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Professors take a variety of approaches to the sabbatical

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By PIPER FOGG

For many professors, a sabbatical is a time to shed the daily burdens of campus life. It is a time for reading or writing in a tranquil spot at an unhurried pace. A beach house, a mountain retreat, a Walden-style cabin in the woods — all are perfect venues for the overworked professor who wants to recharge.

For others, a sabbatical is a chance to pursue research in far corners of the world. Many faculty members use paid leave time to visit distant libraries or archaeological digs in exotic locales. But for some, the idea of leaving their day job, even for a semester, is out of the question: too much work to be done on campus!

The sabbatical is a time-honored tradition in academe. Policies vary, but many colleges offer professors a chance after six or seven years of work to apply for a leave to further their professional development.

Here are four different approaches to taking a sabbatical:

The Sabbatical Junkie

Over the last two decades, Jack H. Schuster has taken seven sabbaticals. If that seems like a lot, it is.

Colleges usually allow professors to take a sabbatical — be it a semester or a year — after every six or seven years. At Claremont Graduate University, where Mr. Schuster is a professor of education and public policy, faculty members can apply for a semester-long paid sabbatical after every three consecutive academic years (or six semesters) of full-time work.

Mr. Schuster has taken sabbaticals like clockwork. The leaves, which come with full pay and benefits, are the perfect opportunity to visit other universities, he says. He has sojourned at Harvard and Oxford Universities, the Universities of Haifa, Melbourne, and Michigan, as well as the Brookings Institution, a research and public-policy organization in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Schuster, 68, usually holds some type of visiting-scholar position while at another university and conducts various research projects there. And as a scholar who studies higher education, Mr. Schuster says he benefits by simply being at an institution other than his own. It helps him get a more "nuanced appreciation of the way in which these organizations work," he says.

The breaks also allow Mr. Schuster to get some writing done. At Claremont, preparing for classes and grading papers, not to mention the umpteen meetings he regularly attends, can pull him away from a good writing streak. And a sabbatical, he argues, is just generally a good change of pace.

Academic work, while not backbreaking labor ("It's not coal mining," Mr. Schuster likes to say), can still be exhausting. He welcomes the chance every few years "to regenerate, recoup — whatever you want to call it."

The one sabbatical he spent at home, in 2002, he says, was to focus on his book, The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers. The 572-page tome, which he wrote with Martin J. Finkelstein, a professor of higher education at Seton Hall University, was published in April. Mr. Schuster didn't get to see the final book until a few weeks after it had been released. He had been in Israel — on sabbatical.

The Abstainer

Leah G. Stambler cannot stop working. The education professor, who works in the teacher-preparation program at Western Connecticut State University, could have applied for her first sabbatical a decade ago. Her husband has even begged her to take one. But she never has.

Until recently, as the coordinator of student-teacher placement and later head of the student-teaching program at Western Connecticut, Ms. Stambler says she was always in a "linchpin position." She never felt she could tear herself away from her students.

Having been a high-school teacher for 14 years before teaching at the college level, Ms. Stambler says she knows what public schools look for in teachers. She feels personally responsible for preparing undergraduates for the rigors of teaching. "My students should turn out to be not mediocre, but really superb," she says. For Ms. Stambler, that has meant working around the clock, often getting only a few hours sleep and doing more than a little micromanaging.

"It takes a lot out of me physically," admits the professor. Her doctors would call that an understatement. Ms. Stambler has had triple-bypass surgery on her heart, once had kidney stones removed, and underwent surgery last month for carpal-tunnel syndrome. When she had heart surgery in 2002, she conned the nurses into letting her use a computer to check in on her students. There she was, pecking away at the keyboard with her arm hooked up to an IV. "I was pleading with them: 'Let me go! I have work to do!'" she says.

Why can't Ms. Stambler pull back? "There's always this drive that I know what's needed," she says. She also wants her students, many of whom are struggling financially, to get their money's worth. "I've been where they there," says Ms. Stambler, "and I know what they go through. ... I have to know that I've done everything for them."

To the relief of her doctors, her husband, and even a few of her colleagues, Ms. Stambler has finally relented — at least a little. She decided to quit her job as coordinator of student teaching last December, feeling that she had a good team in place to take over.

And she applied last year for her first sabbatical. She plans to use the time to work on several research ideas, including a project on character education in schools through the teaching of Holocaust studies.

But she has already put off the leave until January. And Ms. Stambler has made it clear that if anyone needs her help while she is away, she will definitely be reachable.

The Unwinder

Billie Wright Dziech had big plans for her sabbatical. The professor of language arts at the University of Cincinnati intended to use the time to finish the research for a book on sexual harassment, complete a rough draft, and present it to her editors, all tied up in a pretty package. But as many professors on sabbatical find out, ambition sometimes loses in the inevitable tug of war with the backyard hammock.

"Many people who go on sabbatical to do X ... end up doing very little while they're on sabbatical," says Ms. Dziech, who took off two quarters in 1996. "You have all these grand illusions, and you think you're going to get so much done, and then life steps in."

Ms. Dziech, who is in her early 60s, did complete the research for her book during her time away, but not the draft. And she took her time. "I would write the bibliography, trail along, do the research," she says. "What's nice is that during a sabbatical, you can be motivated to work at your own pace on your own time."

For some professors, that means an hour here and there, squeezed in between quality time with family or trips to visit friends. Ms. Dziech spent some of her leave at Kiawah Island, off the coast of South Carolina, where she and her husband, an architect, have a second home. She took walks and visited with friends and neighbors, sometimes discussing her research on higher education. She also read novels for pleasure. "It's very nice on a sabbatical, honestly, to be away from your own environment for a while," she says. And gaining some distance from campus culture can be healthy. That way, she says, one comes back re-energized and ready to crank out work.

It is like the creative process, she explains: After working on a project for hours, "you fall asleep, you watch a movie. Then when you come back to it, you're really ready."

Indeed, when Ms. Dziech returned to Cincinnati after her leave, she quickly whipped out a draft of the very book she was hoping to finish during the sabbatical.

The Retooler

Many professors would agree that the point of taking a sabbatical is to get away from the classroom.

Not R. Daniel Bergeron. The professor of computer science at the University of New Hampshire spent much of his 2004-5 sabbatical immersed in college courses — as a student.

Mr. Bergeron, 61, got the idea after faculty members from the biology department kept showing up for help using computer applications to make sense of their data.

"We'd meet with these biologists and walk away saying, 'It sounds interesting, but I don't understand it. It's like a different language,'" he recalls.

If he could learn to speak that language, Mr. Bergeron realized, he could collaborate more with the biologists and delve into bioinformatics, a hot field that had intrigued him for some time.

In computer science, he says, it can take years or even decades before a program or technique makes an impact. But working in bioinformatics, which uses computer-science techniques to solve problems in biology, would permit him to "see a more direct potential benefit for humanity:" helping geneticists better understand different genomes.

Before he could benefit humanity, though, Mr. Bergeron had to start with himself. The last time he had taken a biology course was in the ninth grade. Luckily, he says, the freshman biology course he enrolled in at New Hampshire "was a big enough class that ... I could hide in the corner."

His plan was focused. "I wanted to have this narrow, deep path where I learned about genetics," he says. So after getting through biology, which he took during the summer, he took a junior-level genetics course that fall. While he skipped a few classes and "wimped out" on the tests, he says, he took the course work seriously. On a month-long trip to India, for instance, he still kept up with the assignments. In the spring of 2005, during the second half of his sabbatical, he took an interdisciplinary course on environmental genomics, which looks at how environmental forces affect mutations.

His work has paid off. Mr. Bergeron has found a new love in biology. "It's just magic," he says. And he's back in front of the classroom, showing others how biologists and computer scientists can work together. This spring he collaborated with the biochemist who taught the environmental-genomics course, rejiggering it to include more computer science. He and his colleague taught the newly named "Applied Bioinformatics" as a team. Their students included three graduate students from computer science and seven from genetics.