Meditations on Sabbatical

Trip Start Sep 07, 2008

148

Trip End Dec 09, 2008

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Flag of United States Medford, Oregon, United States
Wednesday, June 18, 2008

          This is the first week of my sabbatical leave. Sabbatical has its roots in sabbath, the holy rest on the seventh day. But in this case, it's a rest after the seventh year. There are very few organizations left that have institutionalized and supported sabbaticals: the academy, the ministry, a mere handful of corporations. So I know that being granted sabbatical leave in my seventh year at the university is a rare and precious gift. This first picture was taken by my Teaching Assistant on the last day of spring quarter, when I was hanging the sign on my office door to remind students I wouldn't be back on campus until September '09, and it really hit me that sabbatical was finally here.
          Universities grant sabbaticals for two reasons. First, to free up faculty to do the kind of professional development we never have the time to do in the normal grind of academia. You can use a sabbatical to write books or research articles, to overhaul curriculum, to get practical experience in the field you're preparing your students to enter, and to maintain currency in your discipline. But the university will also admit to the second motive for granting sabbaticals: to offer rest, respite, and renewal to a professor. They're hoping that you'll return from sabbatical mentally and physically rejuvenated for your next seven years of teaching, service, and scholarship.
          It sounds like such a fantastic opportunity -- to disappear from your normal job for a year to work on yourself and take your profession to the next level -- and it is. But sabbatical can also be costly. You receive a significantly reduced salary, and you are still bound by a "no compete clause," so you can't use sabbatical to draw two paychecks at once. You end up leaving students who have been a joy to advise and teach in the lurch to find other mentors. You have to disengage from campus projects and committees you believe in, losing touch with the pulse of the university. And most sobering of all, you must make every day of sabbatical worthy of the sacrifice of the colleagues you left behind who are scrambling to cover your absence.
          Knowing what it costs, I remain convinced that taking this sabbatical is absolutely the best choice I could have made. I don't have the stamina to function well when I'm tired. And I've been emotionally and physically exhausted for two years. When I was in graduate school, I was so worn down I would wake up every morning as tired as I had gone to bed. I put lotion on my toothbrush instead of toothpaste. I broke down in tears all the time. These past two years, I found myself in that place again.
         I realized as I hung the "away from campus" sign on my office door that counting this summer when I'm not teaching, and next summer when I might not get a teaching slot either, I will be gone from the university for fifteen months. Fifteen months! Even with two of those months spent on overdrive doing the final preparations for Greece, and three more of those months pouring every ounce of energy into the experience of Athens, that still leaves me with ten months for the recovery to really sink into my bones -- for perhaps the first time in my life. I need to read some more books on relaxation, because I certainly don't have an innate sense of how to do it. I hope I have the strength to live up to this unbelievable opportunity I've been given.
          Sabbatical is a sacred rest indeed..