The Slow Professor was a book recommendation given by Scholar Culture, and has become the one book I can't stop recommending to fellow scholars ever since. Even at the time I was reading it, I would take it out of my bag at Uni and recommend it to other PhD candidate friends (no, not at all intrusive).
It goes without saying, I loved this book: a beautiful articulation of why it matters to take time with our writing and thinking, to be generous with ourselves when our daily patterns of creativity and yearly patterns of productivity don't fit the corporate model, to embrace joy in teaching because interactions in the classroom are effective as well as intellectual, and to seek out energizing connections with our colleagues that are not about networking but about community. Imagine the university if we embraced these principles!
It's particularly satisfying that authors Berg and Seeber begin the book by quoting and picking apart the kind of managerial literatures that have come to dominate accounts of writing--and successful writing--in the academy.
Berg and Seeber convinced me that a lot of this material works to inculcate a feeling of scarcity and time panic and to underplay the structural problems in the corporate university: "Time management does not take into full account the changes to the university system: rather, it focuses on the individual, often in a punitive manner (my habits need to be pushed into shape). The real time issues are the increasing workloads, the sped-up pace, and the instrumentalism that pervades the corporate university".
This book was an interesting and timely read for me. I've been struggling juggling several tasks at once (as if I could ever do that successfully). It does a great job explaining the systemic issues within today's institutions. It also provides beneficial tips of how to collaborate and to promote collegiality among colleagues, mindfulness, and a slow movement agenda used to ensure productivity in scholarship and excitement within our learning environments.
I highly recommend this book to everyone affiliated with the academy in one way or another.
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