your questions answered...After my flippant post about sabbatical, I got enough comments and questions that I felt like I should give a straight up review of how sabbatical works and what the scholarly expectations are for science profs at a Small Liberal Arts College. If only it were that simple...
The first complication is the issue of "tenure". I work at a peculiar institution where there is an unusually sharp division between the undergraduate and graduate programs - they are basically two separate schools, with two separate faculty. When I was originally hired, only the graduate faculty could have tenure. The undergraduate faculty worked on a contract basis. After two 3-year contracts, you were eligible for a 5-year contract, which was basically considered a sort of "tenure light". That has changed in the past year or so, and now we can opt to go for tenure as well, although few have done so, because the expectations for scholarly achievement are still unclear.
What I mean is... if I am a psychology prof at the graduate school I have things like graduate students and research money and a lab. If I'm a physics professor at the undergraduate school, I have none of these things. Which means I can't exactly be held to the same standards of "scholarly output" as someone at the graduate division. I can hardly be expected to do "real science" in the absence of any of the resources that real science demands. (We in the undergrad science department THINK that the administration understands this, but it is not 100% clear.) So the question then becomes... what "counts" as scholarly output or a "publication record" in that context?
Non-technical articles in teaching-journals? Trade books? Conference presentations? Curriculum websites? I wrote a fucking PLAY, does that count for anything? Nobody seems quite sure.
So. If I were a normal particle physicist at a normal university, a sabbatical would mean that I'd work on my research. I might travel to another institution, or a national lab like Fermilab, or to someplace abroad like CERN. The expectation would be that by the end I'd have a paper or two to show for it, published someplace like Physical Review.
But that's not what I do. My last publication in Phys Rev was my dissertation research almost 15 years ago. (Oy!) I teach undergrads and I develop new courses (I've taught something like 12 different NEW courses since 2003.) I present educational conferences to share curriculum ideas and teaching strategies. I got a grant to write a play about Copernicus. I assemble and edit 200-page collections of historical sources to use as course readers. Does any of this count for the kind of scholarly activity that a tenure committee (or hell, even a 3-year review committee?) is looking for? I honestly have no idea. And being only ONE physicist among only FOUR scientists... I don't have many places to look for guidance.
And so when I applied for a sabbatical, I was asked to provide a "rationale"... in other words... what will I be doing with my time. What I gave them was a one-page synopsis of two books I'm working on (mostly in my head) that straddle the line between trade paperbacks and undergraduate introductory texts. Both are ideas that I've had for about 2 years... Both are started or at least outlined. (One stands as a 28-page outline of chapter headings and introductions, the other is around 60 pages worth of essays, some of which are completed.) I can see them both winding up as 200-page books, but I have no plans to seek a publisher right now. For now, the plan is to have two 200-page books by the end of the sabbatical, at least one of which is finished, edited, and ready to print and use as a text for my introductory class. (I will probably use Lulu.com and just sell them to my students w/o a profit.)
So, I have clear goals for what *I* want to accomplish in those 8 months. Whether or not the powers-that-be will look at this output and see it as appropriate for an undergraduate physics professor, I have no idea.
