WORK
The Slow Professor
Berg and Seeber's 2016 manifesto for reclaiming the timefulness of academic life against the corporate university's productivity demands — and the template their framework offers for resisting AI's compression of thought.
The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy (2016) is Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber's polemic against the corporatization of higher education. Drawing on the Slow Food movement's resistance to industrial efficiency, they argue that scholarship requires protected time — for reading without a deliverable, for conversation without an agenda, for thought that does not resolve within a grant cycle. Their central move is to distinguish pleasure as cognitive signal from pleasure as indulgence: the satisfaction of sustained intellectual engagement is evidence that the mind is working at a depth that productivity metrics cannot detect. The book has become the operational reference for academics defending depth against speed.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book emerged from Berg and Seeber's collaborative frustration at Queen's University with what Berg called the corporatization of academic life — the progressive replacement of scholarly judgment with metrics, impact factors, and quantified output. They drew on Slow Food (Carlo Petrini, 1986)