The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy

If there is one sector of society that should be cultivating deep thought in itself and others, it is academia. Yet the corporatisation of the contemporary university has sped up the clock, demanding increased speed and efficiency from faculty regardless of the consequences for education and scholarship.

In The Slow Professor, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber discuss how adopting the principles of the Slow movement in academic life can counter this erosion of humanistic education. Focusing on the individual faculty member and his or her own professional practice, Berg and Seeber present both an analysis of the culture of speed in the academy and ways of alleviating stress while improving teaching, research, and collegiality. The Slow Professor will be a must-read for anyone in academia concerned about the frantic pace of contemporary university life.

Maggie Berg is Emeritus Professor of English at Queen’s University. She has published, and continues to write, on the novels of the Brontë sisters. She won five teaching awards during her career at Queen’s including the W.J. Barnes Award for Teaching Excellence three times, the Chancellor A. Charles Baillie Award for Teaching Excellence, and a University Chair in Teaching and Learning. In recognition of The Slow Professor, she was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Mons, Belgium.

Barbara K. Seeber is Professor of English at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. She is the author of Jane Austen and Animals as well as General Consent in Jane Austen. Her teaching areas are eighteenth-century literature and animal studies, and she is the recipient of the Brock Faculty of Humanities Award for Excellence in Teaching. Most recently, in recognition of The Slow Professor, she was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Mons, Belgium.