Sabbatical

At Mason they’re called “Study Leave”, but around academia they come around every six years or so (at least that’s the unspoken rule) and provide either one semester or two for the purposes of “re-charging” the old intellectual batteries. Novels have been written about sabbatical. Somehow they always take place in delightfully urbane locations which feature perhaps a flat in London or a small pied a terre in Paris. Less is written about the supposed re-charging. It leaves the question: what ought one do with one’s sabbatical?

Academics get a bad rap, of course, on this. At most cocktail parties that I’ve attended with non-academics, it’s a matter of course before someone brings up such experiences as the ultimate academic sinecure besides tenure. In fact however, most professors I’ve known have treated sabbatical as a serious period to focus exclusively on scholarship (as opposed to teaching), very often staying at their home institution during the entire period.

For many scholars, their teaching and service responsibilities leave, on average, very little time for pursuits of the mind–research. That is why institutes for advanced study, like Krasnow exist of course. Such time needs to be protected, sometimes as a place (Krasnow) and sometimes as an institution (sabbatical).

Jim