PERSON

Maggie Berg & Barbara Seeber

The literary scholars who diagnosed the corporate university’s war on thinking—and whose The Slow Professor arrives at the AI moment as a precise prediction of what happens when an institution dedicated to thought is handed a tool that can produce thought’s artifacts without the process that makes them meaningful.

In 2016, Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber published a slim volume whose central claim was radical only because it was so obvious: the contemporary university had reorganized itself around a definition of productivity that made genuine thought nearly impossible. The Slow Professor was not a manifesto for laziness. It was an empirical observation about what happens when the institutional conditions necessary for deep thinking—unhurried reading, open conversation, the freedom to pursue ideas without immediate measurable outcomes—are systematically dismantled by a management apparatus that rewards the appearance of productivity while undermining its substance. The framework they built is structured around three propositions that, taken together, constitute a theory of what knowledge institutions are for: that intellectual work has an inherent tempo that cannot be accelerated without destroying the quality of the work; that productive friction—the difficulty of engaging with material that resists easy comprehension—is not

Keep reading with YOU ON AI