Maggie Berg - The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy

I love this book. Mentors should give it to newly hired faculty members. Advisors should buy it for their graduating PhDs. Individual faculty should read it to reclaim some of their sanity.

Nancy Chick, University Chair in Teaching and Learning and Academic Director of the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, University of Calgary

I read this book with the intensity and engagement that I read a novel. Its a fresh and insightful study that reaches out to readers with wisdom as well as information.

Teresa Mangum, Director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, University of Iowa

In The Slow Professor, authors Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber neither describe nor endorse procrastination and lethargy They see the need and advocate for deliberative, imaginative, and reflective thought as definitive of a professors work and life. Creativity and contemplation, they understand, cant be multitasked It is reminiscent of the era of consciousness-raising that grounded second-wave feminism a half-century ago It gently and good-humouredly reassures the novice and the veteran alike that their fears, their feelings of futility, and their fretful excursions into sometimes damaging self-criticism are not entirely their fault. The book is aspirational and redemptive.

Howard A. Doughty, CAUT Bulletin

What Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber are doing in The Slow Professor is protesting against the corporatization of the contemporary university, and reminding us of a kind of good selfishness; theirs is a self-help book that recognises the fact that an institution can only ever be as healthy as the sum of its parts

Emma Rees, Times Higher Education

It isnt too late, Berg and Seeber write, to reclaim a more sane and deliberate rhythm of work; and to reclaim pleasure in teaching; to reclaim collegiality It is a welcome part of a crucial conversation.

Rachel Hadas, Times Literary Supplement

While its already raised some eyebrows as an example of tenured privilege, its at once an important addition and possible antidote to the growing literature on the corporatization of the university What makes Berg and Seebers argument unique, however, is that they reject the crisis language that dominates the many books that have come before Instead, Slow Professor proposes with some optimism that professors have the power to change the direction of the university by becoming the eye of the storm, working deliberately and thoughtfully in ways that somehow now seem taboo.

Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Education

Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seebers The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy is a much-discussed manifesto that has launched a vitally needed conversation on the importance and pleasures of protecting open enquiry from the frantic pace of the modern academic assembly line.

Susan Prentice, Times Higher Education, Books of the Year 2016

Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy

Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber

University of Toronto Press

Toronto Buffalo London

University of Toronto Press 2016

Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com

Printed in Canada

Reprinted in paperback 2017

ISBN 978-1-4426-4556-1 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-2185-1 (paper)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Berg, Maggie, author
The slow professor : challenging the culture of speed in the academy/ Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4426-4556-1 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-2185-1 (paperback)

1. College teaching. 2. Education, Higher Philosophy. 3. Slow life movement. 4. Time management. I. Seeber, Barbara Karolina, 1968, author II. Title.

LB2331.B45 2016 378.1'25 C2015-907570-X

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

It has taken me a long time to write this foreword. But then, writing usually does take a long time, I find certainly long when compared to the brevity and unsatisfactoriness of the outcome. However, it may be a mistake, a representative and revealing mistake, to concentrate on the outcome. Writing is a complex activity, and quite a lot happens along the way, including discovering what we really think. In the present case, for example, I have also found myself doing some background reading, brooding on the functions of a foreword to a book which already does a good job of introducing itself to its readers, and reflecting on the differences between classroom teaching (the default form of university teaching assumed in North America) and lectures, seminars, and tutorials (the main familiar modes in the UK). As it happens, I have also made quite a lot of coffee, been running, imagined conversations with the books authors (whom Ive never met), and tidied my study. I concede that a more disciplined writer might have dispensed with some of these elements, though Im a little suspicious of those aspects of discipline which are self-punitive to the point where unremitting toil becomes a perverse psychic satisfaction in itself. Still, these or other comparable ingredients are part of most writers experience of writing, and one of the many valuable recommendations in this book is that we academics should, collectively, talk to each other more about how we actually spend our time, with all the anxieties, displacements, and failures that involves, rather than presenting ourselves as the overachieving writing robots whom most systems of assessment seem designed to reward.

Such systems are supposed to stimulate productivity, though the truth is that one of the main obstacles to genuine intellectual productivity in contemporary academia is that most scholars publish too much. I do not say that they