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[digger]

Does anyone use a service sabbatical to support faculty scholarship?  If so, how does it work? We are trying to find a way to keep junior faculty from drowning in a sea of service duties, but have nothing formally structured.

TIA

[onion]

My university has competitive in-house fellowships for junior faculty.  They get one course release and are released from all service for a semester.  The "trade off" is that you have to attend a weekly works in progress seminar with others who have received the fellowship.

I'd give my eye teeth for a service sabbatical!

[digger]

Any chance you could PM me the document/criteria you use?

[onion]

I just poked around on our website, and there is no white paper or selection criteria that I can see, as they are all competitive fellowships that just have some boilerplate language about what applicants should have--"a record of excellent teaching and a promising research or creative agenda in pre-tenure years", etc. I guess the committees or deans are the only ones with access to the policy and that language.  Sorry about that.

[janewales]

We just don't give them service duties for the first 2 years, and then ease them very carefully into only certain kinds of limited service after that. I'm not sure I understand why you'd need something formal-- do you have department chairs who are being unreasonable, perhaps?

[digger]

Since I am the chair and am trying to find a way to cut them some slack.
Yes, completely unreasonable…
;-)

Not university policy but I don’t give them any first year service and ease them in over the next two. I would like to see some way of giving a person in year 3-5 extra time to pursue a great project. The other part of the idea is to, perhaps, open the field to all my faculty. Faculty seem to be very preoccupied (and vocal) with the contents of everyone else’s plate. This "service sabbatical" would provide some release time with the advantage of having a level of transparent decision making.  A few chairs in the college have been discussing this so we may be able to have this plan adopted college wide.