An attempt at demystifying sabbatical applications: a 10-year dataset
A few things we can learn from 94 approved sabbatical proposals
This week in my mini-series on sabbatical nuances, I’m going to share a few insights from a dataset I created by coding the sabbatical summaries of 94 applications approved by my institution in the past decade.1 I developed this dataset from publicly available lists of approved sabbaticals posted on my institution’s Academic Affairs Office website.
I was looking for this information about this time last year, because I was planning to apply for a sabbatical myself. If you’ve been following along, you’ll know we don’t need a spoiler alert this week, though. The short story is there is virtually no guidance on the politicking/rhetorical side of academic sabbatical applications, and not much guidance on sabbaticals, period.
As I’ve discussed numerous times, my position is a bit unorthodox, so I’ve learned it’s wise to look for both the posted and the tacit norms and expectations of academic bureaucracy. Overlooking (or not being aware of) the tacit side of things poses risks for someone like me, in a contingent, underpaid faculty role. Since I couldn’t find anything helpful online, I decided to try to decode the sabbatical decisions made at my institution.
There are two key considerations to keep in mind as we look at these data:
Our Academic Affairs Office leadership and staff have turned over several times in the past decade. There’s no telling, truly, whether the trends we see in these data are a reliable source of information for the future, or just a report on the past. Nevertheless, there are some useful insights to be gleaned.
I was not able to find data on unsuccessful sabbatical applications at my institution. Some of the results reported below will seem inequitable (ratios of non-tenure-track (NTT) vs. tenure-track/tenured (TT) faculty approved) and others seem almost at parity (gender ratios approved). However, these stats do not provide information on attributes of applicants and their applications. We are only looking at attributes of approved applicants and their applications.
That said, here’s what nearly 100 sabbatical applications at a very research-active R2 university2 can reveal to us.
First, the ratio of NTT versus TT faculty approved is stark and grim. Only 9% of approvals over ten years went to NTT faculty (Table 1). I emailed the approved NTT faculty asking if they had any thoughts on why this might be, and the consensus was: “who knows!?!” It could be because far fewer NTT people even apply (not knowing it’s an option, not supported by supervisors, etc.), or because Academic Affairs is biased against them.
Similarly, while the length of sabbatical people are approved for is almost a 50:50 split between one year and one semester (Table 1), there is a stark difference between NTT and TT faculty. NTT faculty predominantly take 1-semester sabbaticals. Again, folks I talked to speculated that this might be because supervisors discourage longer leaves, Academic Affairs doesn’t approve longer leaves, or because NTT folks are typically under paid and cannot also weather the 40% year-long pay cut imposed on people taking full-year sabbaticals at our institution.
Next, there was near-parity for approval by gender (Table 2), and close-ish ratios for NTT vs. TT (50% NTT women, 42% TT women; not depicted in table). Given we do not usually see gender parity in higher ed hiring, and certainly not in STEM, these ratios might bode well for women seeking sabbaticals at my institution. However, the the almost 60:40 split for TT men:women might lead to some similar questions as those above: who is being encouraged versus discouraged to apply, and at what levels are these inflection points occurring?
Typical proposed activities included peer-reviewed papers, grant applications, a book, other major scholarly/creative work (especially in arts, theater, etc.), conference talks, etc. (Table 3). In other words, the majority of proposed activities fall under higher ed’s recognized scholarship activities.
Other proposed activities were teaching or admin related (Table 4), such as the redesign of a grad or undergrad course, running or developing a new program, etc. However, some activities were less typical (Table 4), such as entrepreneurship or applied collaborations with no academic outputs.
In particular, 3 TT people focused on personal entrepreneurship, and this fascinates me. How is this not a conflict of interest, and if so, how/why did the university approve it!? (And, why did no NTT people have this sort of sabbatical, considering the inequities in pay faced by NTT folks?)
Similarly, only 1 NTT did a non-academic focused sabbatical, while 10 TT folks did. There are positive and negative possibilities for why more TT folks take this approach. As a negative example, perhaps NTT folks don’t think such work will be allowed (and perhaps it isn’t in their job type). Or, perhaps, thinking more positively, the TT positions pursuing this approach are in Extension or some other especially applied field. Essentially, the reasons might actually vary depending on the nature of one’s position, department, and institution. So, inquiring about this possibility for yourself is probably more useful than assuming only TT folks get to do non-scholarly sabbaticals.
Certainly, it is useful to know that scholarly work is not the only possible sabbatical activity (at least at my institution). But, I’d argue it is more important to note that zero approved sabbaticals proposed doing every type of activity, scholarly or otherwise (Table 5).
Indeed, there was one major theme per proposal.This focus usually involved the applicant projecting an average of only 2.8 types of activities, from the 8 types/subtypes of activities that I coded for.
Conclusions
What does all this mean for someone developing a sabbatical application? Well, I propose we can draw a few semi-universal conclusions.
1. Take the time to truly figure out what you want to work on.
It can be tempting to guess at your institution’s priorities and then write a proposal that does that. But, (a) that’s impossible unless your administrators are being verrry candid. And (b), administrators can turn over any time, so tying your sabbatical to ephemeral decision makers isn’t sustainable. Then (c), you have to do this work, or something sufficiently resembling it to meet expectations for future sabbaticals. And, finally (d) a sabbatical is supposed to help you recharge your batteries, inspire future scholarship and teaching, etc. So, don’t sign yourself up for something you don’t have genuine motivation for.
Instead, use some sabbatical goals reflection/planning resources3 (largely corporate, but you can “translate”) to identify what you actually want to spend your sabbatical work time on. Refine those ideas into a coherent theme so you have a general sense of what you’ll propose.
Be sure to also map out how much actual time off you will take. Vacations are allowed!!! After all, you’re allowed to take them in an ordinary year, right? (Of course, this says nothing of whether you actually do.) But, more importantly, weekends and evenings and other periods of time off are essential to your humanity (and also your productivity).
2. Unless you see it in writing or it comes from a decision-maker, don’t over-commit.
Given the vast majority of approved applications at my institution proposed 1-3 types of activities (and only a couple of outputs therein), your best bet is to:
Figure out if the same frequencies apply at your institution.
If possible, compare your institutional norms with your college and department, to ascertain whether your supervisors might have higher expectations you first need to navigate, mitigate, or just deal with. For example, what do people in your department really do?4
If your frequencies work out similarly to those at my institution, you might best ignore anyone who suggests you need to run yourself into burnout to (a) get your application approved and (b) have your sabbatical outputs deemed adequate.
Then, you must get real about how much time it takes you to do one unit of whatever you want to propose. Let’s say you want to write several papers and a grant proposal, plus use the results of that work to inform a couple of conference talks and redesigning your grad course. (Basically, a minimum typical year for a TT faculty at an R1 with a teaching release or two.) First, you should ask yourself why you are promising all of that. Is it because you are so excited to do that work you can’t wait!? Or is it because you feel like you need to stay on the academic productivity hamster wheel? And, how does this work relate to your metrics of success, not just the prestige paradigm of academia?
When you’re clear on that, you need to know what kind of time it would actually take to do what you want? For one (or each) of the papers, say: do you have existing data collected, so you can skip the time it would take to collect it? How long does it take you to clean, code, and analyze such a dataset? How long will it take to draft a manuscript your collaborators can comment on? How responsive are they, typically? And so on. Same or similar questions for the grant proposals. And redesigning a course is different from creating one from scratch, sure, but you’ll still have a lot of reading, reconfiguring, lesson planning, etc., to do.
If you don’t already track your time5, now is the time to start! Otherwise, virtually all the productivity research indicates that we massively underestimate how long projects will take us, while simultaneously overestimating how much time we actually work. The combo of those miscalculations can result in you promising waaaaay more for a sabbatical than (a) is humanely possible and (b) you’ll be satisfied with not completing. You do not want to set your institution, department head, or yourself up for disappointment here. This is, within reason, probably a situation where you want to under promise and over deliver.
3. Balance feasibility with making a case for needing “time off.”
Once you have a true sense of the kind of time your desired activities would take you, you will decide how much of it you could really do in a year (or semester!) while also resting, seeking inspiration, and pursuing the myriad non-work things that make life meaningful.
At that point, you are in a strong position to (a) pitch a compelling but feasible scope of work that (b) clearly demands a sabbatical from teaching, admin, and service. In other words, you do need to make the case that what you propose is possible in the time you’re requesting. But, reviewers need to believe the work isn’t actually, already possible within your regular workload.
How about you?
Have you ever reviewed sabbatical data for your unit or institution? How do the results compare to those I’ve discussed here? And, how does that inform your thinking about a feasible, meaningful sabbatical if you’re in the position to apply for one?
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This dataset does not include my own application, nor any submitted in fall 2024 for possible AY 2025-2026 sabbaticals. I compiled and coded the data in prep for my own application. I also could not discern people’s department, college/school, or discipline directly from the listings provided by Academic Affairs. I did not go looking for that information, in part because not everyone in the data set even still works at my institution, and also because I didn’t intend to devote that kind of time. But I am now curious if we’d see parity in approvals across colleges or disciplinary groups (e.g., STEM, arts, humanities, business, etc.).
Yeah, yeah, I know. Technically, with Carnegie’s recently updated criteria, my institution is now ranked as an R1. But we didn’t change anything significantly enough to rank as R1 per the old criteria. And I assume most folks tuned into R-anything rankings are more familiar with the old criteria and will find that descriptor more useful.
Any web search will point you at the handful of books on this subject. You could also look more broadly at self-reflection resources, including numerous ones I’ve mentioned in past posts here.
At my university, we have to give a talk to our department reporting on our sabbatical, so you should be able to at least read between the lines. Better yet, just ask your colleagues to share or summarize for you their sabbatical reports.
This post of mine focuses on what we can say yes to when we carefully say no. There’s a footnote in it that points to a free time-tracking template I developed to help me stay aware of what I was actually spending my time on. You can modify it to your needs to figure out how long projects and tasks actually take you.