GHEA21 Publications
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Summer 2026
Recommended Citation
Ohdedar, Birsha, "Slowing the Academic Treadmill: Writing, Reflection, and Resistance in the Neoliberal University" (2026). GHEA21 Publications. 44.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/osun_publications/44
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Comments
To work or study in a university today is to feel the strain of acceleration. Students move through shortened terms, larger class sizes, and tightly packaged degree programs; staff navigate precarious contracts, funding pressure, rising workloads and the relentless tick of audits and metrics. Beneath the glossy rhetoric of “excel- lence” and “student experience”, universities have become places where alienation and exhaustion from the rhythms of everyday life are the norm. This paper argues that neoliberal reforms have transformed the university into a treadmill of accelerated, metrics-driven performance, eroding its core values of learning, reflection, and critical inquiry. Yet, by experimenting with the “slow peda- gogy” of writing-to-learn practices it may be possible to carve out small, yet signif- icant, spaces of resistance that prefigure more humane and democratic forms of higher education.