Higher education is commonly described as offering combinations of work and leisure, but the implied relationship is often limited. Different conceptions of leisure, especially leisure as pleasurable experience, raise new possibilities for seeing academic activity itself as leisure in several important senses. The importance of identifying pleasure as a necessary component of work and politics is discussed. Several more specific approaches to try to understand such pleasures are reviewed: Cultural Studies approaches, the work of Bourdieu on taste, and some recent work in the Sociology of Leisure.