While the upsides of the tenure-track professoriate seem to be waning, there is one particular gem that the most privileged ones of us still have access to: Sabbatical.
This sounds almost too good to be true, but I’m scheduled for a sabbatical for the 2024-2025 academic year1. A whole year away from all of the small obligations that seemingly add up to consume all of our professional time.
What am I doing with that time? I’l be based out of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, in the Department of Ornithology. I’m absurdly thrilled to pivot to a new line of investigation, which I’ve been building towards for the past couple years. The first paper on this from my lab should hopefully be out before the end of this year. I also will be taking full advantage of my open schedule to see new places and do new things. I haven’t planned much yet2.
While I’m using this time to grow as a researcher, I also plan to do other writing and formulate some priorities for the next phase of my career.
I was talking about figuring out my next steps with some good friends, and one of them did the math: Let’s say I’m planning to retire in 15 years, which sounds about right. “That gives you 800 weeks of work left.” Excuse me, what? Yeah, really?3.
I’ve talked about this with a few people, specifically that I’ve got 800 weeks before I’m probably going to retire, and they said out loud what I thought: “That’s wild.” I concur, it feels wild. And an entirely factual way to think about it, too.
So, then, how do I want to spend this precious amount of limited time?
The concept of sabbatical is as peculiar as the concept of tenure or the concept of academic freedom. I think we can make the most of tenure by using our sabbatical well.
Admittedly, I might be sleeping in a bit more, and running more 5ks, but I’m gonna be busy with work. I’m beyond excited to have the bandwidth to do some things I’ve been thinking about for years but haven’t had the stretches of time to grow. I’m also thinking about the successes and failures of my prior sabbatical, which was eight years before this one. I got sorta proficient with R, built a new collaboration that resulted in some great stuff, and I got my first book together, which turned out quite well. But the most important thing I got out of that sabbatical was perspective to understand where I was and where I wanted to head to next. The time between then and now, I’ve experienced a lot of growth as a scholar and a leader, and I’m prepared to chart a new direction. This’ll give me a chance to be more deliberative.
What does sabbatical mean for my work here on this site? If anything, I think you can expect me to write here more frequently. I’m committed to doing this at least once a week, let’s see if it picks up. Thanks to all y’all who have subscribed, unpaid or otherwise, this helps me keep at it.
At my university (and as I understand it, at most places nowadays), we have the option of taking a semester at full pay or a full year at half pay. I’m choosing the latter. I currently don’t have the cash sitting around to make up for the shortfall in my paycheck, but I do have a proposal in review which, if funded, would make up the gap. And also, if it somehow doesn’t come through, I s’pose I will manage to get by in this period of time. My last sabbatical was also a full year, and when I did this, I had managed to squirrel away enough summer salary that I was almost at full income over the year.
In all sincerity, I’m excited to find reasons to visit cool faraway places and people, and if this would align with your institution’s interest in having me visit, do think about dropping me an email? There are a lot of things that I won’t be able to fit in but I have some windows of time that look really promising and wide open.
Since this conversation, I’ve read the 4000 weeks book, which I wouldn’t categorize as earth-shattering, I thought it was uncommonly enlightening and helped me put a lot of things in healthy perspective.
Daunting when you think about your time that way. It’s a pretty finite resource. I highly recommend Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman for such existential questions about our time use.