WELL, IF YOU GO CHASING RABBITS.

You end up, Inside Higher Ed contributor Uddipana Goswami suggests, not feeding your head.  "Slowing down is key to more meaningful, intentional teaching and scholarship."  Nothing has changed.  "[T]here's enough free agency among academicians, particularly those still holding tenured posts, that academic work life is a bundle of self-made purgatories."

If anything, in the eleven years and counting since I opted out, those self-made purgatories involve even more rabbits to chase.

The constant pressure to conduct research, secure grants and fellowships, attend conferences, and publish or perish is only part of the story. There is, additionally, the immense responsibility to teach and mentor students who are facing their own mental health crises.

In the inescapable race to beat the tenure clock and, once tenured, move to the next rung of the ladder while staying relevant and recognizable in our fields, faculty members need to take a pause. We must slow down to strengthen our mental health, ensure student success and produce meaningful scholarship.

Some might ask how slowing down will help us keep up. How will we survive in academia if we are slow to publish in high-impact journals, or present our research in international forums, or participate in faculty development opportunities, or mentor multiple students, or be on several significant boards and committees? We will, if we do not equate slowness with being lazy or unproductive and, instead, understand it as the pace and the process that allows us to function and create deliberately, contemplatively, while resisting exhaustion and burnout.

You could stop coddling the snowflakes.  You could treat the "faculty development opportunities" as the faddish time-sucks they are.  You could recognize that those "significant boards and committees" are hidey-holes for campus politicians.  You could make a practice of being deliberative.  "There is no such thing as 'doing nothing at all,' as those ideas are percolating. Let the ideas percolate.  And disregard all the foolishness from faculty 'development,' which alternates between sage-or-guide and more-effective-technologies, and act like the expert you are."

All of which is likely to be more productive for your institution and better for your frame of mind then yet another jargon-heavy whine against injustice.

Only by slowing down to reflect on, and gradually dismantle, the tools that perpetuate cultures and structures of violence can we enable enduring peace, ensure the well-being of the communities in conflict and reduce the recurrence of everyday violence.

As I move deeper into decolonial feminist peace in my scholarship, teaching and practice, I recognize the university depends on some of the same tools of violence and patriarchal control that are used to perpetuate the colonial and postcolonial conflicts that we study in my classroom. For example, the “fast-paced, metric-oriented neoliberal university” makes constant demands on faculty members’ time and effort, ensuring we are exhausted and preoccupied with “keeping up.” To meet its numerical expectations, we often sacrifice our “intellectual growth and personal freedom”; we rarely pause to reflect on the quality and real-world impact of our output or the toll it takes on us. Exhausted people rarely have the time or energy for community and rest, which are essential not only for individual well-being but also for collective resistance to slow violence.

Exhausted people also tend not to be creative. "Yes, when that idea is rattling around in your brain, best to sketch some ideas on paper or noodle around with Maple or run a regression, and one of the risks of becoming involved with an academic is precisely that those ideas take over way more disruptively than a hobby or a mistress ever can."  But you make the space for that idea to rattle around by telling the snowflakes seeking accommodations for their neuroses to suck it up, Buttercup, and by saying no to those calls to serve on committees, and you ruthlessly block out all those electronic vanity journals promising quick review of some uninteresting Minimal Publishable Unit.