On the Limited Academy, LABraries, and Formative Figures

When addressing the possibility of a revival in independent scholarship, one of the most pressing questions hangs over those research disciplines which rely on extensive equipment.

December 25, 2025

On the Limited Academy, LABraries, and Formative Figures
Your Scholarly Digest 25th December, 2025

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Online Thumbnail: Don Quixote Reading to Rosemante; Credits: National Gallery of Art

Hi Scholar,

Happy holidays. This is the final edition of The Scholarly Letter for 2025, delivered to your inbox on Christmas Day. If nothing else, perhaps this Letter might offer a small respite amid the occasional tensions that tend to gather around the holiday table.

We’ll keep the intro short this week: if this publication is or was something you valued in 2025, please support it by becoming a premium subscriber. The Scholarly Letter can only continue if it is sustained by those who care about receiving it.

Thanks for coming along, it’s been a year to remember.

In today’s Digest, we have: 

  • Brain Food: The Completeness of a Limited Academy

  • Current Affairs: LABraries

  • Resource: A Source for Writing Resources

  • Keeping it Real: Your Efforts, Your Work, and The Generous Heart You Put Into It

BRAIN FOOD

The Completeness of a Limited Academy 

One of the core principles of The Scholarly Letter is a commitment to advancing a view of scholarship and inquiry as something scholars pursue for its own sake: because it satisfies their curiosity, brings them aesthetic pleasure, and because they find it impossible not to do it. Matters of usefulness are seen as secondary in cultivating a relationship with scholarship and knowledge.

Such a view of knowing, learning, and inquiry has perhaps become familiar to many of you regular readers of The Scholarly Letter. But we wondered whether you might like to know more about its philosophical underpinnings – that is, the assumptions about the world and about life that guide such a view.

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