If this email forwarded to you, sign up to receive weekly letters for the examined intellectual life.

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

— Written by San Choudury

If I am being completely honest with you, I am at a complete loss for words. This surprises me because I’ve been waiting an entire year to write about this moment. This moment is the passing of a year since Reece and I decided to make a world out of our words.

Words which were themselves born from our experiences of and engagements with the world of academia and academic research. But in writing about this world, our words started offshooting in the direction of a world which was not yet there. A world which came to be only in our minds and on the pages of The Scholarly Letter, firmly positioned in the pure realm of imagination and play.

Sitting atop hills overlooking the Rivelin Valley in Sheffield, we would spend hours lying on a picnic blanket, staring up at the sky, occasionally at horses grazing in the fields, thinking how wild it would be to meet people like ourselves who were also thinking the way we were about the world of learning, inquiry, and scholarship. Not so unlike the world that is already made possible by our universities, but just with a change in what I, with my lame internet discourse, can only refer to as a ‘vibe’.

Peter Fleming in Dark Academia likens working at our universities to working for Accenture: one in which ‘collegiality evaporate[s] as dark suited bosses and their HR footsoldiers [snarl] at us.’ Maybe a bit harsh, depending on who you ask, but you get the vibe.

On the other hand, the kind of place that Reece and I had been chasing, while grazing in the meadows of our imaginations, was perhaps a bit foolishly romantic, some might say even hopelessly impossible. A utopian site formed and held together by a passion and desire for the academic vocation. One where the innocent pleasures and pains of thinking, studying, and pursuing our intellectual curiosities constitute the becoming of the very place which supports these activities. A site for scholarship, therefore, which emerges from the pure vibes of doing scholarship.

So it began. First as images in our heads, then as words on the pages of The Scholarly Letter, and soon after, if I may be so bold as to suggest, in the minds of the readers of our words. And finally, with a dash of self-delusion, which led us to believe that apparently there were others who desired an alternative world for scholarship, came an attempt to build that world.

From the way I began this essay, you may have hazarded a guess that our attempt to build this alternative world, which we named S, has been successful. I am, after all, writing a year after it was instituted. Where, then, does my loss for words come from when we are at a present moment of having successfully existed and been active for a year?

A year ago, I thought that when this time came, I would be full of words, singing praises about what we had created, writing about our successes, all the lovely things we had done and achieved through this space, and what we were planning on doing for the year after. In many ways, I have already done this. Initially, as part of the annual reporting work we need to do for the governance and compliance of our organisation. And then later on, looking back at all of what we did in our first year, feeling extremely proud, and sharing it all on my Instagram account.

But now, as I put my fingers to the keyboard and begin to think about our alternative world with more depth than what is required for either reporting work or content creation on Instagram, I am robbed of my words.

Looking back on the year that has gone by, a year spent building and existing within Scholar Square, it feels as though to sing songs of its success is still very much premature. So perhaps my muteness on our first-year anniversary, which nevertheless I recognise as a momentous occasion, comes from a reckoning with the fact that what we started a year ago is still very much an attempt.

“Ich probiere,”
German for “I am trying” or “I am just fooling”

I came across this phrase a few years ago while reading Abraham Flexner’s essay on the usefulness of useless knowledge. Flexner was the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Study. In the essay, he narrates a story of a seventeen-year-old student at the University of Strasbourg who, instead of following the prescribed anatomy curriculum involving dissection and microscopic examinations of tissues, was experimenting with dyes and microscopic specimens. Eventually, when his professor approached the student, Paul Ehrlich, and asked what exactly he was doing with his “rainbow array of colors,” Ehrlich responded, “Ich probiere.” His professor did not put an end to Ehrlich’s fooling around, and instead responded, “Very well. Go on with your fooling.” Through this fooling around, Ehrlich would eventually, but unintentionally, go on to produce techniques for selectively staining biological material.

The point that Flexner makes with this story is that something useful came out of something that wasn’t intended to be useful from the very beginning. Trying, attempting, just fooling around, and having the space to do so had to come first.

Reece and I met when we were young. He was 19, and I was 18, both in the first year of our undergraduate degrees. When we met for the first time, it wasn’t love at first sight. Far from it, it was friction. Our coupling, Reece as a STEM student and I as a social science student, meant that we had been trained into different ways of knowing and making sense of the world. For the most part, ours was a relationship defined by a tussle of views from the very beginning. But it was a tussle that was animating nevertheless. We opposed each other’s views and were, at the same time, completely fascinated by them. That we saw the world so differently was evident in our many arguments and shouting matches at the pub, in our flat shares, and on walks through the woods. Many around us thought it made for an impossible match. Yet, for us, these differences completed the way each of us viewed and experienced the world, as we constantly, stubbornly, and passionately showed each other our wildly different perspectives and understandings. We have yet to resolve these differences, and likely never will. But it is also this debate, difference, and opposition that began our play, like children fighting on the playground but playing still.

Since we met, therefore, we have influenced each other’s intellectual lives and beings. I wouldn’t have even considered doing a PhD had it not been for Reece casually mentioning over a pint one day that he would do one, which suddenly made me consider the real viability and possibility of doing one myself.

We have always been kids sitting in fields and meadows, in pubs and on benches overlooking valleys and rivers, letting our minds wander and play.

Ten years on, much of what we do today has begun through our acts of fooling around. We did not one day suddenly get out of bed and seriously decide we were going to completely change the way scholarship and research get done. We were just two kids lying around lazily, enjoying the few sunny days of the summer months, dreaming and imagining what ifs, what could be, and what might be. It is from this imaginative playing and trying that an alternative space for the practices that we so keenly enjoy has emerged.

A space which, I believe, has now come to be something more serious, more substantial than we had ever initially thought possible.

I was driving the other day when Something to Lose by Stella Lefty came on. It’s a cheesy love song, but a few of its lyrics caught my attention:

“This was never supposed to be
Nothin' but a little somethin' to do
.
.
Now I got somethin' to lose,
Now I got somethin' that keeps me up, drives me wild.”

Funnily enough, what came to mind as I listened to these lyrics was the world we created through Scholar Square.

It all began as fooling around with Reece. The questions we were grappling with were serious in their own right, as were the problems we were trying to tackle. But we never really took any of it so seriously at the beginning that it felt consequential for our lives. We hadn’t seriously planned and carefully mapped a route from a newsletter written for pleasure and provocation to a community, an organisation, or whatever else this thing might eventually become. We were trying things, playing with ideas, writing things down, imagining things that did not yet exist.

Now, however, this space that we have built has become something that I am very much afraid of losing; something which keeps me up many nights and drives me wild on many days. But what I am also coming to terms with is that, despite the serious character which it has necessarily taken on, I think it still very much continues to be an attempt.

So, looking back at the first year of our world’s existence, I think I understand better now the muteness which initially struck me as I sat down to write about this last year of Scholar Square’s being and becoming. It is an attempt at building something different, and to write about its successes so unreflexively might unwittingly put an end to our further attempting, playing, and trying, for it would signal to us that we have arrived.

Scholar Square was born out of, and continues to remain, ‘Ich probeire’.

If this essay stirred something, be it a question, a reflection, a story of your own, we want to hear it. Even if it’s something negative, it’s okay. The Scholarly Letter exists because we believe that intellectual life begins in conversation and communing. Respond to this email we want to hear what you have to say and share.