A scholar is a person who is a researcher or has expertise in an academic discipline. A scholar can also be an academic, who works as a professor, teacher, or researcher at a university. An academic usually holds an advanced degree or a terminal degree, such as a master's degree or a doctorate (PhD). Independent scholars and public intellectuals work outside the academy yet may publish in academic journals and participate in scholarly public discussion.
In contemporary English usage, the term scholar sometimes is equivalent to the term academic, and describes a university-educated individual who has achieved intellectual mastery of an academic discipline, as instructor and as researcher. Moreover, before the establishment of universities, the term scholar identified and described an intellectual person whose primary occupation was professional research. In 1847, minister Emanuel Vogel Gerhart spoke of the role of the scholar in society:
[A] scholar [is one] whose whole inward intellectual and moral being has been symmetrically unfolded, disciplined and strengthened under the influence of truth... No one faculty should be drawn out to the neglect of others. The whole inner man should be unfolded harmoniously.[1]
Gerhart argued that a scholar can not be focused on a single discipline, contending that knowledge of multiple disciplines is necessary to put each into context and to inform the development of each:
[T]o be a scholar involves more than mere learning... A genuine scholar possesses something more: he penetrates and understands the principle and laws of the particular department of human knowledge with which he professes acquaintance. He imbibes the life of Science... [and] his mind is transfused and moulded by its energy and spirit.[1]
A 2011 examination outlined the following attributes commonly accorded to scholars as "described by many writers, with some slight variations in the definition":[2]