Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up receive weekly letters rooted in curiosity, care and connection.
Know someone who will enjoy The Scholarly Letter? Forward it to them.

All previous editions of The Scholarly Letter are available on our website.

Hi there, 

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?

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?