Review
Högre utbildning
Vol. 8 | Nr. 2 | 2018 | 47–50
Review of he Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture
of Speed in the Academy
he Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. Maggie Berg and Barbara
K. Seeber, with a new Foreword by Stefan Collini. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017,
ISBN: 978-1-4875-2185-1.
I entered the academy having inherited a particular view of higher education from my mentors.
hey informed me about what I would face if I were lucky enough to land a teaching position.
Not surprisingly, what they shared with me was an accurate foretelling of what I have experienced, including the exhausting Retention, Promotion, and Tenure (RPT) process, with its
focus on research, teaching, and service – and ranked in that order!
It was after a quarter century of being a professor that I was fortunate enough to stumble
upon he Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy by Maggie Berg and
Barbara K. Seeber, a book that expresses much of what I have found wanting in academic life.
he Slow Professor is an enlightening commentary on the contemporary life of the university
professor. he authors begin with a foreword by Stefan Collini, a preface, and an introduction,
followed by four chapters, a conclusion, and works cited (a whopping 150 titles).
Berg and Seeber have done well with Collini setting the stage in just ive pages. Collini makes
clear what awaits the reader of this timely book: an elucidation of “the existential condition” of
today’s professor. Building on Collini’s claim that the book has “elements of a self-help manual,”
it is diicult not to read he Slow Professor as an “existential threat” to that very condition.
Collini tells us the existential condition of the professor has changed due to “the corporatization of higher education.” What has emerged within the university is a managerialism that oversees the neoliberal model of economic production, one that seeks advantage in environments of
intense competition. Administrators have increasingly redeined the academic life of professors
in terms of productivity – requiring them to be as productive as possible in order to beneit from
a limited (or even dwindling) pool of resources (viz., release time and money).
By emphasizing productivity as the measure of eiciency in converting inputs into useful
outputs over time, time has become increasingly important. his in turn has made it even
more urgent for professors to rise to the top of the institutional pecking order. A day has just
so many hours, so the task is to increase the output to time ratio. his neatly meshes with the
RPT process that quantiies the ranking of journal publications, teaching evaluations, and the
committee work and/or community engagement undertaken. his makes it easier to reward (or
punish) professors as needed.
Unfortunately, this focus on productivity carries over to the personal sphere, where the hurried life continues and checklists abound. Imbalance becomes emblematic of the ambitious
professor who feels the need to follow the mantra: “Get through with one’s ‘home life’ as quickly
as possible because there is ‘serious’ work to be done.” hose who believe that the professor
leaves campus at the end of the day without books and papers in hand are simply delusional.
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©2018 Rory J. Conces. his is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0
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Citation: Rory J. Conces (2018) «Review of he Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy», Högre utbildning, 8(2), 47–50.
http://dx.doi.org/10.23865/hu.v8.1293
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Rory J. Conces
he adage “here is always more work to do” is one that gnaws at every professor, even though
to succumb to it is ruinous to their overall well-being.
hankfully, as intimated by Collini, the current existential condition of the professor is not
absolute. Exposing the corporatization of higher education and the plight of the professor is just
the beginning of the “existential threat” that is intended to re-humanize both the professor and
the intellectual life of the university. he preface makes clear that the authors regard their little
book as a manifesto for the insertion of slow principles into the university. A set of new mantras
becomes clear: “Slow down and enjoy being a scholar and teacher!; Enjoy interaction with your
colleagues, both old and new!; and Make room for a personal life!”
he introduction is a mixture of personal relections and the results of a number of surveys
and analyses that together reify the author’s concerns. As the authors make clear, academic
training involves assimilation into a culture of “scholarly individualism.” his is especially true
of those in the humanities who are not a part of anything resembling “team science,” with its
crowded laboratories and extensive co-authorship of publications.
Berg and Seeber do not hide the fact that the life of the academic is a privileged one. Finding
positions with comparable job security, lexibility of hours, and time to be passionate about one’s
work is diicult. Yet today’s scholars are dealing with increasing amounts of stress, something
that post-graduate students should be mindful of when deciding whether to join the academy.
Stress from both the competitiveness of academic life and the misconception that professors
make up a “leisured class” conducting questionable research is nothing new. What is ratcheting
up the stress levels for professors these days is the corporatization of higher education. Now professors worry about justifying their positions and their programs, especially when concerns like
“return on investment,” “capable workforce,” and “job placement” become more pronounced in
the eyes of legislators, administrators, parents, and students.
As the introduction ends, the reader understands that the rest of the book will be an attempt
to use the slow movement to save both the professor and the university from the efects of
corporatization. he momentous turning point for the professor will be “to act with purpose,
taking the time for deliberation, relection, and dialogue, cultivating emotional and intellectual
resilience…,” that is, to take back agency. As for the university, an important turning point will
be the renewal of “non-instrumental intellectual enquiry…this critical thinking…at the heart
of the university as a public good….”
Berg and Seeber do a masterful job in packing each chapter with insights gleaned from their
own personal experiences and from the writings of others. Chapter One, “Time Management
and Timelessness,” is the most “visceral” of the chapters.
One truth about time that encapsulates this chapter is that no matter how much “real”
time the professor has each day, it is never enough. Academic work is always ongoing, due in
large measure to “increasing workloads, the sped-up pace, and the instrumentalism that pervades the corporate university.” Work now begins to deine the corporate academic, with time
management no longer making sense as “busyness” and “one-upmanship” begin to dominate as
virtuous behaviors.
Another insight is the fragmentation of the academic’s workday. Between teaching, class
preparation and marking, meetings, advising and mentoring, dissertation committees, and professional service, a professor’s week is composed of a sequence of stressful starts and stops.
Teaching and the rest can survive fragmentation, but research is diferent. Some professors
can eke out a sentence in-between classes, but many cannot. What they need to prosper in their
Högre utbildning 49
intellectual work is “timelessness,” the experience of becoming so engrossed in a task or an event
that one loses all sense of time.
To ofset these problems, Berg and Seeber ofer ive recommendations. Of those, I found
lessening one’s workload and carving out regular periods of timelessness to be obvious truths.
Unfortunately, these are the most diicult to achieve because peer pressure and the corporate
culture work to thwart them. I suggest it will take much courage and perseverance to counter
such forces.
Chapter Two, “Pedagogy and Pleasure,” addresses slow principles in teaching. I know when
I have held a good class: when I am “jacked up,” and my students feel it too as they continue
the discussion in the hallway. Talking about ideas is important, but successful teaching is much
more. As Berg and Seeber note, “Pleasure – experienced by the instructor and the students – is
the most important predictor of ‘learning outcomes.’” he authors’ expansive exploration of
afective and emotional goals, as well as cognitive and informational goals, leads to further
insights, including the motivation associated with “the sense of belonging” within a learning
community.
Unfortunately, these pedagogical tidbits are even more diicult to achieve when teaching
online, a “sort of teaching” that is becoming increasingly common. I also teach online, but I
feel much more at home in the face-to-face classroom than I do “managing” students in a virtual environment. Perhaps I am unable or unwilling to implement a “pedagogy of pleasure” for
my distance education students, thus failing to produce “creative, intellectually expansive, and
resilient students.”
Recommendations are ofered under the heading of “Enjoying Teaching” and are divided
into three sets regarding (1) entering class, (2) sustaining class, and (3) preparing for class. Most
of these are worth taking seriously. he recommendation that resonated with me the most
deals with my least favorite activity: the marking of assignments. heir advice is to think of the
assignment as something that is also “useful and enjoyable for the student themselves.” Perhaps
more to the point, as herese Huston notes, “students learn on the basis of what they do in your
course, not on the basis of what you know.”
he most onerous of the chapters is the third, “Research and Understanding.” he hallmark
idea of the corporatization of university research is that it is supposed to produce knowledge
that is quantiiable, applied, transferable, fundable, and proitable. It is when strategic mission
statements understand “excellence” as “groundbreaking research” and when priority areas are
understood in terms of “productivity” and “external funding,” that faculty are “nudged” to
comply with the imperatives of the institution. So-called knowledge creation may place the
humanities at a disadvantage, however. To ofset this, the authors procure a more apt description
of the contribution of the humanities: “understanding” rather than “knowledge.” By making
this subtle shift, as Collini notes, publication becomes “the expression of the deepened understanding which some individual has acquired, through much reading, discussion, and relection,
on a topic which has been in some sense ‘known’ for many generations.” his is in keeping with
Berg’s and Seeber’s central claim that slowing down research makes it less about production and
more about “contemplation, connectedness, fruition, and complexity.”
Berg’s and Seeber’s recommendations here total nine, but three stand out and are especially
meaningful for PhD students. First, do not simply search online, but wander the library stacks,
allowing serendipity to assert itself, and, second, do not select the “fashionable” research topic,
but work on what drives your curiosity.
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he fourth chapter, “Collegiality and Community,” is the shortest, due to the diiculties in
dealing with human relationships. Professors rarely consider their own wellness, which includes
the interpersonal. he idea that we need support from colleagues seems antithetical to the solitary scholar. No wonder faculty oices are rarely occupied, often to the dismay of students. hey
are more like malls, places that one goes to only sporadically and only for short periods. Even so,
collegiality and conviviality are an important part of anyone’s psychological well-being.
At this juncture, Berg and Seeber ofer no recommendations, but only less than rousing
“points of relection,” including not making all department events mandatory, venting one’s
frustration, and willingness to take risks in being candid with one’s colleagues. he inal chapter
is the weakest of the lot.
his leads into a very short conclusion, a relection of how he Slow Professor is itself an
example of a slow collaboration between Berg and Seeber. It is the product of conversation, the
centerpiece of their method. Reducing shame and building trust gave them the wherewithal to
push forward with this project. In the end, they were able to “think together” and resist corporatism just a bit.
he Slow Professor stands as a dedicated attempt to revive a much-needed vision of the professoriate and the university. It is a virtue of Berg’s and Seeber’s book that it aims to cover the
diagnosis and treatment of what ails the academy in so few pages. However, its discussions of the
mayhem that the corporate model has wreaked on both professor and university are integrated
with recommendations that only make sense at the personal and interpersonal levels. When it
comes to ways of bringing about institutional change, the book falls lat. Until such changes
begin to take hold, we are all on our own.
Rory J. Conces
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Department of Philosophy
University of Nebraska at Omaha USA
Email: rconces@unomaha.edu