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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?

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.