The Scholar Manifesto

🍏your Sunday read 20th April, 2025

A well-researched original piece to get you thinking.

Image Credits: New York Public Library Archives, The New York Public Library. "Public Catalog" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1875 - 1925.

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Hi Scholar,

Have you ever wondered why we decided to call this publication The ‘Scholarly’ Letter? We could have decided on a more conventional category for our publication to speak to: like that of an ‘academic’, a ‘researcher’, or even ‘scientific’. But we didn’t. Why?

 Perhaps such questions do not bother you much, for ‘what is in a name?’ But we believe that names hold significant weight. The naming of a thing, or a publication in our case, is not just symbolic; it has material consequences. A name shapes how a thing is taken up, what it does, how it invites others in, and therefore, is engaged with.

 At the time of deciding the name of this publication, we were both strongly against relating it to categories like the ‘academic’ and ‘researcher’. But ‘scholarly’, ‘scholar’, ah! There was something about this word which we were drawn to. It left a different taste in our mouths when we said it out loud. Back then, we were unable to articulate the distinction between ‘the scholar’ and ‘the academic’, even though we had a clear preference for one over the other.  But it is a line of questioning that has provoked us often. Who is a scholar? What does it mean to be scholarly?

 In this Sunday Letter, we take up that question. And to answer it, we begin not by defining the scholar, but by turning to their shadow: the academic. By tracing what has happened to the academic - what they have become and what has become of them - we aim to illuminate the figure of the scholar. Not in opposition, but as reclaiming. By working through the ruins of the academic, we, as writers of The Scholarly Letter, seek to erect a vision of the scholar.

 P.S. this piece is inspired by a wide variety of reading. Rather than referencing throughout, we’ve compiled this bibliography if you’re interested in what previous work has informed the making of ‘The Scholar Manifesto’.  

The Scholar Manifesto

Written by The Critic and The Tatler

We have scoured the Internet in search of what it means to be a scholar. At every turn, we repeatedly encounter the image of the ‘academic’, someone who holds an advanced degree – typically a doctorate – and works at a university as an instructor and/or researcher. And why shouldn’t the scholar be linked to the academic?

 The academic has an interest in, and maintains a relationship with, knowledge. She consumes, produces, and disseminates knowledge. She conducts her relationship with knowledge in the university, which traditionally referred to ‘a community of teachers and scholars’. 

 Today, however, it refers to an “institution of higher education offering tuition in mainly non-vocational subjects and typically having the power to confer degrees".

 Many individuals desiring to be in a relationship and work with knowledge flock to universities in hopes of becoming academics. By pursuing the profession of the academic, the hope is that they will be able to satisfy their intrinsic motivation for pursuing knowledge. For is it not true that the academic is one of the rare professions today where the desire to ‘know’ can be translated into a livelihood?

Will you, Scholar, allow us a moment’s diversion as we linger on this ‘desire’ for knowledge we all have in common being gathered here in the space of The Scholarly Letter? 

 For the human species, as Cristiano Castelfrenchi suggests, knowledge is purpose in itself: an activity, a pursuit that provides motivation purely from within. We acquire and seek out knowledge because it is an activity we are capable of, through our interconnectedness with, and situatedness in, the world. Our abilities to understand, analyse, and interpret are borne from our curiosity about, our interest in, and our passion for, the connections we form with and in the world.

 We pursue knowledge the way we do because we can: it is both an exercise of, and an amplification of our cognitive capabilities. It is this kind of activity - this intrinsic motivation for knowledge – that we cannot help but deem ‘scholarly’. And yet, if we wish to understand what it means to be scholarly, we must look not only to the intrinsic nature of this desire, but also to what becomes of it. 

 For in tracing how this desire is institutionalised, shaped, and at times constrained within the academic form, we begin to see more clearly what the scholar is, and what she is not.

This brings us to a difficult reckoning. When we settle into the grooves of the modern university as professional scholars - i.e. academics - we begin to realise something unsettling. The university, imagined as a place where curious individuals can pursue knowledge as an activity with an intrinsic purpose of its own, reveals itself to be an illusion. We begin to realize that knowledge here cannot be purpose in itself. This realization comes alongside the academic’s growing awareness of ‘where’ she really conducts her relationship with knowledge.

 The university is not simply a place where individuals pursue knowledge, but an institution that is both embedded within and plays a significant role in the knowledge economy. And it is the situatedness of one’s knowledge in the economy in its current form, as we will show, that begins to drive the academic to lose touch with her scholarly pursuit of knowledge.

The Knowledge Economy and it’s Regime

In his 1858 manuscript, Grundrisse, Karl Marx recognised that “knowledge has become a direct force of production”, while predicting that knowledge would ‘blow capitalism sky-high’. The idea of a “knowledge economy” began to solidify when, almost exactly a hundred years later in 1959, Paul Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker” to refer to those individuals who possess and apply knowledge to work for generating economic productivity. As Marx predicted, knowledge became an important economic resource. Value in the economy is produced by information and ideas as well as by more classical resources such as land, labour, capital and enterprise. Universities, and the individuals they employ, had always been places where knowledge was produced. However, as knowledge became a productive economic asset, their role expanded to become sites of value creation as well.

In the 1980’s, the neoliberal economic philosophy emerged and began to change the market logic, or the assumptions underpinning how value is created in the economy. There are many tenets of neoliberalism, but in the context of the knowledge economy, and the academic, perhaps the most relevant are its encouragement of privatisation, belief that competition leads to improvement and its privileging of the individual. Additionally, neoliberal logics promote the profit seeking ethos of business, linking “value creation” solely to financial reward: the financial price of a good or service that someone is willing to pay for it indicates its true "value”.

The knowledge economy, according to these logics, treats knowledge as an economic resource whose value is determined by financial reward.

We tell you this to propose the following: participation in a knowledge economy framed by neoliberal logic suffocates the scholar out of the academic. 

It’s a bold claim. As we’ve already acknowledged, the scholar and the academic share a commonality: a relationship with knowledge. But in the modern day university, a key institution of the knowledge economy which has become dominated by neoliberal logics, that relationship begins to fray.

The value of knowledge is determined by market demand which depends on its utility, and it is this potential for financial gain that often determines whether knowledge is produced at all. In addition to serving capital, knowledge must also realize its inherent financial value as quickly as possible. Universities are required to justify their existence through cost-benefit analysis and are subjected to measurement by metrics, rankings and their usefulness to industry. In turn, they behave more like businesses by deprioritising the production of knowledge that cannot be rationalised by neoliberal logic. 

All of these changes have profound consequences for the academic who is a key actor in the knowledge economy.

The academic’s relationship to knowledge is transformed as they become knowledge workers whose work must generate financial value. When knowledge becomes a product to be produced and traded according to market logics, the academic is no longer simply in pursuit of knowledge. 

She is turned into a producer, a competitor, and her relationship with knowledge becomes strained.

Like a smog that descends on a city and chokes its residents, neoliberalism and the short-termism it encourages has enveloped academia and is making the academic sick.

In what follows, we begin to trace the symptoms of this illness - fast research, competitive publishing, and the tyranny of excellence - as we follow the academic deeper into the neoliberal university. Only by understanding the contours of their sickness can we begin to grasp what the academic has lost and imagine how the scholar might emerge from the ruins of the academic.

Fast Research, Competitive Publishing, and Objective Excellence 

Who in their academic journey hasn’t heard this said to them at least once: 

 ‘Your PhD is the only time that you will get in your career when you’ll be able to take all the time to explore, study different things, go down rabbit holes. After that, it’s all about churning out research.’ 

 4 to 5 years - which is the average duration of a doctoral programme - is what the individual in academia is entitled to for living out their desires of pursuing knowledge. After that, the imperative is to produce knowledge, and to carry out this production fast. After all, the dominant mode of knowledge production in academic research today is a model of fast research which relies on the cumulative advance of disciplinary knowledge. 

Researchers, particularly in the ‘hard’ sciences, are well-trained in fast research. Their training involves providing them with the right kind of intellectual equipment for extracting phenomena from the messy interconnections of the world, abstracting them into objective terms, and producing individual facts at a steady pace. 

Inspired by the logics of industry, fast research is governed by the imperative to never ‘waste time’. Questions that cannot be answered quickly through modes of abstraction or that demand engagement with the messiness of the world are discouraged. Research needs to service industrial progress. It must produce facts and knowledge rapidly to drive the development of techno-scientific products and services: those most likely to yield profit in the knowledge economy.

What becomes of the knowledge after it is produced - its consequences for the broader ecology of things, people, and relations beyond those who profit from it - is not considered a matter of scientific interest. The task is to produce the knowledge. Considering “what happens next?” is the kind of concern that only slows science down.

In this way of doing research, one assumes the role of a mere producer. 

We produce and discard knowledge like the way clothes get produced, consumed, and discarded in fast fashion. 

Individual facts and truths are produced, a publication materialises, and we move on - onto the next fact. In this process, the scholar-academic does not just become a mere instrument for incessant production. Without any sense of ownership or responsibility regarding what happens with their knowledge once it is produced, she also becomes alienated from her outputs. 

As if the instrumentalization and alienation of the academic weren’t already enough to suppress the scholar within, the neoliberal logics of the knowledge economy deliver yet another blow: a system of competitive publishing bolstered by a framework of objective excellence which turns the academic into a self-serving competitor.  

In this system, knowledge becomes something to be packaged and counted - instead of something to be lived with, struggled through or held responsibly. For the academic, who is now reduced to a knowledge producer, publishing research is key. And while the two may be assumed to be one and the same, there is a difference between producing knowledge, and publishing research outputs. 

This difference does not imply that publishing research is not an important aspect of knowledge production and creation. Research published, especially in the form of journal articles, provides an efficient, easy way for researchers to communicate their knowledge with each other regardless of where they are in the world. The ‘packaging’ of knowledge in journal articles is exactly how knowledge produced by researchers takes on a material, tangible form that can be accessed long after its production. 

A journal article is, to an extent, proof that knowledge has been produced. 

But while knowledge production achieves its material form through publication, the publication of journal articles is not always conditional on the production of knowledge. It is possible - indeed, increasingly common - for research to be published without any new insight or intellectual risk. To explain how this works, we need to turn to the system which universities have created for fulfilling their role as producers of large quantities of useful knowledge.   

Ultimately, while money is essential to knowledge production, universities do not have access to an endless supply of it. This means there are limited opportunities available for promotions and research funding which will sustain knowledge production. The neoliberal preference for private enterprise over governmental support has meant universities must increasingly turn towards their industry allies to raise more funds for producing knowledge. Industry, naturally, wants useful knowledge that is able to drive up economic profit. This in turn means coming up with a system of evaluation and bench-marking which will enable university decision-makers to decide what research, and therefore which researchers, are ‘worth it’: to put it crudely, who will give the best return on investment? 

And thus, an evaluation system based on an objective framework of excellence is born. 

Objective measurements of excellence are done by looking at all sorts of ‘data’ and ‘evidence’ as is espoused by the neoliberal regime of the knowledge economy. As we’ve said, publishing journal articles is evidence that research has been done and that knowledge has been produced. A track record of published journal articles is, therefore, viewed as an indicator for how productive an academic has been. Of course, in addition to producing large quantities of knowledge, academics must also produce knowledge that is useful. In theory, the more useful knowledge is, the more other academics will talk about it, i.e. cite it. Therefore, the more citations an academic has received, the more useful their work is deemed to be. The winners in this framework of objective excellence are those with the most publications and citations. 

Given that this framework of evaluation is entirely a numbers game, it is open to manipulation by its players. Incentivised to produce more, and produce more useful (i.e. cited) outputs, academics deliver. 

In what is truly the triumph of neoliberal ideals, academics are incentivised to be self-serving. 

Instead of producing knowledge, the goal of an academic is to publish papers. These papers do not have to contain new, rigorous knowledge: they just need to exist. Importantly, given that papers - not knowledge - need to be cited, topics that are safe, fashionable, or likely to attract attention are prioritised. Risky, radical, and imaginative long-term projects are avoided because there is no guarantee that they will yield publications, and there is always pressure to publish more and more frequently. 

That publishing papers can be done without producing knowledge itself creates the possibility of severing the relationship academics have with knowledge.

Examples of academics who have built entire careers on publications filled with fraudulent data are not hard to find: but these individuals did not produce knowledge, they polluted knowledge for their own gain. And while it is true that they are in a minority, is a single case not enough to show how efficiently the scholar is cleaved from the academic, to lay bare how starved the soul of an academic can become?

In the frenzy of this competitive system, where knowledge has only a far-removed role to play, academics forget that the publications they produce are meant to contribute to humanity’s collective knowledge. More than that, these publications, which claim to be knowledge, might actually be used in ways which might have real, material effects on our lives. 

A disconnect from knowledge, a lack of care or sense of stewardship for the integrity of knowledge is not only possible, but a logical conclusion of a system that no longer asks what knowledge is or why it matters. Only that it appears. 

And so, the academic is caught in a system that encourages speed over substance, publications over knowledge, and metrified excellence over integrity. She is no longer in pursuit of knowledge as a way of being in the world, but in pursuit of metrics that stand in for meaning.

This is not simply a critique of the individual academic, nor of publishing, nor even of research. It is a reckoning with the regime that has reshaped what it means to know and importantly, what it means to be someone who knows. For in this neoliberal knowledge economy, the scholar is no longer recognisable in the figure of the academic.

And yet, all is not lost.

To articulate a vision of the scholar, we had to pass through the ruins of the academic. Now, having walked that path, we can finally ask: what might reemerge from the rubble? 

Here, in the ruins of the academic, we raise our vision of the scholar.

The Scholar

We have not achieved some perverse pleasure in laying bare the academic and the conditions of her existence in today’s knowledge economy. It is not a task we took on in mockery, but in mourning - to show how the Scholar has been suppressed, squeezed.

The Scholar and the Academic overlap in their desire to know. It might even be said that the Academic comes after an individual has been struck by a scholarly desire for knowledge. But there are things the Scholar does not share with the Academic. And there are things the Academic must do - under pressure, for survival - that lead her to suffocate the Scholar within. An Academic’s scholarly qualities are eroded, not of their own volition, but by the rules and logics which govern their work.

The Scholar cannot thrive under conditions where her only relationship to knowledge is one of incessant production. As we’ve said before, the desire to know emerges from our interconnectedness with, and situatedness in, the world. We seek knowledge about the world because we are entangled with it. We live in relation to the world we want to know. This relational way of knowing, and the pleasure, curiosity, and care that it brings - is what the Scholar holds on to; and what is torn from the Academic.

The Scholar resists the reduction of knowledge to a tool. She refuses the instrumentalisation of inquiry. 

The Scholar, too, takes pleasure in the acts of thinking, asking, reading, and composing; they enable us to exercise and amplify our cognitive capabilities. Knowledge does have a function and it often proves useful. But it is not only useful. It is also joyous. Stimulating. Difficult. 

The Scholar knows that knowledge is neither fast nor disposable. The Scholar does not produce and discard, extract and abandon. A Scholar returns; she continues and composts. Holds. Fast research, driven by abstraction and the abandonment of the world, is antithetical to this. The Scholar does not abstract herself out of the world in order to know it but chooses to stay in it. She remains entangled.

Slowness is not a luxury but a condition of scholarship. The root word of scholar’ - scholè - meant free time, the opposite of busy-ness, or a-scholè. But the slowness of the Scholar, despite what the knowledge economy believes, is not a waste of time. She does not think of uncertainty, risks, and mess as a way of getting in the way of knowledge, she knows they are part of it.

The Scholar is unbothered by the demands of objective excellence. She does not measure her work by volume or how many citations it attracts. She does not write to be counted but to add something meaningful to humanity’s collective knowledge. She is a steward of knowledge and assumes a duty of care for it. 

In this vision of the Scholar, we are not saying that the Academic and the Scholar are mutually exclusive. That one cannot be a Scholar if they are an Academic. For as we have already said, the academic starts out as a scholar. But we are saying: the Academic must resist the forces of competition, speed, and objective excellence, and reclaim the Scholar within. Resisting and reclaiming need to happen if the Scholar is to be revived. 

The vision of a Scholar and her practices are incompatible with the knowledge economy as it stands: it is not a suitable environment for her to thrive. Where then, might she operate? 

We propose the Scholar refuses her positioning as part of a knowledge economy and instead begins to see that she is part of a knowledge ecology.

An interdependent system of relationships between people, ideas, practices, materials, environments, and questions that collectively nurture, sustain, and regenerate knowledge over time. A view of knowledge which rests on its role as a public good. Knowledge which does not just remain within the confines of capital but is always entangled with where it comes from. Such an affirmation of the knowledge ecology encourages responsibility to, care of, and continuation with knowledge. It is a space where knowledge is cultivated and connected instead of extracted and utilised. 

Knowledge is no longer seen as an opportunity for exploitation, but a possibility for connection.

The ethos of a knowledge ecology we have presented here is still in its infancy. It is, however, the foundational principle The Scholarly Letter rests on and aspires to embody.

This ethos, this manifesto, forms the foundation of The Scholarly Letter and unites all of us who gather here in its space. If the motives and views laid out here align with your own, dear Scholar, then welcome. 

You are already part of this ecology and your scholarship - slow, thoughtful, connected - matters deeply.

If you have any questions, feedback or comments on The Scholarly Letter, drop a comment or write to us at [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you!