What is a waste of time?

Or, who decides what aspects of a sabbatical are "worth it"?

This is a real scene I spotted (not set up!) in the desert near Tucson, Arizona some years ago. This image and quote were on my New Year's card in 2023. All "rose-colored glasses puns apply."

Dear Troublemakers,

As regular readers may know, I'm on sabbatical [1]. And in the realm of (the very few) folks who pontificate about sabbaticals online [2], most of the commentary points to things that were learned, things that were done, places that were went (?; gone?? 😂). Notably, almost none of these pieces come from non-tenure-track faculty.

Moreover, I've yet to see a list of naps taken, art made, households moved due to change in housing circumstances (not voluntary travel moves to sabbatical locales), ailing pets tended, major life decisions made then remade multiple times in a month or so, or extended, ongoing medical goose chases endured.

In my most generous moments, I assume the lack of such personal lists stems from the reality that personal circumstances are not what sabbaticals are approved for--that would be FMLA (or should be, "should be"??). And so, perhaps folks follow the rules and talk only about what they were granted permission to focus on. In my crankier and sleep-deprived moments (read, let's cut through the b.s. moments, aka all of my 2026), I am confident that we see a dearth of humans being humans on sabbatical because (a) folks are fearful they are going to get retroactively taken to task for being human on sabbatical, and (b) concerned they may not be approved for sabbatical ever again if the truth of not being a robot leaks out.

But, pretending we aren't human and don't have the attendant needs, challenges, joys, and sorrows, is killing the promise of higher ed. It's making those of us working therein unwell and worse. And it's drastically compromising what we could be doing in our work as academic laborers. There is no upside to pretending to be a machine nor to pretending machines can ethically or meaningfully do the work of being human. Pretending such only facilitates the mechanization and corporatizing [3] of the institution.

One of my favorite quotes -- especially for when someone tells me work for change isn't worth it/change isn't possible -- comes from Toni Morrison (see quote on header image above this post). In light of that sentiment, I'm going to say out loud, here, that there are no hypotheticals in that list of personal demands in paragraph 2. That's why I haven't written to you in a few weeks, and why there have been some gaps in my writing all spring. The more the latter demands have pressed upon me this year (2026 to be precise) the fewer naps have been had, the less art has been made, and the more desperately I've needed them both.

Nothing in my sabbatical proposal is relevant to what life is demanding of me right now. Whether that sabbatical work is getting done, and who even gets to judge that, has no bearing on the vertigo, pounding headaches, medical cliff my dog recently plummeted off of, road construction that effectively blocked off the housing I needed to move into two weeks ago, and so on. It's not every soul on the internet's business what all one relatively inconsequential professor of practice is juggling during her remarkable gift of a sabbatical. But it is the business of any of us trying to make academia (and thereby the world) a better place that you know: the publications, awards, invited talks, that will "count" as my sabbatical work are a façade. The work of being human prevails on my priority list right now. These circumstances are, once again, casting my priorities into stark contrast with those of the academic prestige paradigm that we can each and all opt to stop perpetuating.

Whatever a sabbatical is supposed to be remains hidden curriculum. But what we need to do to make working in academia more humane is crystal clear. Pretending a sabbatical is only for and consisting of CV items is not getting us there. So, today I won't. And this fall, when I do the required sabbatical reporting talk for my department, I intend to also present the human effort side of this year, not just the academic accolades side of it. [4] Please help me remember to do so. Remembering anything at all has been challenging in the fog of fatigue and change I'm weathering.

How about you?

Have you ever had a professional leave that wound up pre-occupied by non-job matters? How did you juggle all that? How did you deal with how the juggling made you feel?

---

NOTES

[1] Well, since I'm not on the tenure track, it's officially labeled professional development leave at my institution.

[2] At least as far as I can tell, it's not many. And, as I previously noted, they only discuss certain dimensions of these types of academic leave.

[3] Is it ironic or predictable (or both?) that the spellcheck for this post rejects both corporatizing and corporatization (which I tried first)?

[4] And yes, I've had accolades and productivity bits and bobs sufficient to tick whatever undisclosed boxes exist. But because those boxes remain hidden curriculum, and because of the year I'm having, I even more deeply resent and resist that performativity right now. Without clear standards of assessment -- ironically a central premise to effective scicomm, education, and research but so lacking in our institutions which claim to value that work -- I'm increasingly less inclined to play along. As I discussed recently, I'm moving on to stating my own metrics, and then translating how meeting my priorities qualifies as doing my job. That's going to be a big theme of my sabbatical reporting talk. 😈