Comments on: No sabbaticals in “I-O-WAAAAY?”

By: funnie

funnie — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 19:38:25 +0000

(As, of course, are your state’s regents/governors/trustees. In fact, it’s even a bit odd that your legislators are so darn *specific* about protecting your flagship’s budget. Most legislatures are pretty lazy and just require cuts from the system, preferring to let the governing body handle the ugly negotiations and referee the fights between institutions.)

Less sarcastically: I’m all for saying that flagships are comparatively privileged, have more clout to throw around, and therefore may receive preferential treatment. Being “impressed” that they, too, are being cut (true of every flagship I know, and the perception of non-instructional, i.e. unnecessary programs proliferating at R1s actually can make their programs a target and an excuse for punishing them more harshly with cuts) is another story. Being impressed at ANY education budget being cut, ever, reminds me of crabs in a pot.

By: funnie

funnie — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 19:28:11 +0000

I’m impressed that you’re impressed, Jeremy. I’d have thought you’d have heard of such a thing before! I don’t know what Southern state you live in, but I do know (pretty much off the top of my head) that by making sure your state’s flagship is “completely protected” your legislature is behaving *totally unlike* those of AL, FL, GA, KY, MS, NC, SC, and TN.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 15:22:30 +0000

Following Dr. Crazy, what happens at schools which are flailing to find a middle ground between R1 and teaching schools? At my southern public university, there supposedly are no sabbaticals, but there are university wide competitions for a handful of awards equivalent of one semester leave at 80% pay for anyone here more than 7 years. We have nearly 1000 tenure/tenure-track faculty, so the odds of getting one are really slim. That may have made sense in olden tymes, when the mission of the school clearly was to produce teachers, but now the admin want to expand doctoral and masters programs.

I am a bit impressed that the legislature is willing to slash flagship budgets – here the flagship is completely protected, even as the rest of the fleet is sinking…

By: Dr. Crazy

Dr. Crazy — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 16:43:27 +0000

H- that may be the case, and also there may be disciplinary differences at work, too, for those of us who are largely responsible for the general education curriculum of the university vs. those who don’t work in disciplines that aren’t. (Which doesn’t speak to the application process at your uni, but it does speak, I think, to CPP’s perspective about research being important in itself, regardless of its connection to the classroom.)

By: Historiann

Historiann — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 15:20:46 +0000

I had the same thoughts, Dr. Crazy, but it might interest you to know that although I teach at an R-1, a great deal of our university’s application for sabbatical asks us to state specifically how our sabbaticals will enrich our teaching and benefit our students. (In fact, there are more questions about that than there are about how our research is valuable or useful in our specialized fields.) My uni is not the flagship–it’s the Aggie school–but all faculty must fill out the same forms whether or not they’re in Ph.D.-granting departments.

Although I think you’re right that different institutions clearly have different identities and different priorities, I wonder if the public/private divide is more important than the teaching school/R1 divide.

By: Dr. Crazy

Dr. Crazy — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 14:48:28 +0000

“I dislike arguments that justify spending money on faculty research because it “improves teaching”, as if the research per se is unjustifiable. Universities exist to serve multiple independent purposes, and research is one of them. Hanging the justification of research on teaching is a very, very dangerous road.”

I see where you’re coming from CPP, but I would respectfully submit that while research is a (small) component of my job duties (at a 3rd or 4th tier regional university), research is not, in fact, a primary reason why my university exists. For that reason, I think that arguments about the centrality of sabbatical to teaching make sense in my context and they don’t actually dilute or distract from what sabbatical is supposed to be (we can apply for sabbatical in order to work on pedagogy – it’s not just a research award) or make any difference in how research is regarded at my institution. Now, if I were at the state flagship, I’d agree with you: sabbatical shouldn’t be justified at a research university on the basis of teaching, because a primary part of the mission of the flagship is, in fact, research. The problem is, you can’t map the mission of the flagship onto the many, many other state institutions that award 4-year degrees (or the mission of the private research university onto the many, many non-research-intensive slacs that award 4-year degrees). So, if we want to preserve sabbatical, we need to address the fact that “sabbatical” is not a one-size-fits-all research award.

By: Susan

Susan — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 05:51:06 +0000

This is just so depressing I can’t get my brain around it and have nothing snappy to say. Ignorance is, well, ignorance, right?

By: Notorious Ph.D.

Notorious Ph.D. — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 02:25:34 +0000

And just when I thought I couldn’t get any more demoralized, there you go. Sadly, this is probably the beginning (or middle?) of a race to the bottom. The ultimate losers will be the students and (by extension) the country as a whole.

By: koshem Bos

koshem Bos — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 21:06:39 +0000

In a country where science is the enemy of way too many politicians, sabbaticals are foot soldiers in a losing war. Darwin is a clown, Newton is a socialist, bridges fall apart, unemployed are bums and our top progressive is to the right of McCain.

By: Indyanna

Indyanna — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 19:52:37 +0000

@ Comrade, This is quite true in a general sense, but it will vary from discipline to discipline, and circumstance to circumstance, and I don’t think it’s merely a pragmatic rhetorical argument to suggest the link where it exists. I always think of my mother’s 1939 college history textbook, which I actually found in a crawlspace, and which was a very pretty book in its day. But it would be criminal to inflict on any students today, and the key to that transformation could be described as a kind of million sabbatical march.

I’d love to see Wikileaks flush out and publish the undergraduate transcripts of every state legislator in the U.S. for the past twenty years. A lot of the people who we give low grades to are in fact quite smart people, they just don’t like to sit in classes and submit to academic discipline, or disciplines. They find their way through to a B.A., make lots of money, and if sent up to the state capital, it’s payback time.