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Hi Scholar,

In 2018, long before AI had entered the public consciousness, the potential role of AI in peer review was debated during a seminar hosted by the Society for Scholarly Publishing. In a piece published last week, the two debaters revisited their arguments eight years on, reflected on the current state of AI in peer review and looked ahead to what might come. We wanted to quote a paragraph from Neil Blair Christensen’s reflections on the current state of AI in 2026:

We agree. Moreover, we find that these observations can be extended to most technologies currently being applied to scholarly work: we are building tools to manage the consequences of a system that most are unwilling to rethink.

So to you, dear Scholar, we just wanted to say: thank you for showing up today, and for engaging with The Scholarly Letter. It is a space where we are trying, however imperfectly, to rethink these things.

It isn’t very common today to hear the gentleman and the scholar spoken of in the same breath. Instead, it is the academic and the scholar that we think of in conjunction with one another – so much so that the two are often used interchangeably. In taking the scholar and the academic hand-in-hand, we tend to imagine the gentleman in scholarship as something belonging to the past.

Yet, it is also not the case that the gentleman has disappeared from scholarship altogether. In fact, it seems to make itself present whenever scholarship attempts to move outside the academy.

At points when we encounter the figure of the independent scholar – someone pursuing research beyond academic institutions – the assumption often follows that they must be supported by some form of inherited wealth, the familiar “bank of mum and dad” logic. Even membership-based scholarly communities and societies (like our own) are sometimes critiqued for harbouring a certain gentlemanly character.

It appears that we are left with rather a curious configuration: the gentleman appears to have been effaced within academia, yet returns with force beyond it. There is something worth ruminating over here.

From my reading of Shapin, the scholar and the gentleman were not always naturally aligned. Quite the opposite, they historically appeared, particularly before the 16th century, as distinct – if not radically opposing – forms of life.

The scholar, culturally speaking, was burdened with an unflattering reputation: poor, melancholic, socially awkward, pedantic, withdrawn. A figure absorbed in study but at the cost of sociability. The gentleman, by contrast, was expected to be amiable, civically engaged, selfless, attentive to others, and at ease within society. Shapin's analysis makes it clear that the scholar and the gentleman did not always belong together.

However, over time, the two were manufactured to come together.

As the nobility of the 16th century began sending their sons to universities – institutions that had long been associated with clerical and scholarly life – the very form of learning they offered began to be modified.