I bought this book in the beginning of the year after coming into some gift card money for my local indie bookstore. Last summer, a mental health counselor on campus had recommended it as something I might look into; he hadn’t read the book himself, but it had come highly recommended from a colleague. I’m glad I picked up a copy, but I’m not sure it’s as good as I hoped it would be.

I appreciated the core critiques of the book—that universities risk losing something important by rushing into quantification, corporatization, and productivity mindsets. As a lifelong defender of the humanities, I appreciated all their advocacy for those fields and not just “marketable skills.” Yet, that only made it more frustrating when they seemed to engage in the pop psychologist’s lifting up of empirical evidence about our bodies and brains that seems to support a deeper point. I also appreciate their problematizing of newer technologies but firmly reject the idea that we can’t have a social, caring experience in an online class.

I also felt like the suggestions for what to do differently didn’t always land for me. More often than not, the book seemed to be a summary of others’ grievances about the academy, and while I largely agreed with those grievances, I would have liked more on the Slow movement that so clearly informs the book but that I still don’t fully understand.

It’s an important book, and I agree with the central thesis, but I would have liked for it to be more.

• The Slow Professor
• Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber
• academia
• slow movement
• quantification
• humanities
• productivity
• mental health
• corporatization