Sabbatical Planning

The word sabbatical has roots in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. It carries the biblical connotation as “resting from work”, although in the academic context there’s still lots of work going. Jewish and Christian sources connect the Sabbath rest, typically to the creation story, loosely paraphrased as “God worked for six days and rested on the seventh.” The book of Leviticus includes a commandment to refrain from working the fields every one year out of seven.

At my institution, tenure-line faculty members and administrators can apply for a sabbatical following six year of service, i.e., you can “go on sabbatical” once every seven years. In most institutions, the options are a half-year sabbatical at full pay or a one-year sabbatical at half pay. I’ve been thinking about sabbaticals because I was working on my sabbatical request the past month or so. The request includes an application and a proposal, so I spent some time thinking about what I would like to do on my sabbatical and how I would go about accomplishing my goals.

As someone who enjoys history, I dug up an old article about sabbaticals in academia. Back in 1962, the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) published a summary article titled The Origin and Early History of Sabbatical Leave by Walter Crosby Ellis. (You can access it on JSTOR.) According to the Dictionary of Education, the sabbatical is “a plan for providing teachers with an opportunity for self-improvement through a leave of absence with full or partial compensation following a designated number of years of consecutive service.” From this definition, Ellis list three essential elements: purpose, compensation, time-eligibility from prior service. However, he thinks there is a fourth that’s lurking – “an investment in the future of the institution”. Arguments are made about the sabbatical being “an intellectual and practical necessity” but what is self-improvement and why is it important?

In answer to this I can only speak for myself. In my last sabbatical, I was able to immerse myself in a new field of study. I did this by visiting other labs (for several months at a time) to learn new things. That’s what got me into origin-of-life research! The summer at the end of my sabbatical was spent writing up a grant proposal that charted a new course of my research. (It was funded!) I was able to construct multiple projects for my undergraduate student researchers. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to present my research at multiple conferences, serve on a grant review panel, and our group has published multiple papers in my narrow area of research expertise relevant to the field. I also spent part of the sabbatical prepping for an elective course on the Chemical Origins of Life, which I taught the fall semester when I returned. A year later I was team-teaching an origin-of-life-themed non-majors science class. I’ve since developed a number of origin-of-life related discussion activities and problem sets for my general chemistry courses.

I would not have been able to do any of this if not for the sabbatical. Being able to have a large stretch of time to focus on learning something new and complicated is important to me, for both my teaching and research/scholarship. Challenging myself to learn something unfamiliar and (potentially) difficult also puts me in the shoes of a student. It reminds me to appreciate how confusing it is to read something where you understand less than half of what’s going on. It reminds me to persevere and keep working, as I make progress inch-by-inch, and eventually understanding dawns. I think of the sabbatical as both diving deep and stepping back for a larger view. I have the time and space to think about my teaching and research in a broader context, but I can also drill down to solve a particular nagging research problem or design a new class assignment.

So what am I planning for my upcoming sabbatical? I identified three aims. There’s some unfamiliar-to-me methodology I would like to learn that could transform the direction of my research group, and also make significant headway in origin-of-life research. That’s my “stretch” goal. High-risk, high reward, but difficult. More mundanely there are a couple of ‘problems’ in my current area that I’ve been putting off. They aren’t as suitable for undergraduates because a lot of experience is needed to do trial-and-error troubleshooting. I suppose I could try hiring a postdoc, but I’ve stayed away from this approach for various reasons. A sabbatical would be a good time to tackle these. Finally, there are some things I’ve been reading about in cognitive load theory that I think could make an impact to approaches in chemical education. I would need to learn a bunch of new things outside my field of expertise, but isn’t that what a sabbatical is for?

But a sabbatical shouldn’t be all-work all the time. I’m also looking forward to feeling refreshed and taking time to smell the flowers! I’ve submitted my request and now I just have to wait to see if it gets approved. Fingers crossed.