Vacation and Slowing Down

I’m enjoying the beginning of a two-week vacation! Lots of sleeping, eating good food and enjoying the company of family. There is also reading leisurely, which I already do regularly even when I’m not on vacation. What better way to start than with The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy by Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber. I first heard about this book from an Inside HigherEd review. Then, my university organized a faculty summer book club to read it, so I signed up. (It’s a short read – purposefully so, otherwise you won’t start reading it because you might feel daunted by the tyranny of time, a subject tackled by the book.) Since one of my goals for the summer is taking the time to think by slowing my pace, I decided to start reading the book on the long plane ride. That way, I could read several pages or sections, then close my eyes, and think! The importance of taking the time to think, and its importance to teaching and scholarship, is one key message from Berg and Seeber.

The book takes inspiration from the Slow Food movement rebelling against the modern agricultural industrial complex. Here, the culprit is the corporatization of the university. Having taken on heavy administrative tasks the last few years (before taking a break this year), much of the book resonates with me. Perhaps I was also primed by reading books about the history of universities and how administration has taken an increasing role from the managerial world, in some aspects for the better, but in many other aspects for the worse. There is no simple solution. Berg and Seeber do not provide one – that is not their aim. And anyone who claims to have found the magic bullet to “solve this problem” should probably not be believed. These are the folks who got us into this situation in the first place.

This reminds me of an essay a couple of months ago by David West titled The Managerial University: A Failed Experiment? It’s a striking and succinct summary of the problem. Here’s the third paragraph that sets the stage for the essay: “In their enthusiasm for the ‘new managerialism’ and the ‘modern university’, however, politicians, bureaucrats and those academics who have hitched their fortunes to the new model seem wilfully blind to the practical results of their reforms. There is some truth in their criticisms of the old idea of the university, but in practice the management of the modern university also leaves too much to be desired. Some of the problems that beset the new model were anticipated by sceptical academics. Their criticisms were dismissed as the products of antiquated thinking and self-interest. What can you expect from academics defending their own privileges.”

While Berg and Seeber exhort faculty to band together as a community to resist the corporatization of the university, this message is not shouted from the rooftops. Rather, it is weaved into a narrative that emphasizes the benefits of slow-thinking, not slowness in terms of speed but rather in terms of richness and enjoyment. There is a chapter devoted to the enjoyment of teaching as a Slow Professor, and another that discusses research and scholarship. There is also an interesting chapter on ‘collegiality’ and community-building, as a counterpoint to the individualistic competitive ethos that permeates corporate culture at its base. This gives the book a very different tone from the more militant warnings of crisis (which have their place). Perhaps if we applied some slow-thinking to the current situation, we may collectively approach a multi-faceted response (there is no “one size fits all”) to the problems plaguing higher education, instead of allowing disruptive demagogues to hold sway. Disruption in itself is not a bad thing, but if we are students of history, we should know that what seems shiny and new is often the repackaging of old ideas – and we should be reflective and skeptical as academics.

What else did I bring along for my vacation reading? Two books that I have recently read, that could do with another round at a slower and more reflective pace. I mentioned one in a previous blog post, The Vital Question, by Nick Lane on an interesting and provocative scenario for locating the origin-of-life in hydrothermal vents. The other is a short but provocative book on learning and teaching by Frank Smith, The Book of Learning and Forgetting. Here’s the teaser: If you really want to learn something, there is nothing that can stop you. If you have no interest in learning something, all the novel pedagogy and tricks will be of no use, because you will simply forget what you are cramming as soon as you can. The author traces the institutionalization of learning with unflattering comparisons to the military complex and managerial standardization, an early version if you like to the corporate tactics of today.

Here’s to Summer Slow Reading!