Intensification, speed of change and faster pace of life have recently emerged as significant issues in studies analysing the current academic climate. This article takes up the "social acceleration thesis" as a conceptual resource for capturing the relationship between the individual experience of time and the changing structure and operations of contemporary academia. Using qualitative data from the UK, it analyses the texture and implications of the accelerating pace of academic work-life. It argues that such pace is both resented, as well as strategically managed by academics. In this way, the analysis opens up more agentic approach to the overall dynamisation in academic work-life and argues that it is possible to conceive acceleration as practical and even thrilling. Against the background of such an approach, the article concludes by stating that acceleration in academic work-life is an ambivalent experience and by questioning recent propositions under the label of slow academia.