“It never even dawned on me that people might look askance,” she says. “Anybody who knows me knows that I’m not some ivory-tower-working-two-days-a-week kind of person.”

Amitava Kumar, an English professor at Vassar College, is similarly frank. Every day he takes a short walk home from the campus, closes the blinds in his study, turns off the phone, switches on his white-noise machine (”I go for rain,” he says), and lies down on a futon for “a magical hour.”

“People joke a little bit about it,” he says. “Maybe it is the triumph of multiculturalism that people are usually forgiving. They think, ‘He’s Indian, it’s okay for him to nap.’”

The academic schedule is generally perfect for nappers, says Mr. Kumar, with one exception: job-candidate visits. “They fill every minute of these visits with some kind of meeting,” he says. “If you could put it as a public service in your article: Perhaps people who plan these itineraries, if they would allow some time to nap.”

From Jennifer Ruark’s piece “Spring Forward, Fall Back (and Take a Nap)” in the Chronicle.

Hat-tip: Jacki Musacchio, my former neighbor, who provided the said futon (not to mention the advice about the noise machine) before she left for greener pastures.

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