ABSTRACT
Universities and academics are being impelled, under market pressures, to respond faster to wider economic opportunities while also developing robust administrative systems for accountability and managerial purposes. These two phenomena, characteristic of the managerial university, are producing a complex temporal situation. Simultaneously, the university is characterized by both fast time and slow time. The entrepreneurial university, competing in academic markets, experiences a speeding up of time in order both to become more productive and to outperform its competitors. On the other hand, the bureaucratic university, wanting to ensure that its procedures are fully systematized and tightly controlled, unwittingly works to a different principle, that of slow time. Its procedures call for administrative work. Globally, academics complain that a significant proportion of their time is now taken up purely in administration. Paradoxically, administrative routines function to slow the university, precisely at the moment at which it is trying to be entrepreneurial and fleet-footed.
