In this article, the authors analyze the impacts of their university eliminating Spring Break and replacing it with intermittent Reading Days during the Covid-19 pandemic. With particular attention to contingency, relations of power, and positionalities, they offer narratives of their lived experiences with Reading Days as a graduate student (Author 1) and as a pre-tenure faculty member (Author 2). They also offer analysis of the public conversations surrounding the institutional decision. The article addresses how the particularities of the narratives are symptomatic of a culture of overwork that predates and continues beyond the moment in time and place of the context described. Authors offer takeaways and calls to action that invite readers to continue examining and intervening in larger, persistent structures of inequity—particularly as they come to bear on academic breaks
