This is part of more mods for the Academic theme. In this case, I attempted to change the RSS feed to show the header image. R-Bloggers show the first image in the rss feed as the post image rather than the header image specified in the post. So I changed the rss template in the Academic theme to specify a featured image. The comments are most likely incorrect in some places since I am just learning how to use the Hugo templates but the line works.