Academic life in the fast lane: The experience of time and speed in British academia

Time structure of academic life

There is little doubt that contemporary academia faces dramatic pressures. These can be broadly conceived as exogenous and endogenous. In the former sense, ever since the 1970s governments and industries in the UK have been construing higher education institutions as predominantly economically oriented social sites. In terms of endogenous pressures, systems of research assessments and quality audits evolving since the early 1980s have had significant implications for knowledge production and institutional cultures of higher education. ³ Both types of pressures impacted on the status of science and knowledge (Gibbons et al., 1994; Nowotny et al., 2001) as well as on the scholarly workplace and academic subjectivity. One of the areas that seems particularly revelatory for an assessment of how these dramatic transformations reshape academic cultures is by focusing on structural and experiential shifts in academic time.

Highlighting socio-cultural temporal patterns, Philip Moriarty (2011: 56–57) notes that in recent years, ‘short-termism’ and a need for ‘immediate impact’ – the imperative of shortening the cycle between ideas-generation and their application – has become one of the most repeated policy mantras of governments, research councils and universities themselves in the UK. Moriarty also notes that this broader ideological change also entails various forms of ‘incentivization’ and ‘nudging’ (Holmwood, 2011b) of academics through surveillance, quantification and measurement of academic output (see Burrows, 2012). Academics increasingly feel these mechanisms in their daily lives and one of the most important ramifications of those pressures is the deteriorating capability to self-determine subjective time. If we consider the involuntary need to intensify and ‘compress’ work, together with speed-up imperatives promoted by managerial and entrepreneurial climate broadly defined (Thrift, 2000) and their negative manifestations, it is little wonder that late modern organizations – indeed including universities – have programmatically started to offer therapeutical ‘oases of deceleration’ (Rosa, 2010a: 35; 2013: 158–159). Driven by well-being ideologies and time management consultancies proliferating in the world of business, many universities, recognizing the temporal pressures academics face nowadays, aim to satisfy an increasing demand for time control techniques. They run staff training modules where academics can learn how to control their time resourcefulness. However, these training schemes also function as standardizing mechanisms of time pressure. Referring more generally to ‘time therapists’ Rosa notes that they often normalize ‘the fact that they [modern individuals] are never capable of working down their task-list, or of getting to the bottom of the email account’ (Rosa, 2010a: 76).

The explicitness of the temporal imperatives Moriarty talks about, and the broader institutional reflections on time-related problems, can be considered as relatively new aspects of academic life. Ylijoki and Mäntylä (2003), examining the experiential structure of academic time as it relates to boarder shifts in organizational patterns and management of Finnish universities, presented one of the most valuable accounts outlining different time experiences in contemporary academia. Their analysis of the temporal structure of academic work distinguishes four time perspectives: scheduled time, timeless time, contracted time and personal time. First, scheduled time means ‘all expressions referring to working according to externally imposed and controlled timetables, such as project deadlines, lecturing hours and administrative meetings’ (2003: 60). This category of time experience coveys a significant dimension negatively affecting academic life. Second, borrowing the term from Manuel Castells, yet giving it their own twist, they introduce the category of the timeless time. It is in considerable contrast to the previous category and ‘refers to internally motivated use of time in which clock time loses its significance’ (p. 62). As opposed to scheduled time – which involves institutional requirements – timeless time allows academics to structure their own temporal rhythm according to their ‘own enthusiasm, fascination and immersion in their work’ (p. 62). The third category, contract time, can be characterized by

a sense of time as something that is terminating combined with and uncertainty about the future. The orientation is towards the end of the present contract (how much time do I have left?), and a worry about the future (how/when/where do I get the next contract?). (p. 65)

Yet, it can be remarked that these experiential categories represent qualitatively different temporalities – whereas scheduled and timeless times are of a synchronic nature and relate to everyday experience (i.e. they occur at the specific point in time), contracted and personal times account for more linear, diachronic and long-term temporal experiences. Ylijoki and Mäntylä, highlighting the (necessarily) conflictual character of the four perspectives, say that ‘conditions like living in “temporal prisons”, experiencing work as an ever tightening “time screw” and “stealing time” from oneself and one’s family are manifestations of the academics’ everyday realities’ (p. 75). In sum, the increasing pace of work appears to be the defining characteristic of academic life. Similarly to Ylijoki and Mäntylä, accounts from different higher education contexts (Anderson, 2006; Jacobs and Winslow, 2004; Levy, 2007; Menzies and Newson, 2007, 2008; Sabelis, 2007; Ylijoki, 2010, 2013) convincingly demonstrate that time pressure, haste, hurry and rush are prevalent predicaments in the lives of academics.

If we briefly consult accounts investigating the broader transformation of the conditions of academic work in the UK, we note a similar tendency to the one Ylijoki and Mäntylä identify (Barry et al., 2001; Chandler et al., 2002; Clegg, 2010; Deem and Hillyard, 2002; Parker and Jary, 1995). Also, a large-scale occupational survey among 14,000 academics and academic related staff conducted by the University and College Union (UCU) in 2012 suggests that British academia is one of the most stressing workplaces in the UK – particularly because of number of ‘stressors’ saturating academic workplace. According to the UCU, they include ‘unachievable deadlines, high work intensity, insufficient breaks, long hours and unrealistic time pressures’ (UCU, 2012a: npn). Even though these are serious and barely disputable findings, there is a need for caution. In a 2012 staff survey ⁴ – conducted internally by a Russell Group university, ⁵ for instance – we learn that when it comes to ‘having a say in their [academic workers] on work speed’ 64% of respondents is often positive, 20% is always positive (seldom = 14%, never = 2%); in the same survey if it comes to the category of ‘unrealistic time pressures’: 45% of academic workers seldom experience it, 29% often, 13% always, 12% never. Even if the methodology of the survey is not entirely transparent, and even if the situation at another type of institution can be, and very likely is, different, this point demonstrates a possible nuance in the interpretation of time shortage in the academic life.

Colin Bryson, employing results from a large-scale survey, ⁶ found out that 36% of participants reported that the academic workload has a negative interference with life outside work (2004: 46). Bryson further notes that

there is some support[ive evidence] for work degradation through intensification. Significant increases in workload have squeezed the time and energy available to ‘high skill’ activities such as scholarly research and staff perceive that it is difficult to maintain standards of quality. There is dissonance between quality as defined by the agencies of surveillance through research and teaching assessment and quality as defined by the academic staff themselves. (2004: 54)

In terms of qualitative studies the evidence shows similar ambivalence. Alongside the reported time shortage, academics also paradoxically testify a notable degree of time autonomy as well forms of excitement, passion and commitment to their work. In their recent study, which explores the impact of UK governmental research policy on the academic life, Carole Leathwood and Barbara Read noted that insufficient time resources for research in the context of intensified workloads are central issues raised by many of their participants (2012: 4, 15–19). Yet, their participants also reported the following: ‘I have felt a constant pressure to publish and to apply for research funding. However, as I really enjoy doing research and writing, this hasn’t felt like a burden at all’ (2012: 18). Similarly, Lynne Gornall and Jane Salisbury's enquiry (2012) into the working lives of academics identifies a constitutive tension between institutional pressures and ‘unseen’ pleasures of academic work. Investigating academics’ engagement with fast communication technologies, Gornall and Salisbury note that an ‘academic may be someone who, like his or her personal computer, rarely switches off’, which indeed can have negative psychological consequences. They continue, however, that: ‘on the other hand, there are not many professional jobs you can do in your dressing gown’ (2012: 151). Furthermore, academic time is not as standardized and subjected to strict temporal allocation and order as in the case of some other ‘knowledge economy’ professions. To this end, assessing surveys from as early as 1950s until our era, Malcom Tight (2010) has shown that, in the UK, academic workload in sum – the primary cause of the time shortage – has not increased as dramatically as it is commonly conceived.

As we can see, the nuances from large-scale quantitative and qualitative studies indicate that academic time is composed of both expressed dissatisfaction about hurry and hastiness resulting from time shortage and of reported – perhaps residual – time autonomy. Against all odds and taken-for-granted assumptions, it is possible to suggest that pleasures associated with scholarly commitment and excitement – largely unaccounted for – are as much part of the academic lifeworld as the progressive lacking of temporal resources. Indeed, the more positive attributes of academic work might be seriously jeopardized and yet it does not necessarily mean that they are, or should be, rendered non-existent. Among all the complaints about lack of time, many academic are well aware of some of the temporal advantages of their profession: We [academics] have a lot of freedom over our time, especially in comparison to many other people…probably compared to the majority of people in the workforce…we are flexible in terms of how we spend our time (Senior Lecturer, history, male). ⁷

Of course, it is possible to ascribe this specific testimony to false consciousness and interpret it as a new form of emerging academic subjectivity or managerial mindset of business-led university. Yet, looking at it from a less reductive angle: how can we account for these contradictory experiences of hurry sickness, unseen pleasures and elements of time autonomy? I propose that it is possible to perceive the structure of the time experience mostly as a tension between, what we can loosely call, institutional timescape (akin to Ylijoki and Mäntylä’s scheduled time) and more internal and subjective temporal subtleties of the academic conduct (timeless time in Ylijoki and Mäntylä’s conceptualization). By counterposing these two different temporal registers, in the remainder of this article I analyse some characteristics of each. Whereas in the former case I consider some consequences and attendant mechanisms, in the latter case I argue for a more positive valence of acceleration experience by reflecting on research conduct.

Oppressive acceleration: On guilt and ‘excellence’

Oppressive acceleration can be defined as the involuntary ‘increase of episodes of action and/or experience per unit of time as a result of a scarcity of time resources’ (Rosa, 2013: 121). It is oppressive because the very speed-up of activities, behaviours and conducts does not result from intended and planned action. Rather, it is reactionary and stems from imposed obligations often associated with the net of technologies, which monitor, measure and regulate late modern work. Importantly, when referring to ‘acceleration’ here we do not necessarily mean physical movement in space, but rather, what John Tomlinson calls, ‘sedentary’ acceleration: ‘we can experience time pressure, haste, hurry and rush – all of these essentially cultural-phenomenological rather than physical description – without even stirring from our office desk’ (2007: 3). In this sense academic life is not extracted from the widely documented social experience of acceleration throughout late modern era ‘where we constantly are starved of time, feel harassed and harried and about the demands made upon our time and must endure the feelings of frustration and incompleteness in our lives and our daily life’s tasks and projects’ (Hassan, 2003: 109).

The Dutch social theorist Dick Pels (2003) explains why these kinds of experience might be particularly problematic for academics. He makes a case for the principle of ‘unhastening’ as an ethical, as well as practical, assumption underlying and enabling activities comprising academic work. In Pels’s conception the academic activities include mainly reading, writing, observing, experimenting, measuring and pursuing fieldwork. We can also add the time needed for pedagogical activities such as lecturing, tutoring, supervising, examining and the preparation those activities involve; and for administrative duties including seeking funds and holding managerial positions. Pels suggests that the time culture of academic work

is primarily located in… ‘lack of haste’, its relative stress-freeness, or its socially sanctioned withdrawal from the swift pace of everyday life and alternative professional cultures. This ‘unhastened’ quality defines … peculiar ‘delaying tactics’, which systematically slow down and objectify ordinary conversations and contest (e.g. by means of reading and writing technologies, publishing conventions, peer review procedures, flexible time economies), and which tend to attract ‘slow’ personalities who read more (books rather than reports or memos) and talk less (e.g. in board meetings, on mobile phones, in video conferences) than the ‘fast cats’ who are attracted to and recruited by more decisionist, stress-driven and hasty cultures (Pels, 2003: 2).

The time that is soaked up by compliance with norms and expectations cannot naturally be invested in those activities that Pels itemizes. This temporal tension – expressed in Pels’s idealistic vision and McLennan’s description – produces a very particular pathology to which I now turn.

Some commentators make rather worrying inferences from this temporal tension. Rosalind Gill, for example, notes that there is currently a widespread sense that ‘a punishing intensification of work has become an endemic feature of academic life’ (Gill, 2009, npn). But what is the relationship between ‘punishment’ and the tension between Pels’s idealism and McLennan’s description? I suggest that guilt can be one of the punishing offshoots of this tension. How can we, therefore, outline a workable definition of guilt? First, one may talk about guilt theologically; second, it has, for a long time, been common in certain intellectual circles to conceive guilt through a psychoanalytical perspective (e.g. Frank, 2006). My aim is not to catalogue the definitions and long history of guilt, but rather to heuristically detect behavioural patterns that convey guilty feelings in relation to the absence of temporal resources. A sociologized definition of guilt might be couched as follows: ‘guilt experiences comprise an amalgam of negatively tuned self-conscious emotions and cognitions that arise either from enduring personality characteristics considered to be deficient in some respect…or from specific acts of misconduct interpreted as a failure or transgression’ (Thome, 2009: 13). Many academics nowadays, recognizing the process of new public management/new managerialism (Deem et al., 2007) and its attendant mechanisms of control and surveillance, often express feelings of remorse towards the thriving administrative apparatus affecting their temporal resourcefulness. As a consequence, some of them experience this limitation in the form of guilt. At the same time, one can speculate whether an element of guilt has always been present in the academic life – even in the previous management regimes of recent decades. Previous regimes were arguably more individualising than the current ones and guilt was largely part of the horizontal and collegial peer pressure. Nowadays it seems that the pressure is more vertical, impersonal and often generated by abstract set of rules and line managers, rather than fellow academics.

Reactions to having unsatisfactory control over temporal resources show that academics feel guilty in a very specific sense; namely that they lack time for pursing the very tasks required of an academic. The pervasiveness of scheduled time ‘leads to intense time pressure and often, when not managing to meet all the requirements as well as one hopes, to feelings of guilt, anxiety and shame’ (Ylijoki and Mäntylä, 2003: 70). In accordance with these propositions, the following testimony, which was a rather common one among my respondents, holds that connection between diminishing authority over temporal resources and guilt stemming from restricted possibilities of satisfying academic duties is a significant one:

It is very much short-term culture and there is no consistent guidance as to what they want to see. I think that is damaging...a lot of my time is now spent on chasing research grant income and I can’t do the work I thought I would do: being a lecturer at the university! [...] It is all about the loss of opportunity we are scared of...many opportunities are just something I can easily get, but because I have not looked, someone else got it...but I would have got it had I known about it...so it is this sort of reasoning that I have resorted to. (Reader, engineering, female)

Various types of temporal regulations – deadlines, power of short notice, instant gratification – have, Rosa continues, the ‘overwhelming effect of producing subjects of guilt: at the end of the day, we all feel guilty, because we have not met the expectations’ (p. 76). Temporal norms ‘appear to be “out there”, and it is up to individuals to fulfill them or not’ (p. 77).

One of the main sources of guilt thus lies in the ‘hidden norms of temporality’ (p. 74). Temporal norms and their habitualization through dominant ideologies – deferred gratification, sticking to schedules and rhythms, resistance and disregard of (even) physical needs and impulses until the right time comes and, above all, hurrying up – come as brute undisputable laws and facts (pp. 76–77). Time shortage – and not being able to cope with this predicament – is couched as a subjective problem and the mark of, at best, a need for improvement, and at worst, redundancy. Moreover, the inability to organize time even becomes pathologized. It marks someone (or even a whole group of people) as being inherently unreliable: the proof of effective time management is part of every job application nowadays.

Strict compliance with the manifold administrative/bureaucratic tasks that saturate today’s academia may (paradoxically) be perceived as an act of misconduct. This is so because of their likely remoteness from key academic activities and practices. Again, this tension unfolds once we scrutinize temporal experience:

If I did my work at a pace I thought allowed me to do my work best I would get fired, because I wouldn’t have enough done. I would be seen as ineffective teacher or marker, researcher or at least I would be too worried that I would lose my job. So I am forced in that way and that is very alienating. I am forced to work in a way I don’t think is good enough. (Professor, politics, female)

I don’t have enough time. I mean that is certainly true of my job that if you take any one bit I am usually, in most cases – not absolutely all the time, very pleased to be doing it. It is just, in aggregate, there is not enough time to do the things I should be doing, and so it can come to the point where, although people will always say – prioritize, that just means choosing who you let down, that is the situation I dislike the most, the feeling that I have to let someone down...so certainly time is short. (Senior Lecturer, history, male)

In turn, the competition–excellence nexus manifests as the multiplication of tasks, increasing bureaucratic burden and the growing net of surveillance mechanics which all result in the commonly reported experience of distraction and temporal interruption. Yet guilt here is not necessarily related to a conscious ‘wrongdoing’, which would result in some psychological discomfort, but is rather expressed in temporal tension between the keeping up with institutional discourse of excellence and the more organically conceived excellence integral to the evaluation of the merits of academic work. The temporal demands associated with being excellent can compromise other, historically shaped, ethical as well as practical aspects of intellectual autonomy. Adhering to the inherently mutable imperative of ‘being excellent’ – which has, paradoxically, become increasingly standardized, thereby bastardizing what the term stands for: being outstanding or extremely good – would often require resorting to highly competitive modes of reasoning and working at an unsatisfactory ‘rat-race’ pace. These necessities preferably assume highly agile and resilient behaviour. However, academic autonomy – defined by the presence of temporal self-determination – is at odds, if not directly antithetical, with the institutional imperative of excellence. This experience likely results in adhockery and experimentation (not in a sense of scientific experimentation) rather than in balanced and poised intellectual pursuits.

The excellence newspeak and affiliated regulations designated to secure the leading status of an institution (McLennan, 2008: 197) can surely be met with cynicism from senior staff, but may also – rather perversely, given its alliance with competition imperative – result in producing guilty feelings, especially among less privileged scholars. In this respect Gill notes a fundamental feature of the changing nature of academic work that is highly relevant for the present discussion: the oppressive acceleration and its discontents ‘is (of course) deeply gendered, racialised and classed, connected to biographies that produce very different degrees of “entitlement” (or not)’ (2009, npn). The existing accounts mapping the negative consequences of time shortage in academia do not particularly reflect on these internal differentiations within the academic labour force – nor does my sample of respondents to be sure. Still a crucial observation can be made. It seems that early career academics are particularly vulnerable to the restructuring of higher education in comparison with more established and tenured/permanently employed senior scholars and professoriate (McAlpine, 2012; Meyer, 2012). Given the nature of my sample (20 senior scholars), I am unable to robustly reflect on the experience of junior scholars (beyond my own experience). Nevertheless, there is some worrying evidence suggesting that teaching assistants, PhDs, post-PhDs and other casually employed academic workers increasingly experience alienation and precariousness. Increasing industriousness and taylorization of the lower rate academic workers relates to increasing differentiation in time allocation and economy that formally structures the relationship between well-remunerated senior scholars/professors and contractual university workers–teachers. In fact, as Glen A. Jones (2013) says, the favourable working conditions of the former group – undoubtedly underpinning and even facilitating the experiential modality discussed below – might only be accomplished by an incremental relocation of teaching, learning and admin workload onto the latter group. Indeed as Gill and many other authors plausibly demonstrate, this class division within academia (Harvie, 2000) is also deeply gendered, which renders the working conditions for early career females particularly misfortunate. The next section needs to be read against the background of these social differentiations.

A phenomenology of research conduct

Notwithstanding these relevant variables, as well the differentiated conditions of labour that significantly affect work time, it comes as no surprise that due to the oppressive acceleration and the reported predicament of ‘no time to think’, the calls for square slowdown have gained in popularity. Initiatives such as The Slow Science Manifesto (cf. Lutz, 2012; Slow Science Academy, 2010) or even articulations of an ‘ethic of slowness’ (Leung et al., 2010) and ‘slow scholarship’ (Lutz, nd) account for direct reactions to the apparent dominance and overwhelmingness of oppressive acceleration in the academic life. Yet, in this section I argue that, whilst focusing on the constitutive feature of the academic life – research – calls for slowing down are deemed to be unproductive not because of their toothlessness but because they miss their target. On the level of individual experience, slowness as a defining principle of scientific work might simply be undesirable and regressive. Static slowness might be highly demotivating and thereby, paradoxically, complement the experience of oppressive acceleration. In this sense, it is doubtful whether both programmatic sluggishness and idleness together with the manifold mechanisms regulating higher education institutions and scientific work styles – including the excellence imperative – have ever been a motivational force or can ever create favourable conditions propelling and allowing academic endeavours. Philip Moriarty, professor of physics, said: ‘Whether or not this research [into “fundamental questions about properties of matter”] can be translated into a marketable product, exploited as profitable intellectual property, or applied in technology is not what motivates me’ (2011: 51). So what can be the motivational and propelling phenomenologies inherent to academic work and research in particular?

The existing accounts examining acceleration pay little attention to its positive features. To use a caveat expressed by Rosa, they tend to emphasize ‘the dangers and pitfalls and neglect the gains and opportunities of speed’ (Rosa, 2010a: 98). Yet, it is understandable that contemporary critical social theorists of acceleration conceive it as an exclusively oppressive force. Ultimately, it is the basic intention of social criticism to identify socially produced pathologies, oppressions and unfreedoms. By doing so, however, this approach excludes some significant phenomenological and psychological attributes of acceleration. In modernity, acceleration can also be seen as an intended experiential modality (Duffy, 2009; Kern, 2004; Tomlinson, 2007) and sought-after physical and psychological thrill (Balint, 1959; Wollen, 2002). These notions transgress the current dominant interpretations of acceleration as an exclusively negative consequence and/or cause of time shortage. Acceleration can be – without any culturally relativistic and apologetic tendencies – opted for and embraced. After all, Rosa acknowledges this point:

Of course, it would be dead wrong to think that individuals are nothing but the hapless victims of socially caused acceleration. Quite the contrary, we are not just agents of acceleration; we also enjoy and desire the dynamization of our material, social and spiritual worlds. In short, speed in modernity is closely connected to the ideas of power and self-determination or autonomy, and hence, to the experience of freedom and even happiness. (2010b, npn)

On one level, due to the dramatic penetration of research engines and other scholarly Internet tools the ‘access to scholarly information and research results have never been easier; and thanks to the vast computational power now readily available whole new areas of scholarly investigation have been opened up’ (Levy, 2007: 237). Despite the tyranny of email and reported distraction due to the integration of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in our lives (Carr, 2010; Hassan, 2012), this more positive feature is surely an important, often neglected, dimension. Academics, despite being busy, do acknowledge this feature. Illustratively, one lecturer said this:

Absolutely, it [ICTs] is power at my fingertips. I remember when I started, first year of my PhD, this was when computers started to become main feature of the university life, and when I wanted to find particular paper in a particular journal, I could go on to the web of knowledge database which just started. Then I could find out which journal, which year, which page, but there was no facility to access it electronically so I had to write this down and get up off my seat and walk to the library and go on the shelves, find the relevant journal, page, have a photocopy...and it took long time to do all that...whereas now I can just click, get the article and it is right there, I am reading it...so yes I find it [ICTs] tremendously enabling. (Lecturer, chemistry, male)

The subjective experience of time is inherently plural and it is often the case that what effectively comprises this experience is a tension between different rhythms, intervals, intensities and frequencies. Referring to the time investment and duration that underpin the solution of complex problems – undoubtedly a common preoccupation of research conduct – Bachelard (2000: 88) identifies ease, euphoria and momentum as energetic instances not only connecting different stages of thinking/researching but also as mechanisms generating motivational energy. Elsewhere Bachelard (2002), in his epistemological and psychological exploration of the ‘formation of scientific mind’, registered the complex dialectical relationship between rational mental powers and emotional senses. Intuition, for example, is often wrong and can barely serve as a solid basis for scientific knowledge and discovery, yet it can comprise the first impulse that then requires a set of time-demanding and slower ‘rational’ exercises of critical examinations, revisions and corrections.

From this angle, instinctive thinking, the ‘aha-moment’, and sparks of inspiration identified by Levy and Bachelard, can all be viewed as accelerative components integral to an otherwise unhasty tempo of research contemplation and procrastination. One of my interviewees noted:

I have got a large research group and lots of stuff comes from brainstorming [and] brainstorming accelerates processes as far I am concerned...but it is less self-indulgent. You don’t do it yourself [but rather] in a group where you fire question and stuff on each other. I find it of great value so I compensate myself by doing that sort of thing, so my ideas get to influence things and other peoples’ ideas influence my ideas. It is a collective process and that is how I tend to operate. I still think about certain aspects of where can I heat myself…I just need to think about certain ideas because I find it satisfying and it is enjoyable. (Professor, engineering, male)

With a hint of idealism, one may say that similarly to the artistic practice associated with literature, painting, filming or composing music, research conduct is a genuinely inventive activity, defined by temporal non-linearity. Of course, time economy and discipline related to one’s contract and employment; planning, strategizing, coordinating research with other colleagues (together with the difficult-to-determine temporalities of non-human matter that researchers often manipulate with) are all of important variables affecting the temporality of research conduct. Moreover, under specific circumstances, these external temporal pressures often seriously impact on the individual organization of time – as expressed in the previous section. Asides from the scheduled time that often limits research inventiveness, there is another possibly inhibitive aspect. As many inventive persons acknowledge, next to the sparking and accelerative moments, the process of research invention is interlaced with periods of unproductive and undesirable paralyses. Deadlocks, stopovers, inertias sometimes end up in severe depression and prolonged inability to work, such as in the cases of iconic thinkers of Max Weber and Edmund Husserl. In this sense, accelerative moments might actually help to nudge and get a researcher out of ‘scientific inertia’ and various forms of unmoving intellectual blockages.

The non-linearity of research inventiveness has to do with one’s

submission to the tasks of getting on with doing what one does, whether that is fashioning problems, engaging in work, developing skills or staying in one’s room and banging one’s head against the wall. Such procedures might well produce a lot less by way of ‘product’ but they might end up at least serving the forces of inventiveness. Who can say without trial and error? And without time?. (Osborne, 2003: 522)

Concluding comments: Legislating unhasty time

Without compromising the negative effect of hurriedness on the constitutive academic activities, I argued that energetic properties (as conceptualized earlier) are not alien to the academic life. Also, if an individual bemoans lack of time, it does not necessarily mean the utter disappearance of temporal autonomy or a programmatic plead for slowdown. As I argued, lacking temporal resources often generates feelings of guilt, which are exacerbated by dominant higher education discourses such as the competition–excellence nexus. Yet at the same time, it is possible to understand acceleration in a more positive sense. Examining the phenomenology of research conduct I argued that accelerative moments comprise significant motivational and energizing aspects in the lives of academics. These nuances do not prevent, and in fact allow, making the case for a more inclusive notion of unhasty time (Pels, 2003) as a universal as well as normative measure in the academic work. Unhasty time, which is not a slow time, comprises four features:

Normatively, it is an antipode to the increasingly reported haste resulting from the structural and institutional transformation of academic institutions, which often results in pathologies of guilt. In this sense it alludes to Ron Johnston’s call:

time … is a researcher’s most crucial resource. Working through an idea calls for quality time; for unbroken periods allowing concentrated effort. Without it, much will be started but never completed. Of equal importance is ‘academic leisure time’ – time away from the everyday demands of teaching, administration and committees – to spend reading something outside the normal. (2010: npn)

What remains the key problem is the legislation and, in fact, a form of enacting unhasty time in the academy. Initiatives advanced by the British UCU, such as ‘Workload is an education issue’ (UCU, 2012b) surely need to be welcomed and might be complemented by the notion of unhasty time outlined here in order to prevent becoming yet another romanticized and futile slowdown platform. However, unhasty time as conceived above – rather than calls for more measurement of stress levels as the UCU proposes (given the overwhelmingness of them, academics would barely welcome yet another intrusive technique of data gathering about their life and work) – what perhaps needs to be done is an explicit and categorical politicization of time. On this level, the concept of unhasty time can benefit from Hassan’s normative and conservative program for time sovereignty as a constitutive principle underpinning temporally self-determined democratic society (see esp. 2009: 187–235; 2012: 171–200; 2013: 215–229, on the idea of conservative university see McLennan, 2008). Hassan’s propositions for temporalization of democratic institutions and his call for the establishment of ‘“natural” unforced rhythms’ (2012: 199) are entirely salutary – if not straightforwardly necessary – in the academic environment. However, if academics and universities are not taking the lead in such a program, one wonders whether anyone at all – powerless slow ideology excluded – can resist oppressive acceleration. Levy and Ylijoki and Mänytlä convey similar concern when they position the academy into the apex of such emancipatory project. Yet it would perhaps have to be those academics in managerial and administrative/‘architectonical’ positions in particular who need to act and somewhat understand and enforce the primacy of unhasty time. Especially, those UK academic administrators who exercise their power through institutions such as professional academic and scientific associations, Universities UK, Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), Research Councils, Russell Group, 1994 Group and Royal scientific societies that need to articulate and enact time sovereignty and legislate the principle of unhastiness into an explicit political demand and ethical principle. This is so because time as conceived in this article not only conditions the purpose of higher education and enables scientific endeavour but it would also decouple the academy from the currently dominant entrepreneurial newspeak, managerial ideology and academic capitalism.