Scholars Pay Themselves

Rather than waiting around for university employment to permit them to be scholars, relying on universities as middlemen who decide how much their scholarship is worth, scholars can directly turn their expertise and skills into livelihood.

November 20, 2025

Scholars Pay Themselves
Your Thursday Essay 20th November,2025

Become a member of Scholar Square, our online digital community where we put our ethos into practice - and get access to all editions of The Scholarly Letter for free.

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

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

Online Thumbnail Credits: National Gallery of Art Open Access Collection; Gift of Merritt Porter Dyke in Honor of Andrew Robison

We are dissatisfied, disgruntled, disillusioned with the institutions that promise to pay us to be scholars. Yes. The universities, the academies, those giant machines that promise the life of the mind and yet quietly take the life of the scholar. 

We cannot pursue the research we wish to pursue. We cannot think as we wish to think. We struggle to perform as they demand of us. 

And still, there is never enough funding. There are never enough jobs. They can no longer afford for us to be the scholars we long to be. 

Scholarship is in trouble. Scholars have become a problem. Nobody wants to pay us to be scholars anymore. 

What are we to do? 

Dare we suggest, 

Should scholars pay themselves?

Scholars Pay Themselves 

-Written by The Critic and The Tatler

It would not be wrong to say that the academy is the proper place of scholarship, learning, and inquiry. And at the same time, it would only be proper to acknowledge that these activities also take place beyond the walls of academia. After all, the pursuit of advanced learning and serious intellectual work is not always performed only by those who are academically affiliated. There are many who have completed their degrees – many who have even received their doctorates – who cannot find positions and opportunities in the academy, and yet remain committed to the work of learning, thinking, and inquiry. And so they pursue this work independently: without affiliation, recognition, and remuneration. For these scholars, as Ronald Gross wrote all the way back in 1979 for The New York Times, 

❝

Scholarship is their joy, but not their job.

Such romantic visions of scholarship – scholarship as joy, passion, calling – are, we shall admit, the very ethos of The Scholarly Letter. We ourselves remain wholeheartedly, perhaps hopelessly, attached to the idea of scholarship as something more than a job. And yet, in writing this essay, we find ourselves interpellated by a practical concern about this independent pursuit of scholarship as joy. The concern takes shape in questions such as:

How do independent scholars financially sustain the intellectual work they do, the research they pursue, the contributions they make to knowledge? 

How can those who are neither professors nor academically affiliated even begin to think of pursuing independent scholarship when there remains those unaddressed matters of pay and income? 

As most of us see it, the only viable way to pursue scholarship is to remain firmly within universities. So when a scholar no longer wishes to remain in university employment – often due to the increasing enshittification of academic positions – they naturally lose the only recognised financial route to pursuing scholarship. Even for those who wish to stay in academia, there is always a chance that they will not secure a permanent faculty position. Then there is also a chance that there may be positions, but only if one is willing to move institutions and cities ever so often. And many do not want to uproot their lives indefinitely. Perhaps, understandably so. As a result, they lose their chance at pursuing scholarship altogether. 

Academic careers, after all, are – as Weber put it – ‘simply a hazard’, where chance ‘rules to an unusually high degree’, even more so than any other career on earth. Reflecting on the role of chance in his own career, Weber writes:

I may say so all the more since I personally owe it to some mere accidents that during my very early years I was appointed to a full professorship in a discipline in which men of my generation undoubtedly had achieved more than I had. And, indeed, I fancy, on the basis of this experience, that I have a sharp eye for the undeserved fate of the many whom accident has cast in the opposite direction and who within this selective apparatus in spite of all their ability do not attain the positions that are due them.

If the only financially viable way for scholars to be scholars is through academic careers – and if that path depends so heavily on chance – then is there really no other possibility for those whom chance does not favour?

This Essay is for Paid Subscribers

Become a paid subscriber to read the rest of this Essay and access the full archive. (If you are a member of Scholar Square, our online digital community, you need to explicitly trigger your access. Log in to Scholar Square - instructions on how to get access to The Scholarly Letter are in The Welcome Hall)

Already a paying subscriber? Sign In.

Paid subscribers receive an edition of The Scholarly Letter every Thursday: :

  • • Two editions of 🍎The Digest every month
  • • Two editions of 🍏 The Thursday Essay