Sabbatical Kickoff

One of the many wonderful things about teaching at a university is the whole notion of the sabbatical.  Every seven years, professors are eligible to apply for a leave from their teaching and committee responsibilities.  Contrary to popular conception, however, “sabbatical” is not synonymous with “vacation.”

At Pepperdine, like other universities, the application process for sabbaticals is a competitive one.  Because the classes taught and committee work applicants would otherwise be covering would need to be covered by one’s colleagues, applicants are required to submit a proposal detailing how the sabbatical would be spent in order to justify shifting the load to others.  The typical application proposes substantial completion of a scholarly writing project, such as a law review article (about 100 pages with 400 footnotes) or a new edition of a textbook.  At Pepperdine, professors can seek a sabbatical for one semester with full pay, or for a full year with half pay.

Shortly before I first became eligible to apply for a sabbatical (in 2005), Dean Starr asked me to join the law school’s administrative team for a two-year term.  When I agreed to become the Dean of Students, I knew that this would delay my sabbatical, but I didn’t know it would be delayed six years.  After Dean Starr became the President of Baylor in the summer of 2010, I finally applied in the fall of 2010 to be on sabbatical for the spring of 2012.  By that time, I had succumbed to the irresistible magnetic draw of Africa, so I asked my family how they would feel about spending an entire year in Uganda.  Predictably (and understandably), they were not thrilled with the idea.  (I have previously posted here the heart-felt and well-written reaction of Jessica, my oldest daughter).  After lots of discussion and prayer, my family sufficiently warmed to the idea of a one-semester sabbatical that I decided to apply.

I was still not convinced that this was what I should be doing, so I only partially completed the application while I continued to pray.  There had been a few e-mails the prior month about the upcoming deadline for sabbatical applications, but I still thought I had several weeks to finish it.  One night in middle of the fall semester, I had trouble sleeping in the middle of the night, so I went downstairs and turned on my computer.  Whether it was my subconscious remembering the deadline, or whether it was a different kind of prompting, I decided to finish my application.  I fully understood that my proposal to spend a semester embedded with the Ugandan judiciary, working to help them implement plea bargaining and other projects to improve their criminal justice system, would be unorthodox and likely wouldn’t result in the completion of the usual scholarly article or book.  Nevertheless, I hoped my colleagues would believe that this project would be sufficiently valuable to justify them carrying my load during this semester.  I finished the proposal three hours later — just as my family was waking up — but did not submit it to anyone because I still thought the applications weren’t due for another couple of weeks.

That afternoon, I was looking for Carol Chase, one of my colleagues in the Deans’ Suite, so I asked another colleague where she was.  “She is at the Sabbatical Committee meeting – she should be back shortly.”  “Crap” (or worse), I thought (or maybe said).  I completely blew it.  A few minutes later, Dean Chase came to my office and said, “I just got back from the Sabbatical Committee meeting – I thought  you were going to apply for one.”  Me, too.  When I explained that I had actually completed the application, she encouraged me to send it to the members of the committee immediately because the final decisions had not been made, but would be made via e-mail that afternoon.  I did, they were, and I was granted a sabbatical.  I am confident that had I not had insomnia the night before (rare for me), I wouldn’t be headed to Africa in a few weeks.

Over the course of the next year, our plans solidified and we decided that we could be more useful if we were there for six months, rather than for the four months we had originally been discussing.  And as we looked into the flight schedules, and as I familiarized myself with the Ugandan judicial calendar, we decided that it made the most financial and logistical sense to leave for Uganda near the end of January, returning in late July.  But since we were renting out our house at the beginning of the spring semester, we needed to move our home base to Santa Rosa (where my parents and Joline’s parents live) for the first three weeks of January.  And since we had this time before we left, we decided to do a bit of traveling in the interim.

In Donald Miller’s book, “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years,” he quotes Bob Goff as saying that he writes down everything he wants to remember because if you don’t remember it, it is like it never happened.  One of the writing projects I have been working on for about a year is deeply personal to me and to Henry, the Ugandan teenager I met in a rural prison in early 2010 who is a big reason I keep coming back to Uganda.  The story that Henry and I lived over the course of two years as we struggled for his freedom is something neither of us ever wants to forget, so we are writing it down.  I don’t know if it will be worth reading when we complete it, but it is something that both of us are committed to completing.  Yesterday, I finished grading my Fall Torts exams.  Today, Joline and I flew to Miami where we will spend the next six days.  Over the course of these six days, I hope to substantially complete and edit this manuscript (with Joline’s help) so I can bind it and present it to Henry later this month in Uganda.

Next week, our entire family will fly to Cancun to spend five days with our “twin family” from Oklahoma (who is also blogging here) so we can get to know each other well before we spend the next six months together in Uganda.  (They surprised their kids with the Cancun trip as a Christmas present and invited us to come along.  I had been saving up frequent flyer miles, so it all worked out).

I recognize that six days in Miami and then five days in Cancun sounds more like a vacation than a working sabbatical, but we will soon be moving to a place that, while it has every bit as much sunshine, lacks many of the other creature comforts.

Sorry for the length of this post, and I promise that later posts will be shorter.  (It might have been even longer if the two year-old kid behind me on the airplane wasn’t about to set the world record in the “Up Down, Up Down” tray table game he is playing.  Parenting is tough – I get that – but c’mon lady, your kid is about to experience shaken baby syndrome first hand.  And if he says “I hate you, mommy” one more time, I am going to empty a squeeze bottle of Purell in his irreverent little mouth).