Sabbaticals for Dummies

Campus Report ^ | January 16, 2008 | Malcolm Kline

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Sabbaticals for Dummies

by: Malcolm A. Kline, January 16, 2008

Those of us who have long been curious about what professors do on sabbatical could glean one sort of an answer from Oregon Univrsity 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...