Abstract
The pace of work in academia has gone up incredibly over the past few decades. As academics, we are expected to produce a steady flow of papers, teach courses, deliver impact, review papers, work on editorial boards, write recommendations for colleagues, supervise PhD's, chair various committees, and so forth and so on. Everybody feels they are too busy and everybody keeps working at the same hectic pace.
Lately, we have been asking ourselves the question whether we should slow down? Maybe we should not be doing more but less? This line of thinking is influenced by the ‘slow movement’ which emphasises that good things take time. It started with ‘slow food’ but the same basic appreciation for slowness has expanded to many other domains of human activity. And now also to the academic world.
We have been inspired by the book ‘The slow professor’ (Berg & Seeber, 2016). The basic argument in the book is that in-depth thinking and reflection takes time. And in-depth thinking is in the end what the academic world is about. It takes time to develop ideas and to communicate these effectively. This is a plea to do less, but to do less better. Fewer board meetings, fewer administrative tasks, fewer papers. This should result in more time for deep conversations with colleagues and time for our core activity: thinking.
Slowing down does not mean that you will have to wait longer for your papers to be send out to reviewers or wait extended periods to receive their comments. We as editors of Information Polity are committed to good service quality and quality papers. At the same time, we are noticing that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find people who have the time to review papers. And we receive an increasing number of papers that we need to desk reject. In this respect, the administrative work of the journal has increased significantly in recent years.
In our vision of a slow academia, we would receive fewer manuscripts but the papers we receive are of a high quality and present original and thought-provoking research. There are fewer manuscripts to process and therefore the reviewers will have more time to write constructive reviews that help to further strengthen the quality of contributions. Let's go for quality and not quantity. Slowing down will help to reach more academic depth.
Our vision advocates a more deliberate, reflective, and humane approach to research and is a direct challenge to the pressures of modern, metrics-driven academic processes. It prioritises quality over quantity, deep thinking over fast production, and well-being over constant output – to resist burnout and foster a healthier academic culture.