Academic Minimalism

What is academic minimalism? I am still searching for the answer, both conceptually and practically. What does it look like? How can I apply it to my life/work? How can I use it to lead a department? To help develop junior faculty? Generally I like to start with definitions and minimalism itself has several. The definition I like best is: being or offering no more than what is required or essential.

But in academia it is often difficult to know exactly what is required or essential. There is no magic formula for calculating the required number of publications, presentations, and grant applications. Instead we are told: more. As for teaching we are told: do more with less. We are assigned more classes, more sections, and/or more students but are given fewer resources and advised to spend less time doing it. Certainly class prep and grading can take all your time if you let it but where is that sweet spot that allows you to only do what is essential for students to learn? How do we even know what that is?

There is plenty of advice floating around to not engage in “too much” service (especially if you’re a woman and/or person of color – since you’ll be asked at least twice as often) – and, in the pre-tenure years, to pick the “easy” service. But how much and what kind of service is really required? And what of service that is essential to the successful running of a department or university but is deemed the “hard” kind, who should do that? As department chair you could spend your entire life trying to figure out what is truly required and what is not.

Stanley Fish, many many years ago, made a rather long-winded attempt to apply minimalism to academic administration and summed up his advice as follows:

Answer the question as precisely as possible and then stop. Don’t complicate, don’t explain, don’t pontificate, don’t muse, don’t speculate, don’t be reflective, don’t be creative, don’t take offense, don’t be defensive, don’t take anything personally, don’t take anything in any way.

Just stick to the point conceived as narrowly as possible so that it can be said of you that you added not.

While I appreciate the satire, this is not the type of academic minimalism I am espousing. I think, at some point (and that point may well be post-tenure), you need to define what is essential to you. There are many times, in my teaching and my administrative duties, that I answer precisely and offer nothing further. But as a full-time strategy it doesn’t build relationships and building relationships is an essential aspect of academia for me.

So I am slowly exploring what is essential, and therefore required, for my academia. I hope to continue this exploration on this blog, as writing is definitely one of my essentials. The bigger question becomes, once I identify my essentials, how do I eliminate all the rest?