Iam one of many in academe who eagerly read The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy, drawn in by the promise of the book’s subtitle. The frantic pace of academic life drives us to distraction — deadlines, teaching demands, information overload, days of back-to-back meetings, the increasingly competitive and resource-squeezed nature of our work.
As an associate director of faculty development at Emory University, I am always on the lookout for antidotes to that counterproductive frenzy. In The Slow Professor, published earlier this year, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber encourage us to simplify our work habits, to allow scholarship time to be fruitful and rewarding, to be more “contemplative” than “productive.” Slowing down, they write, allows for periods of rest and perspective, and it lets scholarship “ripen” in the context of community rather than competition.
It sounds luxurious, doesn’t it? Time to think. But as I read, I wondered: Are there unintended consequences?
