“SLOW DOWN: You Are Entering a SLOW TIME ZONE.” The poster greets anyone who comes to my office in the Dean’s Suite, just as it did those who came to my faculty office in my department. The poster comes from the 2016 Bellarmine Forum that I co-directed on “The Values of Time.” Along with the shared courses, guest speakers, and signature events, there was the SlowLMU Movement, a call to mindfully resist the culture of acceleration that has taken over our lives and our work as scholars. This theme coincided with the publication of The Slow Professor (2016), a manifesto demanding that the life of the mind, in its non-busyness, return to the halls of the academy as the intellectual lifeblood of the university.
Even when I became associate dean, I wanted to stay true to SlowLMU. Associate deans are faculty leaders, with one foot still firmly planted in teaching, research, and department life. However, I am willing to argue that even deans can slow down and stay connected to the life of the mind. Deans often have to remind their colleagues that they, too, are faculty. One way to demonstrate this is to continue some features of the faculty life. Being dean should not demand the abandonment of one’s intellectual life in exchange for academic leadership.
There has been an increase in tempo in higher education. Smartphones render one perpetually accessible, with notifications to constantly interrupt us of new email, texts, and new calendar invites for yet another meeting. Office hours have given way to Zoom appointments that theoretically can happen at any time. As a consequence, the hallways have become empty. Do we not miss the buzz of students hanging out, waiting to speak to professors, therefore connecting with fellow students? Do we not miss seeing our colleagues in the hallway when students were not coming by, when most “business” informally happened? The organic and accidental exchange of ideas and information, as well as the informal mentoring of colleagues, has mostly disappeared. This leads to increased work for the dean’s office to ensure that policies are known, procedures are handled, and that the work gets done. The life of the mind can still be had by faculty, but it has become more solitary, limited, and fragmented by this acceleration.
It seems that everyone is doing more work than ever before, but this increase in worktime does not seem to correspond with greater productivity. More time is being spent, but rarely is more work being done. It seems as if the same set of tasks now takes up more time, with everyone claiming to be overworked. Time is a terrible thing to waste. At the heart of all slow time movements is the recognition that time is valuable. Although slow time advocates for the role of leisure, even leisure cannot simply be “wasting time.” Slow time is the art of being productive in the time allotted to work, creative in the time allotted to leisure, and restorative in the time allotted to sleep and wellness. A well-balanced life requires work, leisure, and rest.
The potential loss of the life of the mind might be more lamentable in the context of my institution, a Jesuit and Marymount university whose mission highlights academic excellence and the education of the whole person as well as the service of faith and promotion of justice. This mission is not only for our students but for everyone, including faculty, staff, and administrators. Non-missional schools would need to ground slow time practices in the secular terms of work-life balance, employee wellness and mental health, etc.
My college has been reasonable in not having one person do more than one person’s work. In our office, there is the dean, three associate deans, an assistant dean, and four administrative coordinators. I am aware that many dean’s offices operate with fewer people or, perhaps, too few people. The accelerationist tendency to extract more and more labor from individuals, requiring them to do the work of many people, becomes a problem in universities that value the life of the mind. Either universities can fund the right amount of staffing to do everything that is expected, or expectations must be modified to account for the number of people and the corresponding number of hours available.
I now turn to the slow time practices that I do in order to ensure that the life of the mind remains possible even while having increased administrative tasks. This is not meant to be exhaustive, of course, and they are particular to my interests and values. Everyone would need to work out their own set of practices. The key thing is to make decisions and stick to them.
First of all, I keep work and non-work separate. When I go home, I go home. No more work for the university will happen that day. My evenings are for other things I value: time with family, attending concerts and vespers, going out for karaoke at my favorite bar, etc. There are a few weekend university events that I will do as part of being at a university (e.g., family weekend, commencement, open houses), but I will never do work that is meant to be done in the work week on the weekend. I go to bed relatively early most nights and make sure that I get not only the sleep I need but also the sleep I want.
Second, I make sure that some of the work week itself is dedicated to teaching and research. Associate deans in my college teach one course per year. I teach my class, which includes holding the proper number of office hours for that class. I decided that I will not compromise the education my students receive due to my administrative position. Students come by during office hours, and I meet with them in the dean’s office. I have weekly meetings with graduate students who are doing independent studies with me. I book them in my calendar and do not allow anything—save a true real-time emergency—interrupt that schedule. I also calendar time for reading and research every week. I have set up my office in the dean’s suite to match my faculty office, with all the books that are related to my research there in the office. This research time is not as inviolable as my teaching time, but when something keeps it from happening it is rescheduled for some other time in the week.
Third, I take breaks throughout the day. After the usual morning meeting, I take a walk through my building. This is not for the sake of exercise – although physical activity is beneficial – but to bump into people, chat, and sometimes answer questions. I eat lunch away from my computer and phone. In the afternoon, I take a break to practice piano. Piano is my main hobby, and practice time is rare in the midst of so many meetings. I bought a digital piano and put it in my office. A previous associate dean who also plays piano stopped playing while being associate dean. I decided not to do that because for me playing the piano keeps my mind and soul balanced. Having the digital piano has not only helped me develop my skill as a musician, but it has also served as a community item, with others stopping by to listen or even play. It really has created more community.
That leaves four or five hours of the workday to do the administrative work of my portfolio. This time must be structured and productive. Slow time, after all, is not laziness. Slow time abhors wasting time. Slow time is the acknowledgment that there is a time for work, a time for play, a time for walking around, a time for lunch, and a time to be somewhere else than work. As part of being productive in my portfolio, I strive for Inbox Zero at least every week. I answer emails and file them away instead of keeping them in my inbox, which causes one to feel overwhelmed. There are daily approval processes that I do every morning online. I schedule the larger projects so that I have the time to do them well. When given a new task, I am honest about how long it should take me to do it given my other time commitments. I try to keep meetings short. Slow time requires time management and project management in order to make good use of the work time because it is the time to work.
Of course, these practices are not always perfectly kept. Yet, it is important to have a predicable set of practices and inform others of them. They express my values and allow me to continue to live the life of the mind with my students and colleagues while still getting the work done.
Suggested Readings
Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016.
Johan Huizinga. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Mansfield Centre: Martino Publishing, 2014.
Josef Pieper. Leisure: The Basis of Culture, trans. Alexander Dru. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1952.
