The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy

In 2018 I went to a Diversity Summit through The Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society and one of the comments made by a professor from the University of California, Berkeley (Oscar Dubon, then also Vice Chancellor of Equity and Inclusion) was that you don’t have to ace tenure review, you just have to make it through. He chose not to travel to conferences because he valued spending time with his family. He passed tenure review, maybe not with flying colors, but he still made it. I read this book after attending that diversity summit and highly recommend reading it if you are interested in going into academia but don’t want to give up your personal life and loved ones to get a tenured professor position.

This book delved into many important issues facing academics today... Increasing pressures on faculty to take on administrative and staff tasks, corporatization of academia and emphasis on efficiency and quantifiable productivity, increases in workplace loneliness and ghost town hallways of faculty office buildings, etc. The bottom line is "no time to think", reflect, read, or write in the spirit of true scholars engaged in the pursuit of deeper understanding (vs. knowledge, which the authors argue is more quantifiable but not the ultimate goal). It was refreshing to know that others recognize and seek to resist these growing influences, and inspiring to hear about the potential inherent in applying the Slow Movement to academic life. A very thoughtful book and a recommended read!

The authors make a case about how changes in the academic culture are having a negative impact on wellbeing, and even quality of research and teaching. However, I was expecting more than just suggesting we have to change this state of affairs, and become "slow" professors. How these changes might be achieved in the current academic context, seem to be lacking in this long argument. I hope they continue to develop this idea, by bringing evidence to support their arguments. It is not enough to complaint about corporatization of the academic life; you have to provide a real way out.

I really dislike the failure of my fellow educators to accept responsibility for the current state of affairs. WHY is the university going "corporate?" It's because we abrogated our responsibilities and gave that power to administrators in order to free ourselves from 1) adjudicating one another's work in a serious way (thus forcing bean-counting on all of us), 2) attending to all the government-generated bureaucratic requirements that would burden us with scut-work, and 3) eliminating most of the need to advise students (i.e., hand-holding). I suspect that academics of the past worked HARDER than we do, although they may have been under less pressure to justify their existence.Let's face it...higher education, particularly the humanities and the social sciences, is mostly cultural overhead. In the past we taught this stuff only to those who could pay (i.e., the rich), thereby paying our own way as it were. But we aren't doing that anymore, and there are a lot of us. People who aren't allowed "slow lives" pay taxes and tuition to fund our (usually unnecessary) activities, so let's stop whining, accept our responsibilities, and carve out a middle way between bean-counting and pondering the universe in our herringbone jackets. There's plenty to be grateful for.Wish I hadn't bought this indulgent nonsense.

This book has given me hope. I can see possibilities as to how to rethink my work and my workplace relations. Thank you!

Now that I am retired from full-time teaching, I can revel in the time to think and write. I feel whole and happy. I teach a few chosen classes online. This book makes me recall all of the frustration and anguish of teaching full time. I did not have time to think. I was besieged by administrative duties. It is a shame that I had to retire in order to enjoy my vocation. Something must change.

I've been teaching for 20 years at an urban university and have witnessed the corporatization first hand It certainly harms students, weakens the teaching profession, and attempts to eliminate the culture of shared governance. This book is a must-read for professors and, more importantly, for students who want a good education.

I’ve given it to friends and colleagues. It is a wonderful book. The title leaves a bit to be desired, it isn’t about intellectually disabled professors. I’d prefer the professor who slows down.

There is an external view of academics as ivory tower effete dilettantes who spend all their time swanning around, thinking big thoughts, or just kicking back during the long vacations. There’s no real work involved, is there?Then there is the reality: ever increasing bureaucracy, more scrabbling for more students, more worrying about “student feedback”, more scrabbling for ever reducing (per capita) research funding, more pressure to publish. I spent nearly two decades in industry, and have spent over a decade in academia: I can say with conviction that academia is much harder work and longer hours.Bosses will say, but that’s because academia is vocational: you work so hard because you enjoy it. Well, we enjoy some of it, maybe even most of it, which is more than many people can say. But also if we don’t work so hard, we fall behind harder working peers, we don’t get promoted, we don’t get the research funding, we get in a death spiral. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons. And when we claim we are stressed because we have too much work to do, we are sent on time management courses (which we have no time for), rather than having workload reduced.This thought-provoking little book (a mere 90 pages of text, to be digestible by the hurried academic, yet sufficiently dense with references to be academically rigorous), analyses the problem, and advocates slowing down, and savouring, the academic life. This is by explicit analogy with Slow Food and as a part of the Slow Movement in general. There are chapters on teaching, and research, and, crucial for academic learning, on collegiality. The call is for individual researchers to regain a sense of agency in the face of overpowering bureaucracy.The authors write from the perspective of social scientists, but the findings and comments are equally applicable to other disciplines. The book documents much evidence of the problems, and suggests some approaches to mitigate these.How well this will go down with that “overpowering bureaucracy” remains to be seen. The issue with bureaucrats is they focus on those outputs, on those products, (presumably) because those are easy to measure, to count, to quantify. Students are to be assessed against learning outcomes: have they learned X, Y, Z? Yet students should grow and learn and change, through a process of becoming educated to think, and gaining meta-skills that can be adapted in a changing world. Research is to be assessed by publication and impact: how many journal papers and books? Yet researchers should grow and learn and change, through a process of reflection, and thinking, and experimenting. With much of academia, both teaching and research, most of the value lies in this process of becoming, hard to measure, even invisible in some cases. How much work are you really doing when reading a book, or staring at a screen, or just staring into space, thinking? Where’s the output, the result, the evidence of your work?Learning and discovering and critiquing and thinking, like the rest of life, is a verb, not a noun.I must read more about this Slow Movement. If I can find the time.

Very helpful to consider the authors’ argument when confronted by an unreasonable quantity of utterly pointless admin! Also for those of us worried by the trend of reframing the student-professor relationship as between ‘client’ and ‘provider’.

Excellent and quick to read. A great diagnosis of contemporary problems in academia

A passionate attempt to apply the principles of the "Slow Movement" to the academic world. There is a lot in here that was attractive and encouraging. Much will only really be relevant to those who hold positions in large universities that are being "corporatized." That said, as someone who doesn't have a job like that, yet is involved in the academic world, seeking to publish, do research, etc., there was much to be taken away about approaching such endeavours with a different mindset, in order to get what is truly valuable out of such work. Filled with lots of helpful sources for further reading on the topic.

As an academic in North America, this book was simultaneously sobering, powerfully resonant, and personally liberating. The issues that Maggie and Barbara (I feel like we're on first name terms) discuss are all ones I've been struggling with over the past 12 years as a prof. Time...teaching...the downloading of responsibility after responsibility... the unreal pressure to publish/present/chase grant $$ no matter what (it doesn't matter if you have a viable research topic: get the publication, get the $$). It should be required reading for anyone involved in higher education. My guess is there are many profs (tenured or adjuncts) out there who would find this book as big a relief as I did. Thank you to the authors.