This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Monday, March 13, 2006

Sabbaticals

There’s a little news meme in Michigan, so far picked up only by local media, about the waste and expense of sabbaticals for university professors.

Every six or seven years, professors can apply to take a semester or a year off. Usually the deal is that they’ll continue to get full salary for a semester sabbatical, or, if they want the whole year, they’ll be given around ½ salary.

Headlined “Professors Paid Not to Teach,” the article that’s been picked up around the state goes like this:

Michigan universities paid more than 500 professors $23.2 million to be absent from the classroom during the 2004-05 school year, even as the state's economy nosedived and parents and students struggled to pay double-digit tuition hikes.

And lax systems are failing to make sure professors use their sabbaticals -- paid time off intended for research, expanding skills and recharging mental batteries -- in ways that benefit universities and students.

Critics question the value of sabbaticals as college affordability recedes and professors already are relieved of many routine tasks by graduate students and other assistants.

"Why do people in higher ed have to recharge their batteries when people almost nowhere else in the world recharge them?" asked Richard Vedder, an economics professor at Ohio University and author of the book, "Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much."


At Michigan's 13 public universities, 558 full-time faculty members received paid sabbaticals in 2004-05, a Detroit News analysis found. That's about 4.4 percent of full-time instructors.

The $23.2 million cost -- calculated using sabbatical and pay records The News obtained under Michigan's Freedom of Information Act -- represents only the salaries paid to professors while they were away from their jobs. When health insurance and other benefits are included, the cost of the sabbaticals increases to about $31 million.

The $31 million, which does not include the cost of temporary instructors frequently hired to fill in for absent professors, represents less than 1 percent of the 13 universities' 2004-05 general fund expenditures of $3.9 billion.


But Michigan's cash-strapped colleges socked students with tuition and fee hikes this year of between 7.5 percent and 19 percent. The schools blamed cuts in state funding.

Sabbaticals are approved time away from the university, typically used to conduct research, publish books and articles and upgrade skills. Proponents say they allow professors to gain fresh insights they share with students, and are critical to attracting and retaining top-flight professors and researchers.

But critics say professors typically work only nine to 10 months per year, their teaching loads have dropped dramatically since the 1960s and their schedules already allow ample time to conduct most research.



There’s a reasonable case to be made against sabbaticals, and the writer’s doing a pretty good job of that here. When you add unpaid leave time off and paid sabbatical time off to low course loads (two courses a semester or fewer) plus free summers, you get a hard to justify system. Not all professors of course enjoy quite this list of goodies, but many do. When unpopular university presidents like Larry Summers talk about the need for faculty to teach more, it’s this sort of picture they often have in mind.

What makes it even more difficult to justify sabbaticals, it seems to me, is the obsolescence of the professor-as-intellectual, the professor as essentially a monkish pensive type. Traditionally, the professor was not a publications-generating, conference-organizing, grants-getting, newspaper-quote-issuing dervish. She was intended to do the world’s slow and careful thinking for it, and her primary function was to share the fruits of that thinking with students and colleagues within the walls of the university.

No one questions the need for contemplatives to sit atop mountains and reflect to no particular end. But everyone questions the need of non-reflective careerists to reflect. To the extent that university professors look more like non-reflective careerists than old-fashioned contemplatives, they can expect people to wonder why they get to drift off to subsidized wanderjahren.
Posted at: 3/13/2006 05:51:00 PM