I’m going to try blogging to test some ideas I have for a fall 2016 composition course. Summer is about R&R (research and relaxation), so I am combining a headlong rush to finish a manuscript with some vacation–which may involve unplugging. But some of the second R is also reading about the conditions under which I work and thinking about how they affect the first R. With a group of faculty here at PSY (led by our instructional designer Suzanne Shaffer), I am reading The Slow Professor (but I confess I am reading the book quickly). The authors consolidate many insights about work-life balance (or just plain work balance) that I’ve garnered from disparate posts on Tomorrow’s Professor, and they connect these insights to broad changes in university culture. So far, I am ruminating on two points from the book: 1) that faculty need to help each other maintain balance in a corporate university culture that encourages compliance and overwork; and 2) that perhaps it’s neither me nor my project that is not moving quickly enough, but rather the academic culture around me, which still hasn’t ingested the challenges posed to it by postcolonial critics now considered passé.