Tag: slow

  • Why Academics Need to Slow Down (opinion)

    Why Academics Need to Slow Down (opinion)

    A 2023 global survey of more than 900 faculty members found that 33 percent are “often or always” physically exhausted, 38 percent are emotionally exhausted and 40 percent are just worn-out. The constant pressure to conduct research, secure grants and fellowships, attend conferences, and publish or perish is only part of the story. There is, additionally, the immense responsibility to teach and mentor students who are facing their own mental health crises.

    In the inescapable race to beat the tenure clock and, once tenured, move to the next rung of the ladder while staying relevant and recognizable in our fields, faculty members need to take a pause. We must slow down to strengthen our mental health, ensure student success and produce meaningful scholarship.

    Some might ask how slowing down will help us keep up. How will we survive in academia if we are slow to publish in high-impact journals, or present our research in international forums, or participate in faculty development opportunities, or mentor multiple students, or be on several significant boards and committees? We will, if we do not equate slowness with being lazy or unproductive and, instead, understand it as the pace and the process that allows us to function and create deliberately, contemplatively, while resisting exhaustion and burnout.

    In my international conflict management classroom at Kennesaw State University, I encourage my students—future peacemakers—to think about slow peace. In my research on feminist agency in violent peripheral geographies, I deliberate on how, in zones of ongoing conflict, active resistance must (and does) surface in response to direct and immediate violence. But this only addresses the symptoms; in the urgency of the moment, what is not—and cannot—be addressed is the structural violence that results from a lack of cultivating peace as a way of life. Only by slowing down to reflect on, and gradually dismantle, the tools that perpetuate cultures and structures of violence can we enable enduring peace, ensure the well-being of the communities in conflict and reduce the recurrence of everyday violence.

    As I move deeper into decolonial feminist peace in my scholarship, teaching and practice, I recognize the university depends on some of the same tools of violence and patriarchal control that are used to perpetuate the colonial and postcolonial conflicts that we study in my classroom. For example, the “fast-paced, metric-oriented neoliberal university” makes constant demands on faculty members’ time and effort, ensuring we are exhausted and preoccupied with “keeping up.” To meet its numerical expectations, we often sacrifice our “intellectual growth and personal freedom”; we rarely pause to reflect on the quality and real-world impact of our output or the toll it takes on us. Exhausted people rarely have the time or energy for community and rest, which are essential not only for individual well-being but also for collective resistance to slow violence.

    Similarly, colonial capitalists initiated my ancestors in Assam, in the peripheral northeast region of India, into the plantation (tea) and extraction (coal, oil) economies by weaponizing productivity and exhaustion. They denigrated our traditional lahe lahe way of life that was based on living gently, slowly and in organic harmony with the planet and its people. The nontribal people of Assam embraced capitalism and the culture of “hard work” and exhaustion. They also aligned with the colonizers to designate the tribal peasants who stayed connected with their ancestral lands and refused to work in the plantations as “lazy natives.”

    This process of ethnic fragmentation started by the colonizers was subsequently exploited by the post-/neocolonial Indian state to diffuse and dissipate resistance against itself as it continued to extract the communal resources of the ethnic people of Assam and its neighboring northeastern states while ignoring their customary laws and political rights and governing this peripheralized region through securitization and militarization. The historical, horizontal conflicts between the many communities of the Northeast undermined their necessary, vertical resistance against the Indian state. Meanwhile, on the Indian mainland, Assam is still derogatorily referred to as “the lahe lahe land” and people from the entire Northeast region are subjected to discrimination and racist violence.

    Building solidarities across marginalized entities alone can successfully challenge larger structures of oppression—whether racism, colonial violence or academic capitalism—that continue to thrive while we remain divided. In the conflict zone I call home, I advocate for addressing the slow and sustained violence that historically eroded indigenous ways of peaceful coexistence between communities. I propose ways of building peace by reintroducing customary nonviolent structures and cultures into everyday practices of communities, allowing community members to reconnect with each other and with nature and the environment.

    For example, traditional slow crafts like weaving organic cotton and silk fabrics involved the entire community while benefiting individual members and protecting the planet. Reviving these practices would slowly, but radically, disrupt the cycle and progression of violence and societal fragmentation.

    Within the academy, too, we can practice slow peace. My individual resistance began when I started questioning my sense of guilt and self-doubt about being unproductive or “slow.” Just as my precolonial ancestors did, I too realized that my self-worth is not tied to my productivity; I slowed down. This deepened my scholarship and made it more deliberate as I connected it to my embodied, intergenerational history. My approach to scholarship also grew more intentional as I re-examined its real-world impact.

    At the same time, I recalled that my lahe lahe culture valued rest and resting in community through finding connections with people, engaging in communal joy and being in nature. I moved away from commodified self-care products and apps and took more mindful breaths during my morning yoga. Now I am more energized in the classroom, where I practice laughter and joy with my students while encouraging them to build an empathetic and mutually caring classroom culture. They bring genuine engagement and produce strong work that they take ownership of. I have also added nature walks with emotional support coworkers, aka new friends, to my routine. Our conversations have led to research collaborations and several creative engagements with the local community.

    If, as Audre Lorde says, self-care is “warfare,” it is no less a war to attempt to build a community of care involving colleagues and students in institutions and settings that are engineered to facilitate isolation by emphasizing increasingly demanding personal achievements tied to hierarchies of power and privilege. As I continue to deliberately and strategically work on decolonizing my academic praxis, I am convinced that within the academy and outside—where our knowledge-making has consequences—the quicker we begin slowing down, the sooner we will reap the benefits of the lahe lahe life.

    Uddipana Goswami is author of Conflict and Reconciliation: The Politics of Ethnicity in Assam (Routledge 2014) and Gendering Peace in Violent Peripheries: Marginality, Masculinity and Feminist Agency (Routledge 2023). Gendering Peace earned an honorable mention in the International Studies Association’s Peace Section’s 2025 Best Global South Scholar Book Award. She teaches at the School of Conflict Management, Peacebuilding and Development at Kennesaw State University.

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  • College English classrooms should be slow (opinion)

    College English classrooms should be slow (opinion)

    In a minorly famous letter to the duchess of Sutherland, Henry James advises that The Ambassadors should be read “very easily and gently,” specifying that his correspondent should ideally “read five pages a day.” At this pace, the duchess would have taken almost exactly 13 weeks to finish the book if she read every day of the week. One imagines that the novel would be tucked into otherwise inaccessibly glamorous, luxurious days for the duchess, days filled with, among other comforts, corresponding with James about how to read his latest novel.

    Five pages a day is very slow reading, but most of us would love to approach our reading at a more leisurely pace, if not a pace determined so prescriptively. On the other side of the spectrum of reading experiences, one finds the average student in college English classes—both undergraduate and graduate. To use my experience as an example, I was at the nadir of my reading life as an undergraduate English major; as someone who naturally reads quite slowly, I spent many nights of my undergraduate career standing at my dresser so I wouldn’t fall asleep while reading. (I couldn’t afford, and doubt I had ever heard of, a standing desk at that point in my life, and my dresser was the tallest piece of furniture in my room.)

    While doing this, I often took notes blindly in a notebook with my right hand while I held whatever book I was reading in my left. I would reread my notes the next morning to help me remember what I had read the night before. I loved the books I was reading, and I wanted to succeed in the classes I took, but I was also, by trying to read upward of 500 pages a week, making myself miserable.

    I don’t blame the professors who assigned the reading—all of them were gifted pedagogues, and not all of them assigned too much reading. They, too, inhabited a culture in which they were expected to work quickly and fulfill numerous demanding institutional roles (years later, I still remember one of my undergraduate professors saying she worked around 70 hours a week).

    Now that I’m on the other side of the academic experience, however, I’ve come to realize that each of us is responsible for resisting a culture that is, by all accounts, making students anxious, depressed and—dare I say it—unproductive at unprecedented rates. Students in undergraduate classes are primed to work quickly. Almost every part of their life—their experience on social media, their online shopping, their use of ChatGPT to complete assignments and their selection of a route on Apple Maps—is designed to help them reach tangible and intangible destinations as quickly as possible. Most students, meanwhile, are terrible at working slowly.

    As academicians, we’re constricted, of course, by all the reasonable and unreasonable demands placed on us by work, family and the other important parts of life, and when we read—especially when we read for professional, critical purposes—we read and work as quickly as possible, that “possible” being an ever-nebulous boundary toward which we strain and suffer while still trying to produce quality work. As professors, if we read books like The Ambassadors, we’re likely to read them in bursts and chunks—butcherly words that sound as unappealing as the process of reading a dense, beautiful novel in such a manner actually is.

    While we cannot, in the immediate future, totally alter the institutional structures of postsecondary liberal arts education, there are still things that English professors can do to resist the pressure for speed. Chief among them is to design a classroom that encourages our students to go slow.

    In their 2016 book, The Slow Professor, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber challenged the culture of speed in academia by advising faculty to work more slowly, a laudable goal, but one that critics pointed out was a luxury that untenured faculty simply couldn’t enjoy. The problem, of course, is that the people who design a job decide how much work ought to be accomplished in a given time frame, and untenured faculty have little control over the amount of work they are expected to produce to attain job security. However, what almost all professors, regardless of contract status, do have control over is how much work we require within a given time frame from the students we teach. In other words, we should design classes that treat our students in a way that we’d like our institutions to treat us.

    As English professors, our job is not to encourage quick thinking but to foster thorough, imaginative and critical thinking. To do this, we must design our courses to foster and prompt slow work that breaks students out of the habits of expediency they have developed throughout their time in school. Designing classes that foster intentional slowness takes effort, but it also means that we can craft the kinds of spaces that make literature enjoyable and show students the value and beauty of literary texts when they are encountered in an environment suitable for literary consumption.

    A slow classroom can take several forms. In the slow classes I’ve taught, it means requiring students to purchase paper copies of the texts we read and to keep a real, physical journal in which they respond to prompts weekly outside of class. I also do something in these classes that I wish someone had done for me when I was a student: I make it clear that they should spend a certain amount of time on work for my class outside the classroom but that they should also give themselves a cutoff time, especially when it comes to reading for class. I tell them that I take around two or three minutes to read a page of a novel well, sometimes more if the prose is dense, and that they should plan for each page of reading to take three to four minutes. I also tell them that if they make time to read and don’t finish, they shouldn’t panic; they should move on with their day and enjoy the nonacademic parts of their life.

    Most importantly, I assign less reading. Of course, I’d love to live in a world where my students have thoroughly read the English literary canon (whatever that means), but more than anything, I want them to have read something and to have read it well. To this end, I try to assign between 20 and 30 pages of reading per class meeting, which amounts to around 10 to 15 pages per day, not too far from James’s edict. Rather than just assigning this reading and hoping for the best, I explain to my students about why I assign this number of pages, talk to them about creating and choosing a time and space to read in their daily lives, and describe the process of reading in my class as one they should understand as a reprieve from the time-pressured demands of other courses.

    In class, I designate much of our time together as technology-free in order to make space for the rich and meaningful conversations that occur most fruitfully when we aren’t distracted by notifications from our phones and laptops. Students engage in small group and classwide discussions, and I challenge them with daily questions that push them out of their comfort zones. I task them with coming up with steel man arguments in support of cultural and fictional villains, I ask them to articulate what makes a good life by finding evidence for and theories of good lives in their reading, and I frequently make them dwell with a given scene until we’ve extracted every last bit of sense (and often a bit of senselessness) from it.

    We tackle around one question a day, if we’re lucky. But the answers and questions we walk away with are finer and fuller than the formulaic answers that students give when they’re in a hurry. In return for designing my class in a way that allows students to work slowly, I expect around the same amount of essayistic output in terms of page numbers, but I design essays to be completed slowly, too, by scaffolding the work and requiring creative responses to prompts to encourage the slow, critical thinking and writing that English professors long to read and rarely encounter. I’ve received work that was thoughtful and occasionally even beautiful, work that couldn’t have been written by AI.

    In many ways, my experience of earnestly trying to read around 500 pages of fiction a week as an undergraduate might seem anachronistic. Professors across disciplines have noted the apparent inability of students to engage with any extended reading, whether this means they’re not reading at all or that they just ask ChatGPT to do the “reading” for them. The irony of worrying—as many academics seem to be doing these days—that students will use artificial intelligence to read or write for them is that many undergraduate classes require students to work like machines, to read and write at a breakneck pace, a demand that prompts the ridiculous phenomenon of classes on speed reading, which many universities advertise and which are also available online (the one I’ve linked here is accompanied by the terrifying motto “Reading at the Speed of Thought™”).

    In a discipline for which the core method is close reading, the idea of students reading a novel as quickly as possible ought to make English professors shudder, and while it’s not necessary to dedicate an entire semester to a single novel, we ought to see course design as part of the solution to students rushing through their work. In an age that privileges fast work, near-constant availability and answers on demand, the slow English classroom is a reprieve, a space where deep, creative and inspired thought is given the time it needs to blossom.

    While our students will likely never occupy the rarefied spaces that the duchess of Sutherland enjoyed when James wrote to her in 1903, with our guidance and course design, they can experience the joy, power and, yes, the luxury of reading and writing slowly. We just have to give them the time.

    Luke Vines is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Vanderbilt University. He recently began serving as the assistant director for academic support at Berry College.

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