Scholarly Crisis, New Labs, Old Preprints, and Unexpected Beauty
Your Scholarly Digest 11th December, 2025

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Hi Scholar,

We must beg your forgiveness for our absence from your inbox last week. One of the most amazing things about the digital era we live in, is the relative ease with which so many of our letters can be delivered to scholars scattered all over the world. We have added emphasis on the word relative with good reason, for it was technical difficulties (read: our lack of technical understanding) that kept us away. We have been working on upgrading our website and, in our eagerness to launch it, temporarily broke the backend of The Scholarly Letter. For now, the new website remains ready, but offline until we can figure out where we went wrong. 

We would usually be taking a two week break over the festive period starting from the 18th of December before picking up again in 2026. But consistency matters to us, and we hope it matters to you too. When Thursday passed without an edition of The Scholarly Letter being sent, something felt… off. To make it up to you, an extra edition of The Scholarly Letter will be sent on Christmas Day - but it won’t be Christmas themed, we promise. If you celebrate Christmas, consider your post-lunch reading sorted. If you don’t celebrate Christmas… then it’s just another Thursday The Scholarly Letter lands in your inbox.    

BRAIN FOOD

The Economic Ecological Crisis of The University 

Nearly ten months ago, when we wrote The Scholar Manifesto, we argued that the scholar should not be working in a knowledge economy, but situated within a knowledge ecology. Ever since, this idea of a knowledge ecology has stayed with us. At the time, we introduced it while it was still in its infancy – at least in our own heads. It wasn’t that no one had ever used the phrase knowledge ecology before. In fact, an organisation called Knowledge Ecology International uses it to describe the management of “knowledge resources in ways that are more efficient, more fair, and responsive to human needs.” In more techno-instrumental discourse, knowledge ecology is used to refer to the inputs, throughputs, and outputs of interlinked knowledge databases, experts, and artificial knowledge agents that collectively provide online knowledge for seamless organisational performance.

But none of these understandings quite matched what we meant. None of them addressed the exceedingly instrumental, excessively financialised, and egregiously metrified conditions under which today’s scholar must navigate their relationship with knowledge. So, ever since the phrase arrived to us while we were writing that essay, we have been on a mission to develop it further.

And how else would two scholars develop an idea apart from reading widely around it? One such text we encountered was Ronald Barnett’s The Ecological University. We have not yet finished thinking about knowledge ecology… not that one ever does finish thinking about something. But we’re not yet at the point where we want to crystallise our thinking into formal writing, giving it some kind of provisional finality through the shape of words. When we reach that point, you will be among the first to read it in The Scholarly Letter.

For now, though, we want to share some of Barnett’s ideas, because they offer a way of thinking about the university that feels genuinely different – far from the version of the university we have become accustomed to.

When we think about the university today, we tend to think of a business. Rightfully so. Universities have been corralled into becoming economic actors serving markets, rankings, and products. As Barnett puts it, “the university has come to be unduly connected with the economy,” becoming “a force of economic production in its own right.” This is perhaps painfully obvious to most, if not all, of us. It is not due to any other reason that so many critics of the modern university have proclaimed its ruin and death. But Barnett refuses the familiar narrative that the university is ruined. Instead, he encourages us to adopt a more positive positioning – even in its current state. By reimagining the university through an ecological perspective, he argues, we might find that hope still exists.

Ecology, Barnett notes, points to interconnectedness – not only in the sense of having many interconnections to different facets of the world, but in being connected in different ways, at different depths, and with different consequences. Importantly, these interconnections are endless and never cease forming. By conceptualising the university ecologically, Barnett proposes that we see it as an institution embedded across several zones of the world. These zones include the economy, of course, but also knowledge, learning, culture, persons, society, and the natural environment. Each of these, he suggests, may be viewed as an ecosystem. And the university is an institution interconnected with all seven of these ecosystems. 

In taking up this interconnected view of the university, Barnett shows us the very real and material place that the institution has in our world. It invites us to see what we take for granted: universities are at the near centre of our society. Many of us pass through them; they produce the research that informs the way we live; they shape our governments; they act as cultural producers; they are economic agents in their own right. They are hardly mere transitory spaces which students just attend. Across the micro, meso, and macro levels of our lives, universities are crucial actors.

Returning to the current ‘perilous’ state of the university, Barnett argues that the problem is not that the university lacks these interconnections, but that one ecosystem – the economic one – has overshadowed all the others. And it is this dominance which is leading to the neglect of the university’s wider worldly connections.

You see, the reason why we are sharing this idea of the ecological university with you here is because perhaps a large majority of you who are reading this Letter are likely situated in a university. We hope that in sharing this framing of a university – one which is connected to the wider world in a real sense – you will remain sensitive to the idea that the work you do, the ideas you think, have real weight in the world. For us, it feels that Barnett’s proposal is not just diagnostic but prescriptive. He tells us that the problem we have right now is one of a hyper-connection with the economic zone and hypo-connection with the rest of its ecosystems, thereby resulting in an imbalance. But he also reminds us that it does not have to be this way if the university redirects its energies towards the other more currently neglected ecosystems.

The ecological university, however, without its constituent people – its students, lecturers, professors, researchers, deans, administrators – is near impossible. After all, it may be argued that if the university is ecological, then every scholar within the university is an ecological actor. And so, it is only when the actors of the ecological university – yes, you – realise the interconnections they have with the wider world that perhaps universities as a whole may begin to tackle the deep imbalance that has taken hold through its excessive entanglement with the economic ecosystem.

NEWS

New Preprint Server Trials AI Reviewers

A new preprint server is attempting to handle the ever growing volume of published academic literature by reviewing papers using AI. aiXiv - which launched in November - gives each submission to five separate LLM’s which assess the submissions for “technical quality, originality, and relevance”; if three out of five recommend acceptance, the article is published on the server. According to their website, human reviewers will then “focus on scientific merit and interpretation”. It is worth saying however, that the involvement of humans in the review process is likely to be minimal - version history for all the 47 articles currently hosted on the aiXiv shows they were published within days of their submission. 

While more traditional publishers are still cautiously debating whether they can ‘officially’ sanction AI use in the production of scientific articles - let alone the review process - aiXiv has gone much further. The platform also publishes submissions labelled as being produced by an LLM -  which are presumably then reviewed by aforementioned LLMs. 

Meanwhile, a pre-print on arXiv poses the question “How far are we from genuinely useful deep research agents”? Their conclusion is… still some distance. The authors conclude that current cutting edge deep research models can understand the task they must perform, but are unable to search for and synthesise the information needed to complete it - not surprising to anyone who has interacted with an AI model in the context of research. All this to say it seems rather unlikely that AI reviewing work created by AI is going to lead us anywhere meaningful.  

RESOURCE

Scholar Labs

Google Scholar has recently released Scholar Labs, which is essentially a more juiced-up version of our beloved academic search engine. All the features you’re used to – citation counts, “cited by,” related articles, years, etc. – are still exactly the same. It’s just that Scholar Labs lets you be more elaborate with your searches: you can write more detailed queries without needing perfect keywords, and you get small highlights showing how a paper might answer your question. We’re not in the habit of recommending AI tools here in The Scholarly Letter, but as two scholars who secretly think that Google Scholar is still the best academic search engine out there, we thought we’d share this new addition as a resource.

OPPORTUNITIES

Funded PhDs, Postdocs and Academic Job Openings

• Postdoctoral and Research Fellow Positions @ Queens University Belfast, United Kingdom: click here

• PhD @ University of Cambridge, United Kingdom: click here

• Postdoc and Faculty Positions @ Hokkaido University, Japan: click here

• PhD Positions @ University of Nottingham, United Kingdom: click here

KEEPING IT REAL

On Everything Beautiful In Science

Government support for academic research in the aftermath of WWII caused deep structural changes in how we do scholarship - as we wrote about in more detail in Scholars Pay Themselves. We wanted to share with you the details of the events that occurred one morning at a conference to discuss these changes. 

On the second day of the conference, Merle Tuve stood up to give his talk wherein his words fell “like a thunderclap on a sunny day”. He pushed back against the growing obsession with scientific instruments, big laboratories and research projects requiring large teams, observing it was the “unadorned mind of man… not the fanciful instruments man conceives, that produces all of the beautiful in science”. 

He was, of course, preaching to the choir and received an extended round of applause. The applause continued for so long, in fact, that the moderator forgot there was supposed to be a press conference immediately afterwards. While the reporters waited, the conference attendees, buoyed by Tuve's remarks and the reception they received, went off to enjoy their lunch.

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