Some examples of academic time discussed by Price include:
- Temporal Breaks
- Time to Degree
- Time-based testing accommodations
- Sabbatical
- Tenure
- Work broken down by time percentage

Examples of Academic Time

During the COVID-19 pandemic, women faculty were often expected to take on both increased academic pressures coming from university directive to do more with less time whilst also being forced to take down the brunt of familial care responsibilities during lock-down. Additionally Black and other faculty of color also had pressure to do more work while their communities experienced higher mortality rates from COVID-19 because of racial disparities in healthcare. White male faculty experienced the pandemic as slowing down and thus used this time to develop more professionally - widening the gaps already experienced because of racism and misogyny in academia.

Academic Time and COVID-19

Price discusses how faculty and students have been increasingly pushed to do more with less time, a pressure that as shown by research by Judith Walker, puts responsibility on the individual to justify the time it takes for them to do things.

Pressure on Academic Time

Price uses the term academic time to discuss the rhythms of the workplace of academia - including the timetables of classes and meetings followed by professors and students alongside the nine-to-five schedule followed by academic staff. Academic time also encapsulates practices like the academic clock, sabbatical, tenure, and the temporal breaks that happen with summer and holiday breaks.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Price conceptualizes as Academic Time, which encapsulates how time operates within academic settings, as including the histories of inequality and abuse by academic systems and the uncertain futures of these systems.

Academic Time and Accountability

The term academic clock generally refers to the time it is expected, for white male non-disabled students, faculty, or academic staff, to reach a point in their academic career - for instance the tenure clock, which is the policy in most universities that a tenure-track professor is up for tenure review seven years after the start their job at that university, or the time it is expected a student will take to earn their degree. Not abiding by an academic clock can have real consequences - having to take out more in student loans, having a poor tenure review, or being seen as less than peers.

Academic Clock

Price, M. (2024). Crip Spacetime. Duke University Press.

Crip Spacetime

Priya, a faculty member with endometriosis reflected on how academic time often was tied with ideas of individuality, for instance Priya completed her doctorate degree within three years, which she reflected was not a sustainable pace, because she learned to accommodate her pain by overworking herself on the weeks she was not in pain. When she became a faculty member she was told that she didn't need to explain her disability because 'her record would speak for itself' despite the fact that she was probably going to have to go on medical leave. Priya ended up taking medical leave and when she came back she applied for a 're-entry grant' from the university she was teaching at, but that grant required that she ceased doing all academic work for a year despite the fact that it was not possible for Priya to cease all academic work because she was on multiple multi-year grants where her stopping would require the entire grant team to stop work on their study. For Priya academic time was compose of not only the present issues with the re-entry grant but also her past experiences in graduate school and the future - the future years of the grants. Priya was also simultaneously told by mentors to create two and four year plans without any discussion of how the unsteadiness of her disability made those plans futile.

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