Today my sabbatical officially begins. And it’s high time it did because I was starting to feel close to a burnout. It’s time for me to take a long rest from teaching because this is not a profession that can be practiced with no breaks. Besides, I was starting to resent everything that interrupted my immersion in my research.
Ideally, of course, we should not be teaching more than 2 courses per semester because higher teaching loads are a profanation of the very concept of teaching.
The sabbatical will be aimed at advancing my research projects (the book, two articles, and a conference talk) and replenishing my scholarly base in a massive way.
This will be so much fun.
Clarissa's Blog 
Just in time for a sabbatical.
“The Illinois Supreme Court on Friday unanimously ruled unconstitutional a landmark state pension law that aimed to scale back government worker benefits to erase a massive $105 billion retirement system debt, sending lawmakers and the new governor back to the negotiating table to try to solve the pressing financial issue.”
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-illinois-pension-law-court-ruling-20150508-story.html#navtype=outfit&page=1
Illinois is one of seven states that has a flat personal income tax regime and according to a recent economic study, 97% of the wage gains since the 2007 recession went to the top 1% of earners in Illinois. Add to this the fact that Rauner is constitutionally opposed to tax increases and you know that the budget will be balanced by expenditure cuts so if you recognize that the main initiative of his deficit strategy is gone then the fiscal knives will come out in earnest for other areas i.e. higher education.
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Rauner is so dumb. Everybody tells him that his budget is unworkable, stupid, meaningless. But he and his grossly overpaid cast of “talented” paper-pushers are too dense to get it. If he slashes higher ed, just in our region, the entire economy will collapse. This was explained to him time and again but he is very, very limited intellectually. He does not understand simple cause and effect.
Illinois just needs to get smarter and stop voting for these proponents of a theory that has disgraced itself everywhere.
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Have a great sabbatical! I wish I could have one, but I’ve only been at my school four years. We’re not eligible until year seven, which is after tenure. It would be more helpful to give junior faculty a semester off to do research, but my university never gives junior faculty a break. Plus, they want us to do research, but don’t really know what that means in concrete terms. Ugh. Anyway – you will have a great time and be super productive. Enjoy!
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Thank you! We also only get sabbaticals after tenure. The places who offer research leave to junior faculty members are very very few. Which is a crying shame.
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We now have a “mini-sabbatical” for tenure track assistant professors. A semester off at 75% pay after three years. This did not exist while I was non-tenured.
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“We now have a “mini-sabbatical” for tenure track assistant professors. A semester off at 75% pay after three years. ”
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I thought that I would throw you some red meat. Here’s an article by an English professor commenting on his Op Ed in the NYT last Sunday.
“Academia is the Titanic. I have suggested that schools stop spending so much money and labor on useless research in the humanities, and instead shift that labor and money to teaching. Pay adjuncts more money and hire them as lecturers on regular contracts. Make no research demands upon them. For research professors, ask them to slow down their publication pace — get off the industrial model — and reward them for contact hours with students. And let’s close down graduate programs that don’t place 80 percent of their Ph.D.s.”
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/12/academia_is_the_titanic_mark_bauerlein_on_teaching_in_the_morally_bankrupt_grind_of_the_new_american_university/
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I Googled this author and discovered that, aside from this article, he’s made himself known with a book titled The Dumbest Generation. 🙂 This tells us all we need to know about his ideas.
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