The Year of The Scholar
Your Thursday Essay 18th December 2025

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Hi Scholar,

According to our platform analytics, we have sent 60 Letters containing a total of 137,500 words in 2025 (make that 141,000 with this Letter). However numbers, metrics and analytics can only tell a part of a story. We decided to take a moment to reflect on what this publication has become over the last 12 months. Yet, we did not write what follows entirely ourselves: it would be impossible to accurately reflect on the journey this publication has been on without acknowledging the input from you, our readers. Every Thursday for the last year, we have thought together. Your words have moved us, inspired us and given us the courage to continue exploring the integrity of thought, the future of scholarship, and the deeper meaning of intellectual work. 

As such, the Letter that follows is a mixture of our own account, interspersed with pieces of correspondence from you. It paints a richer picture than can be captured in numbers. Do read on, it is partly written by you after all. 

(We are sorry that once again we are a few months behind on responding to all of the letters you have written in - the reading and thinking that underpins consistently writing 2,600 words of original work every week tends to take up a significant amount of time. If you are still waiting for a reply, know that it is coming.)

The Year of The Scholar

— Written by The Critic and The Tatler

2025 has been the second full year of The Scholarly Letter and perhaps the most developmental one so far. When we initially started writing this publication, we hardly knew what, why, and who we were writing for. As actors in the world of scholarship – The Critic as a doctoral candidate and The Tatler as a scientific publisher – all we knew was that we wanted to write about scholarship itself. This world interested us. It always had. Otherwise we would hardly have found ourselves in it.

We were both avid writers and readers but we were also finding the kind of writing we had to do for our day jobs – as a PhD candidate and a publisher – increasingly tiring and monotonous. At the same time, we were also in the habit of writing letters to each other, in the form of emails, about things we read and experienced in our day-to-day work. So, at the beginning of 2024, we decided – after much debate and disagreement – to extend these Letter-emails to a wider list of people. Thus arrived the idea of a newsletter-publication.

But as soon as we extended the scope of our recipients – that is, it was no longer for just ‘our eyes’ but rather an external ‘audience’ – we stuttered and stammered. We began to think of what ‘the audience’ would want to see and find useful. This perceived audience-gaze muffled our voices, and with it, it distorted our writing into a utility-based, how-to publication.

The beginning of our publication coincided with the mass proliferation of AI tools for research. This not only ushered in a new era of productivity culture in research more broadly, but also captured our writerly imaginations of what we thought people wanted to read about. Safe to say, there were AI tools knocking at our door, offering to pay us a fixed fee for every pair of eyeballs that saw their ad at the top of our Letter. And in the interest of honesty, we shall admit that in 2024 we agreed to run ads with some of them and were sorely tempted to run more. However, words cannot express the sense of disappointment that we felt seeing these ads in our precious publication. Introducing marketing gimmicks and cheap, sensationalist copy, when what we really wanted to do was write about the world of scholarship – as we saw it, experienced it, and wanted to reimagine it – was unbearable.

All of this, however, changed after a single, simple, surprisingly freeing realisation towards the end of 2024. 

One evening, after sending out a particular Letter that was only read by a fraction of the people who had opted to receive it, we looked at each other and said: 

Who knows if anybody actually reads this thing?

It was a moment of frustration but also invited a small voice inside us to probe:

Well if no one reads it, then why not write what we really wanted to write about?

There were things we wanted to say. We had grievances to air. Complaints to raise. Ideas to develop and alternatives to propose. And who was going to stop us? It seemed unlikely that our current readership would protest loudly at a change in direction when we could not even be sure they were really there on the other side. 

So, we decided to embrace this freedom and ‘write like no one’s reading’. And that was the mood with which we began this current year of writing The Scholarly Letter. 

There were three further decisions that defined this new era of The Scholarly Letter. 

First, not only were we going to stop writing for a perceived audience who desperately sought utility-based, practical how-to guides for doing research fast and easily, but we were also going to stop running ads. We were determined to remove anything which muffled, distorted, and compromised our writing. This included the permissions required from ad partners to produce content that was “marketing friendly”. 

Second, we decided not to paywall the publication. How we were going to fund it, we had not a clue. We hoped one day it might become a reader-supported publication funded through a donation-based model – if it even were to survive this new era. For the time being, however, all we knew was that we needed to write in the way we wanted to write. 

Third, we decided to push back against the prevailing culture of consumption. Instead of cramming as many bite-sized items as possible into each weekly Letter, we chose to reduce the number of curated pieces in our Digest and discuss them more deeply. We were tired of convenience culture in general but especially in the context of scholarship that promises to save time and render everything bite-sized. We decided we would write for scholars who were willing and able to dedicate time to what we created – whether or not they existed.

With these decisions in place and in mind, we ushered in a new era of The Scholarly Letter in 2025.

As we said earlier, there were many things in the worlds of scholarship, research, and academia that had been provoking us for some time but which we had so far restrained ourselves from writing about. Chief among these was a growing unease with the ways knowledge has come to be organised both within and beyond formal academic institutions: increasingly financialised, accelerated, abstracted, and severed from meaning, care, and response-ability. 

We found ourselves writing with suspicion about solutions that promised liberation to underfunded scholars while reproducing the very same market logics they claimed to escape, whether through established institutions or their supposed alternatives. At the same time, we were beginning to turn this critical gaze inward, asking how we ourselves understood our place as participants within these knowledge systems. Composing with Franz Kafka’s Research Like a Dog, we came to recognise that knowing is always bounded by inherited frameworks of thought, by perceptual and conceptual limits. And yet we also understood that this hardly rendered our research meaningless. It did, however, mark an important philosophical shift for us: a renewed epistemic humility.

As we continued to write through these provocations, our attention increasingly turned to the consequences of knowledge as it is currently produced and valued. We were troubled by the persistent disjunction between soaring scientific and technological advancement and the stubborn continuity of degraded material conditions on the ground. Scientific knowledge, we asserted, could no longer justify itself by capability alone. It must also address who the knowing is for and what it can do for real, material conditions of life. And yet, this critique of science abstracting itself away from life did not lead us to abandon research or scholarship. Instead, it forced us to ask a more fundamental question: why were we drawn to science and research in the first place? Beneath the layers of utility, impact, and performance metrics, we rediscovered and reaffirmed curiosity – the pleasure of thinking, the desire to ask difficult questions, the slow and often futile formation of understanding – as the animating force that had first made us scholars. 

Through this writing, we were beginning to form the philosophical foundations of The Scholarly Letter. More than that, writing in this way – openly, freely, and unapologetically – provoked us even further, and much more sharply this time. 

The ways we were beginning to think about scholarship sat uneasily, even incompatibly, with our everyday experiences of academia as its proper institutional home. Increasingly, the figure of the Academic, shaped by speed, metrics, competition, and financial value, no longer held its shape for us as something that aligned with the vision of scholarship we were trying to articulate. Looking back at our writing from that early period of The Scholarly Letter, what we realise now is that the Scholar had been present all along: in our resistance to hype and novelty, our acceptance of epistemic limits, our insistence on meaning, our defence of curiosity, and our refusal to treat knowledge as a commodity. So when we wrote The Scholar Manifesto in April of this year, we did not introduce this figure so much as finally give them a name.

In naming the Scholar, we also began to understand who we were writing with and for: 

those who recognise themselves in this tension, who have felt the Scholar strained within the Academic, and who are seeking a way of remaining in a sincere, committed, and dedicated relationship to knowledge through an altogether different vision of scholarship. 

The first four months of writing in this new mood renewed The Scholarly Letter. We had landed on why we were writing – to forward a different kind of vision for scholarship – and who we wanted to write for – you, Scholar. This kind of writing was, therefore, foundational to our becoming as both writers and as a publication. 

Looking back now, we believe that this internal renewal also brought about a renewal in our readership. In forming a definition of who we were writing for, we believe our readers too engaged in a renewed understanding of themselves as Scholars. We believe so because we began to receive correspondence from some of you. 

But we no longer felt fettered by the chains of being read by an audience.

If anything, knowing that you were reading our Letters, dear Scholar, gave us a sharper sense of purpose. 

In recognising the responsibility we had to our small but growing community of scholars, we found ourselves compelled to grapple with the real problems, frustrations, and suffocations that contemporary scholars today face. 

We had to look nowhere else but the publication’s inbox: offer after offer from AI companies for promoting their tools. So, we set our sights on the very same AI companies we had agreed to work with during the first year of this publication. We disliked the way they preyed upon over-worked academics attempting to maintain a relationship with knowledge under enormous pressure to produce. In our eyes, the Tech-bros bringing these tools into our work did not care about scholarship. They were happy to prescribe a vision of research as something that should be easy and fast – it was profitable for them. 

The Tech-broification of Research was bitingly critical – perhaps in part because we were cleansing our conscience of our earlier dealings with them. But more importantly because it may have prevented at least some scholars from falling into the trap of believing that research can and should be frictionless: 

Reading the correspondence from the scholars we were writing for, we began to notice the intensely personal nature of our shared experiences with scholarship and academia.

Up to that point, we had examined, interrogated, and analysed the problems and frustrations faced by contemporary scholars, but had largely shied away from sharing how these had manifested in our own personal contexts – though they certainly had. Otherwise, could we have been provoked enough to raise them to the level of analysis?

And so, The Scholarly Letter took on a more introspective tone. Having decided to define our publication as something distinct and yet not completely divorced from academia, The Critic devoted three essays to explaining her decision neither to leave nor remain within academia but to stand outside it. 

In the first installation of this series, she wrote vulnerably about how and why – at least in her case – she had come to break up with academia. Ultimately, the reasons were not so different from The Scholar Manifesto – competition, a lack of care, metrification – but here they were personal. 

And, sadly, not unique. 

It was an account of what it feels like to be an aspiring academic trying to navigate the modern academy and it prompted a veritable flood of letters back from scholars who had experienced similar things: 

As she continued to write this series, she reminded us that, as scholars we hardly ever fall out of love with knowledge, with research; rather, we come to find it insufferable to sustain that relationship within modern academia. So, she told us she could not let go of the scholar within, but also that she could no longer stay inside academia. Instead, she would stand outside it. 

The last essay of her series caused a crack inside of us. 

What does standing outside actually mean? Are we serious about this? Can it really be done? How could it be done? 

The time for identifying the problems we were aiming to tackle – for saying things we had felt but dared not say out loud – had to give way to something more. 

After all, were we really just going to become yet another iteration of the academic who writes eloquently about all the problems they observe from their ivory tower without offering very much in the way of alternatives? 

Having written so energetically, extensively and evocatively about all that we saw as wrong with the system for the previous seven months, it felt like our responsibility to now reimagine it.

And so, in this next phase of The Scholarly Letter, we began to be guided by new  set of questions: 

How could we have a different kind of academia?

What kinds of changes would we need to nurture the scholar and their scholarship? 

With this, a writing of a different kind and purpose began. 

Where else could we have started if not perhaps what is one of the most problematic areas of our scholarly world – publishing? It was also an area of particular interest and concern for The Tatler. 

During his time in publishing, he had seen first hand the way that the “publish or perish” mentality hurts academics, hinders true knowledge creation, and enriches private publishing companies. Thereafter, as he read and thought more about scientific publishing, he found himself unable to point to the act of publishing research and knowledge itself as the core problem. Instead he began to ask: 

But what of the goliath machines of scientific publishing – yes, the publishing companies – which stand almost impenetrable to challenge due to their fundamental positioning in research and academia? 

Here, he realised, was where the problem lay: with the companies themselves, which facilitate, manage, organise, and administer our entire practice and process of publishing. 

A different model could be possible, he proposed, if publishing companies hired fewer administrative staff and instead compensated scholars who do all the essential work of publishing research. It was a radical proposal but not a complete overhaul. The ultimate benefit, he argued, would be a transformation of our current system from being publisher-led to scholar-led. The Tatler concluded that particular essay by writing:

To which a response came:

What else was there to do but keep going? 

We had long disagreed with the logics of speed and efficiency in the pursuit of progress that have come to dominate academia. To us, the entire system supporting the creation of knowledge seemed to be threatening to buckle under the strain exerted by these forces. Perhaps more at risk – judging by the Letters we were receiving from you – were the scholars themselves. 

The speed and scale of science – and more importantly, its self-positioning that the only way forward is more and faster – seemed to us one of the critical ways in which scholarship was losing its way. So we asked: is there a limit to how fast science can safely progress? What are the minimum requirements for good scholarship to flourish? Where are the thresholds which, once crossed, begin to damage it? 

We turned Kate Raworth’s concept of the ‘Doughnut’ and applied it to scholarship. Using this model, we suggested certain minimum conditions for high quality scholarship: opportunities for intellectual risk taking, curiosity driven inquiry, time for deep thinking and reflection etc. Correspondingly, we proposed outer limits that would cause harm if exceeded: preferences for speed and fast returns on research activity, excessive publications, systemic burnout and job insecurity.

In reimagining some of the most critical parts of the scholarly world so boldly, we wondered with a certain sense of hesitation, 

‘Were we really headed in the right direction?’ 

Once again, fellow scholar-readers wrote in with their thoughts on our proposals:

We felt reassured. So we continued. 

As always seems to be the case, the more we wrote and explored these questions the more new avenues opened up. We had so readily been writing about the conditions required for good scholarship to flourish and imagining what a healthy environment for scholarly work might look like. But how would we evaluate what good scholarship is? We had done away with the metrics and yardsticks used by contemporary academia. So what were we to replace them with? How could we tell if the new vision of scholarship we were imagining – should it ever come to pass – was successful? 

Turning to scholars and their work from the early 20th century, we took inspiration from how seriously they attended to their work while also taking immense pleasure in it, finding joy and beauty in the act of scholarship. From this, we argued that the success of the scholar and their scholarship could hardly be ‘measured’ quantitatively but must instead be experienced qualitatively. It was along micro-aspects of the scholar’s everyday life that we proposed our definition of scholarly success. We wrote, 

Far from provoking an outcry against such romantic nonsense, our readers showed us that these ways of redefining success in scholarship were, in fact, welcome: 

Romantic Academics we shall remain and romantically shall we keep writing. In perhaps what were some of the most romantic Letters we ever sent out, The Tatler experimented with writing that was autobiographical yet fictional in nature. These Letters were full of hope and optimism. How could they not have been when we received the kinds of responses that we did from you? 

Over the course of this year, the Letters we’ve been writing have shaped us. The Letters we received back from you – our readers, our fellow scholars – have shaped us too. And so we ask you again, 

How could two idealists, so called “Romantic Academics”, not be full of hope and optimism?

Starting right from his own experiences of life in the lab as a doctoral candidate to his time spent in scientific publishing, The Tatler wrote about a future yet to come in a three-part series. Indulging in a future in which the practices of scholarship had been fostered under a different culture and a different set of conditions, his fiction playfully – yet definitively – set forth the kind of scholarly future we are setting ourselves up to work towards. Such speculative fabulation was a necessary step in our journey towards imagining, and even creating, the possible, probable, and desirable futures so urgently required by our world of scholarship. It appeared there was agreement here: 

We went from laying down our philosophical foundations, to contextualising this philosophy within the real, experiential problematics of contemporary scholarship, to adopting a forward-looking approach that asked how we might do scholarship differently – and be different kinds of scholars — all within the span of the last twelve months. 

Did we not begin this essay by telling you that this year has been a developmental one for The Scholarly Letter?

And as we near the end of this year, we are more optimistic than ever that the ideas and proposals we have laid out through our writing — for bringing about positive change in scholarship, research, and knowledge — will come to fruition as we move forward together. Having registered as a not-for-profit Community Interest Company, The Scholar Initiative CIC, we are already taking tangible steps towards bringing this vision to life. One of the first projects we undertook this year, as part of translating ideas from The Scholarly Letter into practice, was to create a space where scholars could come together to practise a different kind of scholarship in community. We called it Scholar Square.

We began to realise that nearly 4,000 scholars were suspended together in a shared mood and disposition every Thursday as they read the Letters we sent out. But did they know they were not alone in their thoughts, provocations, and reflections? For the longest time, we ourselves had felt alone. But through the letters we received, we came to understand that we were not. And so we decided it was no longer enough simply to write about these ideas. We needed to bring scholars into community, to place them into conversation with one another, and to show that another scholarship is possible – if we work together and practise what we had, until then, been quietly thinking about all along.

We look forward to thinking, reading, writing, and communing together as scholars as another year rolls around.

Read The Scholarly Letter in full. Every. Single. Thursday. Plus get access to our entire 137,500 word archive.

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 knowledge and scholarship begins in conversation and communing. Respond to this email, Scholar, we want to hear what you have to say and share.