Amid recent conversations about budget cuts, faculty at Lewis & Clark have reported concern about professors’ ability to engage in the long-running practice of academic sabbatical leave. But to many students, the beginning and end of their engagement with sabbaticals is whether or not their faculty advisors will be present for a given semester. So what is a sabbatical, what do professors do on them and why should we care if they go away?
Associate Dean for Faculty Development Daena Goldsmith explained via email that at LC, sabbaticals are when tenure-track professors continue to be employed and compensated by LC while having no teaching or service obligations to the college for either a semester or a year. While not all professors take sabbaticals, those that do are given the opportunity for professional — and sometimes also personal — growth.
“Tenure-line faculty are expected to be excellent teachers, excellent scholars, and to contribute to service (which includes service to the college, to their academic field, and to the larger community),” Goldsmith said via email. “All three of those components are rewarding, challenging, and time consuming and it can be tough to do it all and balance it all. Sabbatical leave recognizes that there are parts of the process of doing scholarship or creative work when it is essential to be able to focus your time and attention on a project in an intensive way. ”
Faculty must apply for sabbatical leave, describing their intended activities and how they will be bringing them back to their students. They also have the option to apply for outside funding, including Fulbright scholarships and American Council of Learned Societies fellowships, to support travel and other academic work.
“Sabbatical activities are as varied as the scholarship and creative work of our faculty!” wrote Goldsmith, who listed travel, research and lab projects, external teaching opportunities and authoring books as all being recent accomplishments of professors on their sabbaticals.
“One of the reasons the college is successful is we can recruit high-quality professors, and high-quality professors want to be able to do research,” said Keith Dede, professor of Chinese.
Dede focused on translating a novel, “Mani Tai” by Jing Shi, over his sabbatical — and experiencing scenes from the novel such as the Chinese Lunar New Year festival in person helped make the work real to him. Over the sabbatical, Dede met with Shi in Nalong, where the author still has a home.
“I’ve been reading about this festival for years, but this is the first time I actually got to go at that time of year,” Dede said. “And I got to sit there with Shi while it was going on, and have him talk about what was going on.”
Experiencing one’s studies firsthand was not unique to Dede, David Campion, Dr. Robert D. Pamplin Jr. associate professor of history, an expert in Southeast Asian history, described traveling to Pakistan for the first time as a way to broaden his knowledge and the scope of his history classes. While he had been to India many times, Pakistan was a new experience for him.
“These two countries, their governments are so hostile toward each other,” Campion said. “They’re different religions, but they know the differences are much less significant.”
Campion described cordial, even friendly relationships between Pakistani and Indian border guards, drinking tea and conversing in Hindi with Urdu-speaking baggage porters in Lahore and watching the elaborate border-closing ceremony from Amritsar. All of these scenes, Campion credited for changing some of his perspectives on the Punjab region developed from years of academic research and study.
“Indian culture has a real footprint in Lahore of course, and there’s just so much that they have in common,” Campion said. “That was something that I read about, but to experience it is a very different thing. I just think of that region and of India and Pakistan very differently now because of that experience.”
Campion was not the only professor who experienced cultural differences first-hand in his travels — Eric Tymoigne, associate professor of economics, who spent much of his sabbatical working with the somewhat controversial Modern Money Theory, described speaking at conferences in France.
“In France, we have the Institutionalists that have a different monetary theory, and you have also what is called a Circuitist. The point is that you have different, contending perspectives. And so the idea was that I was there to present (another) perspective,” Tymoigne said.
Modern Money Theory goes against much of conventional macroeconomics by arguing that governments who control their own currency are not tied to dollar-amount budgeting because they have the power to issue as much money as they need. This framework is often used to argue in favor of increasing government spending on progressive policies such as universal healthcare and job guarantee programs.
Tymoigne’s travels in France, as well as to China on the same sabbatical, helped develop frames of reference outside of U.S. perspectives on budget and government works.
Professors including Tymoigne described new courses that they were excited to teach on research and knowledge they developed over their travels, including an upper-level language course from Dede and Tymoigne’s course on the history of monetary systems.
“Sabbaticals are really a way to give some time for professors to develop further their research agenda,” Tymoigne said. “Even now, I still work on research, but (a sabbatical) frees up time to improve even further. And out of that, you get much richer courses provided to students, and basically a better ability to guide students through research projects.”
The National Institutes of Health reported that there has been a marked increase of stress, anxiety, depression and burnout among educators at all levels, from grade to graduate school. Teachers and professors are expected to fulfill huge workloads, supporting both students and school administration with tasks that can require far more time than a 40-hour, 9-to-5 work week can hold.
College professors, including those who spoke to The Mossy Log, balance class time, office hours, communication with colleagues and students, committee responsibilities, curriculum development and grading with their own responsibilities to succeed in their academic careers. Many professors engage in long-term research or writing. Professors of the arts have their own creative projects and many professors travel extensively for field research. As such, the travel opportunities represented by sabbaticals are crucial to professors’ academic development.
Not all benefits of the sabbatical are travel-specific. Jay Odenbaugh, Frank F. Miller professor of humanities, stayed in Portland for his sabbatical, working on writing projects surrounding environmental issues and completing a book on the philosophy of emotions. Projects that otherwise would have to fit around a professor’s school-year responsibilities were given much more attention, and Odenbaugh had the freedom to work in ways that were conducive to his writing.
“At Lewis & Clark, we live by what we call the teacher-scholar model,” Odenbaugh explained. “And so Lewis & Clark is a unique institution, in that you can be an excellent teacher, but you also can be someone who’s really productive in your scholarship, too. To do both of those things, we need to take time and really devote it to research, where teaching is not on top of you. I think, you know, it’s the sabbatical which is valuable for us to be both teachers and scholars.”
The benefits of sabbatical leave for professors are broad, and many of them transfer to students.
“(My sabbatical) rekindles the joy I had in getting into my field to begin with,” Dede said. “When I started out, I really was interested in this part of the world. I just love discovering new things, learning about them and writing about them. To be able to do that again re-lights that fire, and when everything is working well, you bring that fire to the classroom.”
Harvard Business Review also reported that, on a personal level, sabbaticals offered more time for professionals to spend with their families, supporting a healthy work-life balances. Multiple professors reported spending time with their children, spouses, aging family members and friends that would not be an option during a normal working semester.
When sabbaticals end, professors return to campus refreshed and with more knowledge and experience to share with their students. At a school known for small class sizes and close professor-student relationships, it opens the door for engaged pupils to pursue new academic horizons.
“Faculty like to talk about what they do,” Dede said. “What I suggest students do, if they are curious about what professors do for research, and we all do it … students should ask!”
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