Scholarship with Impact, Identity, and Disagreement
Your Scholarly Digest 29th January, 2026

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Hi Scholar,

One of the key figures who has significantly shaped The Scholarly Letter is Virginia Woolf. Her playfulness, her dialogic style, her mastery of the letter as a form, and her unconstrained, questioning prose have all very much influenced how we write. You may begin to hear the contours of her voice in our work now that we’ve named her – especially if you’ve read Woolf before.

And if you haven’t, we can only encourage you to do so. Reading Woolf is, in itself, a lesson in how to write freely, boldly, and passionately.

This past Sunday marked Virginia Woolf’s birthday, and it prompted us to reflect on her enduring influence on our thinking and writing. We so rarely pause to honour those who have built us up foundationally. Her birthday felt like too good an opportunity to let pass without acknowledging the role she continues to play in shaping The Scholarly Letter.

Allow us to share a line from Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own that embodies the ethos behind this publication:

BRAIN FOOD

Scholar, what’s your impact? 

Have you ever wondered whether your research is really worth it? Chances are you have, because at some point or another, you have almost certainly been asked to justify your work in terms of the value it produces and the impact it will have on society or the world.

After all, most of us operate within a higher education system that insists research must demonstrate “an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia.” Impact has become one of the most important performance indicators of universities. Institutions, especially those funded by taxpayer money, must continually prove their worth in order to justify their continued existence. And when large industry firms bring significant amounts of cash into universities, the pressure to prove their impact becomes even greater.

But what, exactly, is this “impact” that universities, governments, and society more broadly, have become so obsessed with?

In Dark Academia, Peter Fleming dedicates an entire chapter to interrogating this question. He begins by recounting a chilling account: in June 2019, a Saudi jet dropped a 500-pound GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bomb on a family home in Ta’iz, Yemen. Six people were killed instantly, including a 52-year-old mother and three children aged twelve, nine, and six. Fifteen minutes later, the jet returned and bombed the house again. Five days later, it was bombed once more. There were no military targets in the vicinity; reports suggested the house had been mistaken for a Houthi operations room several kilometres away.

The laser-guided “precision bomb” used in the attack was manufactured by Raytheon, the world’s third-largest defence contractor. Raytheon employs tens of thousands of workers and maintains close research and training partnerships with universities. One such partnership is the Raytheon–UMass Lowell Research Institute, established in 2014 to cement a multimillion-dollar collaboration between the company and the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

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