The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy by Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber (review)

This slender volume has gotten a fair amount of attention since its publication and understandably so. The authors, both accomplished English professors in Ontario universities, have written an engaging reflection on working in academia in an age of speed. Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber begin with the "desire to be less harried" by the demands of corporatized education, and they transform it "into a philosophical and political commitment to shift [their] sense of time" in accordance with a more humane and localized model of practice.

Berg and Seeber base their model on the slow food movement; the latter, they explain, began in the 1980s as an answer to the fast food industry that has come to dominate much of the global food supply. The slow movement now "challenges the frantic pace and standardization of contemporary culture" in numerous areas; this book extends its approach, for the first time, into the academic world, a "sector of society which should be cultivating deep thought" but which often seems enamoured of speed, corporate models of productivity, and consumerist thinking.

The authors show much that is wrong with the drive for speed. For example, they cite research that shows that the ease of accessing journal articles digitally can narrow the range of citations and lead unintentionally to groupthink. Berg and Seeber stress the importance of letting research take time. Similarly, they argue, teaching, service, and general quality of life can be enriched by a slow approach and in similar ways. Their chapter on teaching is full of practical, humane advice that reflects many years of experience; it is perhaps the book's best section. Here especially it is clear that the "slow" in Berg and Seeber's thinking does not mean "lazy"; rather, it means giving tasks the time to be done well and making space for people to work in a manner appropriate to that goal.

The book strives throughout to be both practical and ethical; for example, the authors point out and reject that common brand of "time management" advice, much of which seems designed to rationalize overwork and which they rightly regard as "unrealistic and simply not sustainable." In addition, they argue that the perfectionist expectations held by many in the academy set people up for failure and should therefore be rejected. Their goal of making the academy a more humane place is admirable, and their ability to make connections between, for example, Henry Giroux's critical pedagogy and the slow movement can be interesting and thought provoking.

All that said, the book has limitations. For example, while Berg and Seeber note the casualization of academic labour, they do so in little detail, and this notice does not extend far into their own recommendations. If full-time faculty decide to slow down, how will this affect less securely employed academics? Could a slow movement among full-time faculty make the problem of casualization, and, indeed, of corporatization, worse than it already is? What, indeed, are the armies of sessional instructors, who do not get paid if they slow down, supposed to do with this book's advice? A more detailed consideration of how and, indeed, whether slowness can work for people in multiple forms of academic work would improve matters; although the authors acknowledge their privilege as tenured faculty, the implications of academic hierarchies problematize their recommendations.

Another objection might be that the slow movement is in origin an ethical consumer movement, based on individual choice. But if the "fast" academy is a product of neoliberal corporatization, then it is hard to see how actions based on such a model can form an effective resistance. The continued dominance of the global fast food industry suggests that the slow food model upon which this book is based has had, at most, only limited success; it may have improved the lives of some individuals, but surely it has not worked as a form...