Editor's Note: This is the final installment of a two-part series on College professors' sabbaticals.
When Dartmouth professors become eligible to take a paid sabbatical from teaching, they receive support through various on-campus avenues, according to religion professor Susan Ackerman. While some sabbatical programs at other insitutions are threatened by budget cuts and deprive professors of full compensation, the only change College professors usually see during their leave terms is that of location.
Confronted with budget constraints in 2010, the College considered cutting the budget for paid faculty leaves, Ackerman said. At the time of the consideration, Ackerman sat on the Committee on Priorities, a faculty committee focused on budgetary issues including sabbatical funding.
"The proposal to limit sabbaticals didn't get far enough to get a lot of faculty response," Ackerman said. "The College realized pretty quickly that one of our highest priorities was to keep the best possible faculty we could have and a faculty that has a world-class reputation."
Professors' sabbaticals at many schools across the nation have been subject to sweeping budget cuts in recent years, according to the American Association of University Professors' 2009-2010 Report on the Economic Status of the Profession. Kent State University, Fitchburg State University, the University of Georgia and the University of Iowa are among many schools that have limited the number of sabbaticals or cut their budget for faculty leave term pay in the past three years, according to the report.
The College's focus on undergraduates can give professors an advantage over larger research universities when it comes to sabbaticals, Ackerman said.
"It's more difficult to take a full sabbatical because you can't just tell your doctoral student that you're leaving for a year and wish them good luck on their thesis," she said.
Professors on sabbatical are not required to undergo any special monitoring process, according to Ackerman.
"Every year, professors report to their deans and fill out the faculty record supplement form, which says what they've done in the past year in terms of teaching, advising, directing honors theses and independent study and research," she said. "Someone who was on sabbatical would fill out the report showing a reduced teaching load, and hopefully an increased research load."
As the College strives to attract qualified professors, sabbaticals take on greater importance, according to Ackerman.
"At schools like Dartmouth, the sabbatical process is crucial because we want to have a world-class faculty, and those people are on the cutting edge of creating new knowledge," Ackerman said. "Being on this frontier involves time off to read what you need to read, learn what you need to learn, understand what you need to understand and write what you need to write."
The College requires faculty members to teach for nine terms in order to be eligible for one term of paid sabbatical leave, Ackerman said. Professors must submit a proposal for approval to their department chairs and the Dean of Faculty's Office, she said.
"The only time there would ever really be an issue of someone not being approved for sabbatical would be if it just so happened that four professors in a department of 10 were eligible at the same time," she said. "It would be problematic if it were the math department and those four just happened to be the professors that teach Math 2. That would get a little messy but these things usually fall out in nice and tidy ways."
Restrictions and requirements for sabbatical terms vary at different institutions. At Harvard Medical School, only tenured professors who have taught at Harvard for at least six years are eligible, according to Harvard's Office of Faculty Affairs. Professors and assistant professors at Yale University are eligible for leave after two and a half years, and then again six years after the end of their first term of sabbatical, according to the Yale University Faculty Handbook.
Dartmouth professors receive full pay during their time on sabbatical, while faculty at Brown University receive 75 percent of their normal salary, according to Brown University's Guidelines for Leave Eligibility. At Williams College, after six years of teaching, tenured professors are eligible for a year of sabbatical at 75 percent of their normal pay, according to Williams' Office of the Dean of the Faculty.
The College's sabbatical program also offers an opportunity for assistant professors to pursue research interests early in their Dartmouth careers, according to economics professor Elias Papaioannou. Papaioannou spent a term taking classes in the Harvard University economics department through Dartmouth's junior faculty fellowship program, he said.
"Dartmouth is super generous in that they allow junior faculty to take a sabbatical after their fourth year through the fellowship," Papaioannou said. "It was super important to me to have the opportunity to work within one of the top departments in the nation."
The College awards a varying number of junior faculty fellowships each year to "assistant professors of exceptional promise," according to the Dartmouth Faculty Handbook. Fellowships are awarded by the Board of Trustees through a competitive application process, the handbook said.
Despite the support professors receive from the College in taking sabbatical terms, some professors are still hesitant to leave Hanover for logistical reasons, Ackerman said.
"I have a dog that's hard to uproot, and I'm also a gardener," she said. "I always tell people that I'm going to Lebanon for my sabbatical and hope they assume I'm exotic and headed to Beirut. What I relish most is being 10 miles away from campus and really having the opportunity to start every morning at 8:30 to work on exactly what is most interesting to me."
Computer science professor Thomas Cormen also took a sabbatical in Lebanon, where his wife, Nicole Cormen, launched a successful campaign for Lebanon's City Council, he said. His choice to stay close to campus was beneficial, he said.
"One of the logistical issues that goes into a sabbatical is that your house can sit empty for a year," he said. "When I stayed in Lebanon, I was also able to stay in touch with my graduate students and attend department meetings during the sabbatical."
