid position of Privatdozent. A Privatdozent lectured at the university without salary, earning only through whatever fees they received from students attending their lectures. In this German system, it was therefore, as Weber says, “extremely hazardous for a young scholar without funds to expose himself to the conditions of the academic career.” It was only those who had private wealth, and therefore could survive years without pay, who were able to remain in academic careers.

By contrast, in America, the scholar could begin their career with more security than their German counterparts, as they could start as a paid assistant. The salary was “hardly as much as the wages of a semi-skilled laborer,” yet it was at least a fixed income. Precariousness, nevertheless, remained a key feature of the American system. This was because their ‘security’ relied upon their ability to attract large audiences of students. The classes one taught – and therewith, the popularity those classes attracted – determined one’s career in science.

In essence, Weber highlighted how academic careers depended heavily on personal connections and wealth. He called the academic life of his time a “mad hazard”: a career where luck, reputation, and personal politics mattered more than talent or scholarship. As he notes, one might have to watch “mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief.”

More than a hundred years later, these conditions are, shockingly, still all too similar to what we have today. And yet, one might ask: is the continuation of these conditions really all that shocking? For if these conditions persist after a hundred years, could it be that we have accepted them as part of our fate?

Let us continue with Weber’s essay. By showing us these conditions, Weber essentially suggests something along the lines of: 

Well, it is clear to us that living from science is not possible; hence, we must live for science and accept it for whatever it is – or has become. 

There is, for Weber, a sort of fatalistic acceptance of the mean conditions of academic life. He accepts the alienated, bureaucratic, competitive conditions of science as given, as the world we must live in. To cope with these conditions, Weber proposes that the scholar find dignity in how they face this struggle: through honesty, intellectual discipline, and devotion to work that transcends personal reward. He calls for an ethic of struggle as vocation, whereby, rather than escaping these conditions, the scholar makes them constitutive of their vocation, working through them with intellectual honesty and inner devotion. He proposes adopting a sober, disciplined acceptance of these conditions and a commitment to keep working within them anyway.

Perhaps, in the last hundred years, we have taken Weber’s proposal of living out science as a vocation a bit too far. We have not only accepted the struggle but also glorified it – to the point where we have internalised these conditions, unable to imagine any other possibility of what academia could look like. We have done very little to recognise that, perhaps, rather than accepting these conditions, we might act a little more like a revolutionary scholar: one who works in refusal and rejection toward transformation. This is not a refusal of devotion, dedication, integrity, or intellectual honesty in the conduct of scholarly practices and processes. Rather, it is a refusal of the mean conditions under which this vocation is practised.

After all, should not science – the very vocation that informs our means to ends, but of course not the end itself – also seek to inform the means to the end of science as vocation? That is, if we accept that we are to practise science as a vocation and that this is our end, should we not then look to identify and transform the means by which we might achieve this end?

It is all well and good to act in scholarship as a sincere devotion to knowledge, learning, and research. But it also needs to be recognised that such devotion does not take place in a vacuum. Material, physical, social, and institutional conditions significantly mediate the possibility of this devotion. And if more and more people are struggling to accept the glorification of the hardships of academic life, then perhaps it is time to stop glorifying these struggles and turn science upon itself. We need to go further than being the accepting scholar and become the revolutionary scholar. The task of this revolutionary scholar is not merely to survive within the disenchanted, disillusioned academic world but to re-enchant it once more – to recover meaning not through resignation but through transformation. 

If Weber’s scholar found dignity in disciplined acceptance, ours might find it in collective refusal: in using science’s own reflexivity to question, critique, and recreate the very conditions that govern it and make it possible.

NEWS

Scholarship Found In Translation

A journal article investigating photosynthesis in trees in an Indian tropical forest has become the first academic publication, in the modern Western tradition at least, to be fully translated into Sanskrit. Authored by Dr Rakesh Tiwari, a postdoc at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, the primary version of the article was published in English, with the Sanskrit translation included as a supplemental file. 

The translation is complete: not one word of the manuscript is in English (with the obvious exceptions of nouns like the authors of references and Latin names for tree species). 

As a piece of the broader scientific literature, the Sanskrit translation does not achieve the typical aim of communicating scientific knowledge to as broad an audience as possible. When challenged with this point, Dr Tiwari answers: 

It is, without a doubt, an act of scholarship in every sense of the word “scholar” that this publication stands for. What other reason does this translation need to exist?

RESOURCE

Curvilinear Rationality in Scientific Writing

Learning how to write scientifically by simply reading a lot of scientific journal articles does not always work. This is because published scientific articles are written in a pretentious form. They present themselves linearly: a clear hypothesis, a clean method, a neat test, a tidy conclusion – giving the illusion that the researcher followed a strict, logical sequence from start to finish.

But this linearity is largely fictitious. Scholars rarely think or work the way academic articles are presented. Real thinking and writing are curvilinear: back-and-forth, recursive, non-linear. Scholars should learn to embrace this curvilinearity rather than reject it out of fear that it appears “irrational.”

Accordingly, this week’s recommended resource is a beautiful essay by Aaron Wildavsky, written in 1981, where he illustrates the difference between linear and curvilinear writing by tracing one of his own writing projects – showing how writing actually comes together.

I’ll leave you with this from his essay as an invitation to read the full piece:

OPPORTUNITIES

Funded PhDs, Postdocs and Academic Job Openings

• Postdoc, Research and Academic Positions @ University of Sydney, Australia: click here

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

• Research and Postdoc Positions @ Macquarie University, Australia : click here

• Research and Academic Positions @ Nanyang Technological University, Singapore: click here

KEEPING IT REAL

The Lens For All That We Can See, But Magnifies The Mystery

The plant biologist Randy Wayne takes his class to the Rare and Manuscript Collection at Cornell University Library every year. In 2013, he discovered a poem by Louis Ginsberg titled “Microscope” cut out from a newspaper and pasted onto the front page of The Microscope, a foundational text on microscopy. 

We couldn’t help but feel that this poem, though written in the context of microscopy, describes an experience all scholars can recognize.  

The book appears to have been gifted to Dr EM Chamot - a professor of chemistry at the university - by the author Simon Henry Gage, who decided to include the poem.

If today’s Scholarly Letter stirred something in you, write back and share it with us. We would be delighted to hear from you. A letter without a response is only half a conversation.