“We do need time to think. We do need time to digest. We do need time to misunderstand each other, especially when fostering lost dialogue between humanities and natural sciences. We cannot continuously tell you what our science means; what it will be good for; because we simply don’t know yet. Science needs time. Bear with us, while we think.” Thus concludes the manifesto of The Slow Science Academy, a Berlin-based community of scientists calling for the deceleration of academic work.
Slow science is part of a broader, if fragmented, movement that promoted “slowness” in various arenas, including slow fashion, slow cities, slow tourism, even slow parenting. The imperative to slow down was first articulated into a coherent agenda by Italy’s Slow Food movement, a collective of left-leaning intellectuals wary of the rapid “McDonaldization” of Italian society, who advocated for a return to traditional foodways, with their more deliberate –that is, slow– ways of producing and consuming food.
Today, it is easy to overlook the leftist, anti-capitalist origins of the Slow Food movement given its more recent flirtation with gustatory elitism. Similarly, critics will rightly observe the swift commodification of slowness, and perhaps rush to reject the slow movement as another consumer trap. And yet, calls to slow down retain their political potential, as they urge us to critically consider the regimes that dictate how we work, how we produce, even how we live our lives.
Academics would be remiss to disregard the “slow” imperative. The question is both epistemological and political, in the broadest sense of the term, concerning both the nature of knowledge itself, and the conditions under which it is produced in academic settings. Intellectual inquiry and critical engagement are central to the ethos of liberal education, values we strive to impart to our students as worthwhile pursuits in and of themselves, rather than a means to another end. Significantly, these are inherently slow endeavours – “we do need time to think”, indeed.
Corporatisation of education
This is a critical juncture for academia at large, and for the humanities and social sciences in particular – the least “marketable” of academic disciplines. The corporatisation of higher education, most prevalent in the USA and Europe yet increasingly relevant to Indian academia as well, is the outcome of decades of neoliberal reform that sought to privatise educational institutions and shape them according to market principles, and has rendered the prospect of a life dedicated to research and pedagogy a precarious pursuit for young scholars. A university fashioned after corporate principles demands quantifiable outcomes of its employees; our service and scholarship are ranked and evaluated according to metrics and principles borrowed from the fields of management science and financial accounting. The rapid spread of what scholars have termed “audit culture” well beyond the confines of the corporate world stands testimony to this. It should come as no surprise, then, that speed, efficiency, and growth are deemed essential.
But what does “growth” look like in academia? In addition to inflated administrative budgets and a reserve army of casual teaching staff, growth translates into predatory publishing practices, hastily researched and written scholarship aimed at ticking the audit boxes, as well as an unsustainable conference ecosystem – academically, but also, lest we forget, environmentally. It begs the question: do the several millions of academic articles published, and conference presentations delivered, every year add up to a meaningful and impactful intellectual conversation?
To be sure, precarity takes different forms and its effects are unevenly distributed. The so-called “adjunctification” of teaching positions is all too familiar to early-career scholars in American and European universities struggling to find their footing in the academy. And, while this analysis does not neatly transpose onto the Indian context, slowness offers a valuable framework to imagine a path forward within a rapidly transforming, and, indeed, increasingly precarious educational landscape. Higher education in India is undoubtedly heading towards privatisation, ever more so since the New Education Policy of 2020 came into effect. Budget allocation for the education sector stands at a woefully inadequate 0.44%, of the country’s GDP, a decrease from the previous decade, despite a promised raise of public spending for education, while institutions like the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research must increasingly seek funding from private sources. Meanwhile, foreign universities seeking to expand their global networks are now welcome to set up satellite campuses on Indian soil. Fast academia is here to stay.
‘Culture of fastness’
For those of us employed in private universities, the pressures of a culture of fastness are keenly felt –and yet, the majority of us are (still) granted the privilege of full-time contracts. For academics in public universities, on the other hand, precarity has already taken a much more sinister turn: last year, Samarveer Singh, an ad-hoc faculty member in Delhi University’s Hindu College died by suicide after the administration arbitrarily decided to end his contract; before that, Singh, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy for seven and a half years, had had to renew his contract with the university every four months. Last October, Indraprastha College for Women sacked all five of its ad hoc Sociology faculty, the very academics who had set up the department in the first place. Meanwhile, several sanctioned positions at the country’s central universities remain unfilled, as “adhocism” in the academic job market reigns supreme.
This precarious climate has a direct effect on the quality of scholarship we produce. To quote critical pedagogy scholar Henry Giroux, fast academia’s privileged “notion of frictionless, spontaneous truth now governs the conditions for all modes of intelligibility,” dictating not only the pace, but also the contours of what counts as legitimate, valuable scholarship. Against this backdrop, against the pervasive ideology of unceasing growth, we would like to suggest that a slower academy would not only allow us to articulate a less precarious professional alternative to the corporate university, but also to imagine a more nuanced, more deliberate process for knowledge production.
Research, a critical and necessary foundation on which higher education is built, requires a climate that is conducive to intellectual inquiry. Calls to slow down compel us to rethink how academic institutions might foster meaningful, independent scholarship, the findings of which may not always be commensurable with the demands of the market. It is hard to quantify and instrumentalize research and pedagogy, and we must resist the corporatised university’s attempts to do so. This need for speed, the compulsive emphasis on quantity that feeds into the notorious yet all too real ‘publish or peril’ dictum does not only engender precarity but is also detrimental to critical thinking and thus the ways in which we transmit knowledge to the coming generations.
There is value in slowness, even if this value is not immediately quantifiable or easily accounted for. As we write this, we are aware that the current academic structures within which the knowledge economy unravels – the demands of audit culture, the inner workings of funding agencies, global university rankings – often obscure that value, diverting our efforts, instead, toward a different kind of valuation. An academy that dances to the tune of the market inevitably prioritises so-called frontier research, a constant search for the “new” – in other words, scholarship as commodity. But, to slow down means to allow ourselves the “luxury” of reflection, to thinks beyond the immediate viability and marketability of our scholarship so as to consider the ethics of knowledge production, research and pedagogy. Frontier research does not necessarily translate into ethical practice; scholars need not assume the role of pioneers. Good research might call for a deferral, a diversion, perhaps even a halt, rather than an arrogant march forward. A commitment to social justice also demands that we acknowledge and respect the limits of knowability. Good scholarship should ask: can I know this? How do I get to know this? Should I know this? Therein lies the value of slowness, a value that is epistemic, political, and ethical at once.
Alexios Tsigkas and Sinjini Mukherjee teach at FLAME University, Pune.
