Brevard College professor Robert Cabin takes up the topic of how pressed for time professors and students are--and along the way delivers an veiled indictment of both the peer review process and academic professionalism:

I do often wonder just how much of what is written these days is ever read in its entirety, and how often even those of us working in higher education ever manage to slowly and carefully think through and resolve our most important issues.

If my experiences are representative, the answers to those questions are not encouraging. For example, in my work as an associate editor of an academic journal, I have increasingly found: 1. fewer people willing to do peer reviews; 2. fewer people completing their reviews (let alone completing them on time); 3. more people turning in brief, superficial, poorly written reviews; and 4. more authors responding to their reviews in a manner that suggests they either didn't read the reviews carefully or didn't have time to focus on them thoroughly. Although I'd like to feel dismayed and outraged by those trends, the sad truth is that I too have found it increasingly difficult to complete my own editorial and peer-review work on time, and have felt forced to do more skipping and skimming than I care to admit.

My recent experiences as an author have done much to assuage my guilt for those sins. For instance, my last grant application didn't make the cut because one of its reviewers didn't have time to read more than its title and abstract page. Moreover, none of the four successive editors assigned to me by my former publisher ever managed more than a "quick skim" of my manuscript. (I appreciated their honesty but was left wondering what exactly such "editors" do these days.) While the editor at my prospective new publisher has been somewhat more responsive, the first thing she told me was that because nobody would buy (let alone read) a 400-page book anymore, if I wanted to work with her press I'd have to cut my manuscript by at least 50 percent.

Even within academe, I'm often struck by how many of us are willing to argue over documents we haven't actually read. I wish I had a dollar for every faculty round-table discussion and journal-club meeting I've attended in which at least half of the attendees had not read the papers we assigned ourselves. And just the other day, the chair of a committee I serve on interrupted a heated debate to ask whether we had all read the relevant sections of a document after our previous discussion of the topic at hand. "Yes," we all groaned irritably, eager to get back at it. "Well, that's quite interesting," she observed dryly, "because I still haven't managed to find the time to write up and send that document!"

"Given that so many of their lives are overflowing with a combination of "real world" commitments (taking six classes a semester, working part time, competing in collegiate sports, caring for ailing grandmothers) and seemingly involuntary virtual additions (texting, Facebooking, gaming, and God knows what else)," he asks, "is it really any wonder that so many are unable or unwilling to grapple with the plain old texts we assign?"

Cabin claims, at the end of the article, to have been employing "irony" -- but he also appears to argue, more or less with a straight face, that the solution does lie in dialing back:

I still dream that someday we will collectively slow down and start demanding less. For starters, how about less e-mail and fewer meetings for faculty members, and smaller course loads and fewer curricular requirements for our students? How about, say, once every other month we turn it all off on our campuses for (gulp!) an entire day—no computers, no Internet, no personal gadgets. Instead we might engage with one another and our surrounding communities the old-fashioned way—and even read and thoroughly discuss a book in its entirety.

Thus does pragmatism meet irresponsibility: Rather than discuss such matters as priorities, self-discipline, organizational skills, professionalism, dedication, and ethics, Cabin appears to read the widespread distraction, abdication, and deflection he sees at both the faculty and student levels as inevitable--and seemingly reasonable--reactions to a situational and sensory overload for which no one is personally responsible. It's almost a foregone conclusion, given this premise, that the answer is to lower standards for students and faculty alike. Failure to fulfill commitments and to do one's work ceases to be a problem when we define away the concepts of failure, commitment, and work, and when we allow inanimate entities such as technology to be blamed for our personal failures. The result: a lost opportunity to think creatively and constructively about how to address a very real problem.

I know I'm overloaded these days -- and you probably are, too. The electronic world I work in has a lot to do with that. But I labor under the impression that the answer is to become better at managing my time, more clear and disciplined about my priorities, more focussed and purposeful in everything I do, more able to say no when that's needed, and more firm than ever that when I make a promise--to myself or others--I keep it. I don't want to dial back and do less--I want to do more and I believe that if I am clever about managing myself I can. You?