Different universities, different temporalities: placing the acceleration of academic life in context

A growing body of literature is encouraging academics to slow down their academic work as a way of managing the acceleration of university life. Little attention, however, has been paid to the important differences in temporalities among different sorts of higher education institutions, and the effect this is likely to have upon the sense of acceleration and, crucially, the capacity to resist it. This article discusses interview data with academics at a particularly ‘fast’ academic site, drawn from a broader comparative study of three very different sorts of institution. It argues that the culture at this university is fundamentally structured around the principle of rapid change, in marked contrast to both more research-intensive and more teaching-intensive institutions. Any advice about the management of change must, I argue, take into account the specifics of institutional situations as well as broader structural causes of institutional difference, if it is to prove effective.