Sabbaticals for Dummies

Those of us who have long been curious about what professors do on sabbatical could glean one sort of an answer from Oregon University English professor Edwin Battistella’s tongue-in-cheek (we think) listing of “Twenty-Five things to do on sabbatical” that appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of The Montana Professor. Although Battistella was obviously in a whimsical frame of mind when he constructed the “to do” list, the suggestions look all too credible to some of us on the higher education beat.

Some of us always thought that the answer to what pedagogues do on sabbatical was akin to an old George Carlin comedy routine. “What do dogs do on their day off?” Carlin famously asked. “They can’t lay around, man.”

“That’s their job.” On that note, here are the insights of Dr. Battistella, who is fresh off of a sabbatical himself:

1. Enter the New Yorker cartoon caption contest every week

2. Create Wikipedia entries for all your colleagues

3. Write in coffee shops

4. Join a gym

5. Get a physical

6. Make a will

7. Take old clothes to Goodwill

8. Put your valuables on eBay

9. Arrange your books by color and pick a color to read

10. Synchronize your clocks so there is just one time zone in the house

11. Change the batteries in the smoke alarms

12. Learn the really cool features in Word, Excel and PowerPoint

13. Test drive a Segway

14. Archive your email

15. Set some Google alerts

16. Switch to on-line bill paying

17. Get your taxes done early

18. Sign up for the national do-not-call list

19. Read more of the daily comics than just Doonesbury

20. Start reading the New York Times travel section; plan a vacation

21. Decide what kind of consulting you’d be best at

22. Write a personal strategic plan

23. Register your name as an internet domain

24. Plan your next sabbatical

25. Ponder the imponderable.

Coming back to the George Carlin routine, how does this action plan differ from what professors do when they are not on sabbatical?

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.