On Successful Scholarship

🍏your Thursday Essay 14th August, 2025

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Hi Scholar, 

In the last few letters we have sent to you we have written to you about our founding of a not-for-profit called The Scholar Initiative. Our motivation has been simple: while being an academic has become increasingly difficult in today’s environment, it has become near impossible to be a scholar. Through this community-interest company – which will launch projects to garner patronage – we aim to use that patronage to build the social and cultural foundations needed for the intellectual life of the scholar, and for scholarship itself, to flourish. It is an ambitious goal, we admit. And ambitions of this kind tend to come with obstacles.

One such obstacle recently emerged in the form of a deceptively simple question:

How will you measure the success of your organisation?

This question arrived – how exactly, we cannot quite remember – during one of our long walks, where ideas are exchanged and dreams are dreamt. We had been discussing a disability-focused community that celebrates disability pride and provides a space for disabled students to connect and build camaraderie. The name of the organisation escapes us – the grapevine was too long to trace – but we recalled that the founder had faced a similar question.

Their answer was pay. That is, the success of the organisation was measured by the amount of income opportunities it could generate for its disabled members. Given the structural difficulties disabled people face in securing employment in an able-bodied world, this comes across as a clear, pragmatic, and socially grounded metric.

But how are we, The Scholar Initiative, which seeks to nurture the scholar and foster a different, more intentional culture of scholarship in our modern society, to define – and therefore measure – success?

At first glance, this may seem like a question of minor operational concern, a bureaucratic hurdle to speak, and perhaps even a little self-indulgent. But we ask you, Scholar, to think again. Because this question – how do we measure the success of The Scholar Initiative? – is, in truth, a question about how you, a scholar, might measure your own success. It opens onto a broader and deeper question: what counts as success in scholarly life? What does it mean for the scholar to succeed?

Thus, in this essay, as we entertain the question of how to measure the success of The Scholar Initiative, we ask you to take it as more than a technical query. See it instead as an empirical case through which we can examine a larger philosophical and cultural question. Our organisation becomes the setting in which this question becomes real: applied, lived, tested. As we try to articulate a vision for measuring the success of our initiative, we find ourselves beginning a larger inquiry:

How are we to measure the success of the scholar, and therewith, their scholarship?

On Successful Scholarship 
- Written by The Critic and The Tatler

In attempting to construct an answer to this question, we initially entertained the same solution proposed by the disability community: measuring success by measuring pay. Perhaps you too have considered income generation a justifiable metric. If The Scholar Initiative is able to find its scholar-members opportunities for income, then surely it is successful.

But simple solutions are rarely ever so. Tell us, Scholar: would you really measure your intellectual success by your income? Can the success of a scholar be determined by the size of their pay cheque? Perhaps in a broader moral economy, one in which we’ve resolved the value crisis, such a measure might carry meaning. But in our world, we know this to be untrue. The highest-paid ‘scholars’ are often those furthest from the life of scholarship – Vice-Chancellors, Deans, strategic leads – while many of the most sincere scholars are underemployed, precarious, or altogether outside the formal institution which employs scholars. A measure of pay, then, would be fantasy. Worse, it would repeat the very coupling of knowledge and monetary value that has led to the corrosion of scholarship in the first place.

We realised, therefore, that the answer to our question could not be borrowed. Nor could it be so easily or pragmatically defined. And so we continued to think.

As much as we hate to admit, at first, we weren’t thinking very creatively. We were thinking instinctively, habitually. You can imagine, then, that after we dismissed income, we turned to outputs. Scholarly outputs to be specific. But the moment we said it aloud, the idea that we might measure the success of The Scholar Initiative by the publications produced by its members, we looked at each other with the kind of sheepish grin one wears when caught mimicking the very thing one set out to resist. 

Were we really about to measure the success of our alternative using the same metrics used by the university that are suffocating the scholarly spirit? The number of publications? What was next, journal rankings and citation scores? Embarrassing, we know. But we are scholars trained in the modern university, and as you know, Scholar, it is difficult to unlearn the reflexes of your training. 

So what were we to do? 

Just as we had exhausted the familiar, institutionalised answers, The Tatler recalled something he had read a few months ago: an essay titled Science and Complexity by an American mathematician and science administrator named Warren Weaver. 

As a young scholar in the 1920s, Weaver advocated for applying the methods of the mathematical and physical sciences to other areas of research. The methods in question were, of course, quantitative in nature, and concerned with the precise measurement of phenomena. He attributed the inventions of the 18th and 19th centuries – such as the telephone, radio, airplane and moving pictures – to the mastery of what he called “problems of simplicity”: problems characterised by reducing phenomena down to two, three, or at most, four variables. 

From the 20th century onwards, advances in statistics and probability made it possible to tackle a new class of challenges: what Weaver called problems of “disorganized complexity”, involving millions, even billions, of variables. Weaver believed, and argued, that research in fields such as medicine, economics, psychology, sociology and political science would be able to make the same spectacular progress enjoyed by the mathematical and physical sciences if only these fields began to measure, quantify, and express the phenomena they studied in numerical terms. 

But his position would change significantly over the next 30 years of his life as a scholar, culminating in his 1948 essay, “Science and Complexity”. Here, he acknowledged that a humble and wise scientist:

What Weaver is saying here is that not all problems can be measured because some phenomena concern values, purposes, and meaning that are alogical, that is, not reducible to numerical form. He grouped such matters under what he called problems of organised complexity: situations involving “a sizable number of factors which are interrelated into an organic whole,” for which neither reductionist nor statistical approaches are particularly helpful. The point is not simply that these problems are ‘complicated’ but that they involve a web of interdependent elements whose significance is partly ethical, partly cultural, and deeply contextual. They cannot be understood without attending to their qualitative dimensions.

Questions such as:

“What does the price of wheat depend on?”

“How can we explain the behaviour patterns of an organized group of people?”

And similarly, 

“How are we to measure the success of the scholar, and therewith, their scholarship?”

are all, in Weaver’s terms, problems of organized complexity. 

Scholarly “success,” much like the price of wheat or the dynamics of a community, is shaped by numerous interrelated factors – intellectual contribution, ethical stance, institutional context, cultural conditions, reception over time – none of which can be cleanly isolated or adequately expressed as neat variables. And crucially, it involves judgements of value and purpose that fall outside the domain of what science can furnish a “yardstick” for.

This was important for us. When The Tatler brought this idea into our conversation, we realised that perhaps we had been asking the wrong question all along.  We could not answer it because we had been treating the phenomena of scholarly success as if it could be solved like a problem of simplicity (few variables) or disorganised complexity (many variables handled statistically). But the success of the scholar is not a variable to be measured; it belongs to the domain of values, ethics, and meaning.

This is not to say we abandoned the question, but rather that we reconsidered the way we posed the question. Instead of seeking a neat, logical method for measuring scholarly success, we began to think in terms of assessing or evaluating it. In our present paradigm, assessment and evaluation have also been collapsed into measurement. But they need not be, if we pushed ourselves out of this paradigm of measurement. Instead of approaching success as a number, it is possible to probe it as a quality: something that can be described, interpreted, and recognised without being weighed on a scale or plotted on a graph. 

With this in mind, we began to wonder what scholarly success would mean in a qualitative sense – in terms of experiencing scholarly success as a lived quality, rather than a measured output. And so, we reconstructed the problem we were addressing to: 

How can we assess and evaluate the success of the scholar, and their scholarship qualitatively? 

In beginning to think about the question of success through a qualitative lens, The Critic recalled something she had encountered during her doctoral research: the domain of the micro. 

If Weaver had led us to see that scholarly success could not be reduced to quantifiable variables, the micro turns our attention to where it might actually be felt: in the smallest, most immediate textures of experience. The micro aspects of life are subtle, without sharp boundaries – almost molecular in the way they work, moving through the subconscious currents that charge us with energy and shape how we relate to the world. 

Such micro-aspects pertain to the everyday life of the individual scholar – not “emotions” in the simple sense, but the kinds of affective charge that scholarship gives and takes. Bodily affects, cultural sensibilities, moods, social tempers: these are the domains of the micro. They produce shifts at delicate scales, at the agentic level of the individual, whereby their workings are almost invisible, yet felt just beneath the surface of recognition. We do not always know what we want or what we are doing, until we find ourselves reaching for it; the act begins itself before the act itself becomes recognisable.

By their very nature, micro-aspects resist the logic of measurement. They cannot be easily identified, and therefore captured, or aggregated. In this vein, trying to measure the unruly aspects of scholarly success would fix them into something they are not. And besides, why shall we impose an order from the outside when we might instead learn to recognise these micro textures of success in ourselves – in our feelings, orientations, and postures? Is not our own relationship to them a fairer assessment of success? 

Still, if the micro is where success is lived, we might wish to name, however tentatively, the qualities by which it is recognised. What, after all, are the felt signs of a successful scholarly life? What names might we give to those moments, energies, and dispositions that tell us, quietly but surely, that we are flourishing as scholars?

Here, we take inspiration from another thinker who, like Weaver, looked beyond numbers to the lived and experiential purposes of scholarship: JWN Sullivan. 

JWN Sullivan, was, by our measure, a Scholar. Possessed of excellent mathematical ability, he formally studied and researched at University College London for two years before leaving without completing his degree. Today, he is known (although sadly, not very widely) for his work as a science writer and communicator, being the first person to translate Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity into English using non-technical language. He was a regular contributor of scientific articles to literary magazines as well as authoring several books. Throughout his career, he wrote prolifically and beautifully on topics ranging from Beethoven to the history of European mathematics to the influence of modern science on the growth of skepticism. JWN Sullivan was, by all accounts, a person who nurtured his relationship with knowledge, even without achieving a formal degree or holding an academic position. 

Much like Weaver, despite his mathematical affinity, Sullivan thought extensively on the qualitative nature of scholarship. As mentioned in our previous essay “Doughnut Shaped Scholarship”, Sullivan begins his book The Limitations of Science by declaring:

Three ways which science meets these needs and desires are:

• offering practical advantages,

• satisfying disinterested curiosity,

• providing the contemplative imagination with objects of great aesthetic charm. 

These features stand in stark contrast to our 21st century instinct to measure the success of scholarship via metrics such as number of publications, years of life saved from disease or percentage growth of global GDP. The closest of Sullivan's three features to our contemporary, quantitative way of thinking about scholarship is his first point: the practical value of science. 

The other two – curiosity and aesthetic beauty – are harder to capture in numerical terms, but it is precisely this resistance to capture that aligns them with the micro-aspects of scholarly life we have been discussing. If the micro draws our attention to the subtle, almost molecular textures of experience, then curiosity and beauty are two of the clearest signs of its presence.

Take curiosity first. 

As the second feature on Sullivan’s list, it speaks to one of the oldest and most enduring motivations for research: the desire to know. Contemporary research into curiosity, for the moment at least, agrees that curiosity is a desire to know that motivates information seeking behaviour. 

Consensus on exactly what we derive from satisfying our curiosity, however, has changed dramatically since the start of formal curiosity research in the 1950s. Early theories of curiosity proposed that information seeking was a way to mitigate the anxiety that accompanies not knowing. Development of these theories over time has led to the more recent proposal that information seeking behaviour motivated by curiosity is an "appetitive behaviour” driven by “wanting”. Appetitive behaviours are motivated by a desire for a specific outcome or reward (similar to hunger or thirst), which, in the context of curiosity, is the pleasure of acquiring information. 

Scholar, does this not accurately describe one of the forces that first drew you to your work, your inquiry? Such is the micro aspect of what a scholar experiences: the pleasure and joy that comes from arousing your curiosity and then satisfying it. To us, it seems that an assessment of scholarly success would be incomplete without considering this micro dimension of whether one is still able to derive pleasure and satisfaction from their learning and research.    

And what of the final feature on Sullivan’s list: the beauty of science, of research? The aesthetics of our work? 

To modern eyes, the most frivolous of them all. Beauty and utility are not a natural pairing to our rational minds, as is perfectly captured by the saying:

 “if it looks stupid, but works, it aint stupid”.

However, to Sullivan, and other thinkers of his era such as Abraham Flexner and Warren Weaver, beauty was not an ornament to scholarship but a potential source of its usefulness. Sullivan writes that Copernicus, who in the 16th century proposed the Earth orbits the Sun, was motivated by his dislike of the “ugly” complex theories the astronomers of his time were working with. He writes:

Here, beauty, too, is a micro-quality – felt, not counted – but one that can shape the very direction of scholarship. Could we not, then, take the presence of beauty in our knowledge, our scholarship, as a marker of success? 

For The Tatler, this connection between beauty and scholarship was vividly experienced as a young undergraduate, when he stumbled across the abstract for a paper titled:

Clonal Origins of the Hematopoietic System: The Single Most Elegant Experiment

The author begins by declaring:

“The paper by Becker et al. (1) is the single most beautiful paper I have read.”

To produce work that could move a peer enough to call it “beautiful,” to inspire in another that mix of admiration and desire: could we not count this, too, as the success of the scholar and their scholarship?

It is along these micro-aspects of the scholar’s everyday life that we propose our definition of scholarly success. If the scholar can feed and satisfy their curiosity, find and create beauty in their scholarship, then perhaps we can say they are, in a deep sense, succeeding as a scholar. And at that moment we realised the answer to our question had been with us all along.

From the very beginning, we founded The Scholar Initiative to support and nourish the scholar, and therewith, the social and cultural foundations for their work to flourish. We have long defined the scholar as one who lives in a sincere, dedicated relationship to knowledge. If our initiative is to succeed, we must nurture scholars in ways that allow them to live that relationship: unhindered, without compromise. The meaningful criteria for success, then, are not publications or amount of income generated, but whether a scholar can sustain that committed, passionate relationship to knowledge, driven by curiosity, beauty, intellectual integrity, and other imperceptible yet vital qualities.

Concerns may be raised by those who see this as a ‘romantic’ idea of what success looks like for the scholar. “What use is it to broader society,” cynics might ask, “if the scholar is satisfied with their relationship to knowledge but not contributing useful knowledge?” Or, in a sharper register: “If taxpayer money is involved, such measures are a waste and a luxury.”

We have a few things to say in response.

First, we would say: your protest reveals how thoroughly modern utilitarian logic has colonised even the idea of romance. Must everything be justified in terms of use? Do you, in your own life, only pursue what you love after calculating its practical yield? What if we began with romance – for its own sake – and only then asked what fruit it might bear? Can utility be primary when the relationship itself has not yet been formed? To focus on use first is to taint the bond before it has even begun. Richard Feynman put it plainly:

Here, you might raise another concern: “The job of the scholar is to contribute to society, and if they are not doing so, they are not successful.” And here, we will agree but with one vital amendment. The job of the scholar is to contribute to society by producing knowledge. And to produce knowledge, the scholar must first have a successful relationship with knowledge. This is the foundation. Only then can they meaningfully contribute.

Certain roles, such as that of the Scholar, are ends in themselves. That is to say that before a scholar can take on the grand, outward-facing purposes of scholarship, they must first be able to inhabit the micro-aspects of being a scholar: curiosity, beauty, intellectual integrity, a daily relationship to knowledge.

That, we believe, is how we can evaluate the success of a scholar – in their ability to be a good scholar in the micro-aspects – and therefore the way we shall measure the success of work that The Scholar Initiative does. If we can help foster a more intentional culture of scholarship, one in which scholars can, in their everyday lives, live in a sincere, dedicated relationship to knowledge, inspired by curiosity and beauty, then we will count The Scholar Initiative a success.

On a final note, Scholar

It is important to say that the work we are undertaking through The Scholar Initiative is rhizomatic. This is not a traditional top-down or bottom-up project, where a mission is decided in advance, then executed in a linear march towards the “top,” broadcasting the message from there. Nor is it a tree-like (arborescent) structure in which all growth proceeds from a single trunk along predetermined branches.

The rhizome, as The Critic has written about before, is post-hierarchical and horizontal. It grows in all directions at once, without a fixed centre or predetermined order. Like a subterranean plant, it sends out shoots and roots laterally, invisibly, unpredictably. Such micro, molecular shifts are rhizomatic: they can ripple outward, connecting with other micro shifts, forming new connections, generating new shoots of thought and practice. Change, in this model, spreads not by decree but by contagion and resonance.

This is how we see the bridge between the micro and the macro. We begin at the level of the everyday, the subtle textures of curiosity, beauty, and intellectual integrity, because this is where the scholar actually lives. But when such qualities are cultivated, they do not stay contained within one scholar’s life. They spread through conversations, collaborations, and shared sensibilities. They connect across people and projects, building a network of small but real transformations that, over time, amount to cultural change.

In this sense, The Scholar Initiative is but one node in a much larger rhizomatic structure of scholarship. Our projects – whether The Scholarly Letter, our forthcoming membership community, or other experiments yet to emerge – are intended as points of connection. Already, readers of The Scholarly Letter have written to us saying that it has provoked them to question their relationship to knowledge and ways of knowing in ways they had not before. Such moments may seem small, but in the rhizome, they are how change happens: horizontally, subtly, irreversibly.

If our ambition is to nurture a more intentional culture of scholarship, then we must take seriously the fact that such culture cannot be imposed from above or engineered from a single centre. It must grow rhizomatically, through countless micro successes that, over time, make the macro shift possible. And when that shift comes, Scholar, we will know we have succeeded.

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