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Mullins, Rima Y.

768 
Book Review 
Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of 
Speed in the Academy. University of Toronto Press, 2016, pp. 115, $14.92 (cloth and 
paperback) 
Reviewed by Rima Y. Mullins
The premise of The Slow Professor – that “[w]e need … to protect a time 
and a place for timeless time, and to remind ourselves continually that this is 
not self-indulgent but rather crucial to intellectual work” – is an appealing one 
(28)1. Described by the authors as part manifesto, part self-help book, The 
Slow Professor purports to be a call to action, and inspiration for resistance 
against the forces in contemporary society that threaten the “long-honoured 
aims of higher education,” by promoting the adoption of the Slow Movement 
within the academy (xvii, 13). The Slow Movement challenges the haste and 
standardization of contemporary culture. Thus, The Slow Professor acts with 
deliberation, “cultivating emotional and intellectual resilience,” rather than 
engaging in frantic activity (11). 
The idea that a tension exists between endless quotidian work responsibilities 
and the conditions necessary to nurture intellectual creativity, and to effectively 
transform that creativity into scholarship, is not new. Almost a hundred years 
ago, in “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf offered a similar premise. In 
Woolf’s essay, she argued that the demands of everyday domestic life stifled 
the ability of many women of that time to effectively engage in intellectual 
pursuits.2 In The Slow Professor, the authors assert that it is the corporatization 
of the academy that has resulted in the “attack on the core principles of the 
university” by the “temporalities” that govern academic work today and stifle 
the ability of academics to engage in effective teaching and research (13). 
1. I began reading this book on an airplane from Miami to Ohio, at 10 pm, after coming 
directly to the airport from teaching a two-hour Complex Litigation class. At the time, I 
was feeling particularly crunched, having spent the two weeks prior grading papers and 
preparing the syllabus for my summer class while traveling around the country with my 
child for his sport. The irony of the circumstances under which I was reading the book was 
not lost on me.
2. Virginia Woolf, a room of one’s oWn, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1929.
Journal of Legal Education, Volume 68, Number 3 (Spring 2019)
Rima Y. Mullins is Assistant Professor of Legal Skills and Values at Florida International 
University, College of Law. She received her J.D. from the University of Florida Levin College of 
Law and her B.A. from Brown University.
769
Somewhat unexpectedly for this type of manifesto, the authors focus on 
encouraging individual adoption of the “Slow” approach to work, rather than 
on demanding institutional change to reverse the corporate university model. 
They contend their approach empowers individual professors to take control 
of their relationship with their work environment, and “resist the corporate 
model’s effacement of the role of the professor” (4). These individual changes, 
the authors assert, will inevitably result in institutional changes. Given the 
authors’ privileged status as tenured professors, however, this view has been 
criticized as indicating a lack of understanding of the relative powerlessness of 
academics who do not occupy such a privileged position.3
The authors first identify and address the problem in general terms: 
professors as a group are overworked and time-crunched, which negatively 
impacts both intellectual creativity and personal fulfillment. The remaining 
chapters explore the application of the Slow Movement to three specific aspects 
of academic life: pedagogy, research, and collegiality. Each chapter begins 
with a critique of the current state of academia and then offers practical ideas 
for incorporating the principles of the Slow Movement into the professor’s 
daily life.
In Chapter One, the authors sharply criticize the promotion of time 
management techniques as a solution to the problem of time starvation. The 
authors argue that popular techniques, such as planners and scheduling, while 
not in themselves wrong, are ultimately unhelpful in addressing the stress and 
fatigue caused by task overload. In fact, these management methods only 
compound the problem because they imply that a professor’s time deficit is 
merely the result of that individual’s failure to properly organize her day, rather 
than acknowledge the systemic and institutional forces that have created the 
lack of time issue. Here, the authors persuasively compare traditional time 
management techniques to diet plans, which may work to help an individual 
lose weight in the short term, but often, rather than providing a permanent 
solution, create long-lasting feelings of anxiety and deprivation (23).
Less compelling is their broad criticism of university administrators for 
focusing on the connection between time spent by faculty on work-related 
activities and university finances. The horror the authors express at the idea 
that an administrator would ask a professor to account for her time in 30 
minute increments, something other professionals routinely must do, simply 
feeds into the stereotype of the ivory tower academic who believes that her role 
in society is above those in the “trades”(24).4 The problem with the criticism 
3. Several reviewers raised the criticism that the idea of a Slow Professor reflects the authors’ 
privileged status because when tenured faculty engage in “slow” behavior, junior and non-
tenured track faculty are expected to work harder to compensate. In a 2017 interview, the 
authors responded to this criticism by pointing out that they had acknowledged their 
privileged position in the preface and arguing that their privilege allows them to advocate on 
behalf of all faculty. Leo Charbonneau, The Slow Professor Revisited, UniVersity affairs (Mar. 
23, 2018), https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/slow-professor-revisited. 
4. The authors take as given that a professor’s intellectual work (research and learning) “must 
Book Review: The Slow Professor
770 Journal of Legal Education
of the monetization of learning is not that it lacks validity, but that the authors 
offer no acknowledgement of, much less alternative to address, the very real 
financial issues with which universities must grapple in order for professors to 
have the resources necessary to teach and conduct research. 
After the “manifesto” portion, the chapter sets forth practical steps that 
professors can use to create what the authors call “a place for timeless time.” 
(28). For the most part, the practical tips are clear and helpful, but they are 
not really anything new: disconnect from technology, avoid multitasking, 
recognize that some tasks do not need to be done, and set aside time for 
contemplation and thinking. 
In the next chapter, on pedagogy, the authors advance the idea that live 
teaching is necessary for the “human exchange” of information to be maximized 
in the classroom. Drawing on research showing that students’ emotional state 
affect their intellectual development, the authors are strongly critical of online 
courses. They argue that the social nature of live classes creates a superior 
educational experience for both the student and the professor. They further 
assert that live classes are preferable because live classes are “obstructionist” to 
the corporate university system (34). 
One can debate whether pedagogical decisions should ever be made, even 
in part, based on how “obstructionist” the chosen path would be. Setting that 
aside, however, the authors’ approach to the issue of on-line classes suffers 
from the same problem as their approach to the issue of the monetization 
of learning: they fail to acknowledge or address the practical reasons for 
online learning. In particular, the authors ignore the fact that online learning 
provides an opportunity to students who might otherwise not be able to 
participate in higher education. Instead of providing some insight into how 
the Slow Movement could be used to improve the emotional and intellectual 
interaction between student and instructor in the on-line context, the chapter 
on pedagogy focuses solely on the live teaching experience. Within that 
limited context, the suggestions for increasing the enjoyment of teaching, 
and concomitantly, increasing its effectiveness, are practical and helpful, with 
an emphasis on fostering an emotional connection between the students, the 
professor, and the material.
The discussion of the role of the Slow Movement in transforming faculty 
engagement in research begins with a biting criticism of the corporate 
university’s stress on the marketability and utility of knowledge. The authors 
bemoan the pressure on scholars to quantify the value of their research and to 
produce scholarship on a schedule dictated by administrators, rather than the 
be measured in a way totally different from the way we measure the work of industrialization” 
(26). Implicit in this assertion is the unfounded (and unsupported) assumption that work 
other than academic work lacks the intellectual components of research and learning. 
Similarly, the assertion that it would be “hopelessly impractical” for a professor to engage 
in such record keeping for research and reading (24) ignores the fact that job requirements 
for many professionals (for example, attorneys) routinely include keeping time records of 
research, reading and writing activities.
771
natural flow of the research process. The authors also argue that the current 
university environment, requiring professors to spend hours on committee 
work, administrative task, grant-seeking, and other non-intellectual tasks, 
distracts from the creative process required for productive research. 
The notion that properly developing and refining ideas take time is one 
that everybody who has engaged in creative activity intuitively knows is true. 
Whether drafting a brief, writing an article, developing research, or preparing 
a lecture, the creative process does not easily lend itself to a schedule. And, 
often, part of that creative time is spent staring into space, puttering around 
the office, doing the laundry, or chatting with a colleague. The brain takes 
time to process information and make connections. The authors encourage 
readers to acknowledge that creating knowledge is not a linear process and 
embrace that “wasted” time as a necessary and important part of developing 
and nurturing new ideas. Although none of this advice is groundbreaking, 
the authors’ open recognition that the experience of the creative process is 
universally challenging is comforting.
In the final chapter, the authors address the lack of faculty collegiality in 
higher education. This chapter relies heavily on remembrances of the “good 
days” to support its premise that the corporate university culture has caused 
the loss of a sense of community among scholars because “corporatization 
has imposed an instrumental view of not only time but also each other” 
(72). Maybe. But the authors are not persuasive in suggesting that the Slow 
Movement can effectively address their primary indicators of the loss of 
collegiality -- faculty’s tendency to be on campus only when necessary, and 
the failure of faculty to provide intellectual and emotional support to each 
other. Lack of collegiality is an important issue that hinders faculty both 
intellectually and emotionally, but to explore the roots of the problem, the 
authors should have been more willing to acknowledge the long-standing 
power differentials in academia among tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure 
track faculty, and how the self-interest of these different groups pushes them 
apart. Blaming the lack of support by faculty on a general indictment of ‘[t]
he corporate and remasculinized university [which] dismisses turning inward 
and disavows emotion in pursuit of hyper-rational and economic goals” is 
ultimately insufficient (83).
Indeed, the authors’ criticism of the lack of faculty on campus seems 
somewhat at odds with the book’s message, which encourages the reader 
thoughtfully to do less, make more time for contemplation, and engage in 
outside activities that encourage creativity, One could easily imagine their 
outrage if a “corporate” university began requiring faculty to be on campus 
for specific business hours. Moreover, while the authors reject the efficacy of 
forced collegiality through department events and mandatory social hours, 
they do not provide any real suggestions for changing the environment on 
campus. 
Overall, I suspect the book will provoke mixed reactions from many readers. 
While I found myself agreeing with many of the authors’ specific points, and 
Book Review: The Slow Professor
772 Journal of Legal Education
I appreciated the practical advice, I found the book’s overall tone off-putting. 
The authors’ “manifesto” risks coming across as the tone-deaf complaints of 
tenured professors whining about how busy they are, rather than an authentic 
call to examine the institutional constructs that create the pressure on 
academics (and other professionals) to constantly engage in busyness in order 
to prove their worth.


Book Review of The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy by Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber

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