I believe in scholarship. I keep the words “scholar” and “scholarship” in a special separate compartment in my head, adjacent to but not quite touching words like “academic” and “university”. Anybody can be a scholar (at least according to this idiosyncratic vision of mine), no matter what else they happen to do, or how they earn their living. Or what class, colour, gender, ethnic origin (etc) they happen to be. It takes a lot of time, and may not be compatible with being highly social (this is probably idiosyncratic again, just because I’m not very social myself), but I truly think that anybody who takes the time to think and read and reflect seriously about things, pretty much anything, can call themself (I need this gender-neutral third-person singular reflexive pronoun!) a scholar.
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