This article is featured in the 2025 Winter Carnival Edition.
Off terms are a fact of life for Dartmouth students. With the unique structure of the D-Plan, most undergraduates are able to take advantage of a non-summer term away from campus — 10 weeks of real-world experience through working, interning, conducting research or traveling.
For faculty, sabbaticals tend to offer a similar escape.
Although Dartmouth faculty don’t follow D-plans the way students do, the ability to take a sabbatical — or a leave of absence — affords a break from teaching and a chance, instead, to explore.
According to English professor Jessica Beckman, faculty members will go on sabbatical when they want to pursue research or focus on projects.
“It could also be that you have applied to fellowship competitions and won something, and you’ll take a sabbatical as a consequence of that fellowship so that you can spend more concentrated time on your research and your writing or archival work, or whatever it is that your research entails,” she said.
Geisel School of Medicine professor and psychological and brain sciences adjunct professorJames Sargent similarly described sabbaticals as a training ground for academia, during which faculty can “learn from” or “collaborate with” other experts.
Getting a sabbatical approved, though, is easier said than done. Tenure-track faculty are eligible for sabbatical leave based on full-time academic service: one term of sabbatical after nine terms of academic service (typically in the fourth year), two terms after 18 terms and three terms after 27 terms. Sabbatical credits cannot exceed the equivalent of one year’s compensation, or 27 credits, according to the faculty website.
After a professor becomes eligible, the application process requires rigorous approval. Applications must be approved by the faculty member’s department or program chair, the Arts and Sciences Fiscal Office and the divisional associate dean, according to the website.
“[Your department and dean] will work with you to see if you can be approved or when you might be able to take those sabbatical terms that you’ve accrued,” Beckman explained.
Though the process can be arduous, professors say it pays off.
More than a decade ago, for example, Sargent took a sabbatical in Germany, where he and a colleague conducted research on the country’s adolescent exposure to movies. That time spent living across the Atlantic “was a really great opportunity to step back” and pursue research outside a formal classroom environment, he said.
“It was a great opportunity because not only did I get to do intensive research but I also got to live in Germany and experience Europe and travel a little bit,” he said.
Beckman, meanwhile, spent her sabbatical — from which she returned this term — conducting research through a prestigious fellowship program at the Huntington Library in California.
“… I was one of 20 fellows in a cohort to spend a year working together, sharing work in progress, giving talks and in my case — because I work with rare books — writing my book in a library that has a lot of the materials that I research,” Beckman said.
For some, sabbaticals are something to look forward to. Ecology professor Raquel Fleskes, for example, said she is interested in taking a sabbatical next year to further pursue her research with ancient DNA and DNA extractions, specifically through a program at the University of Wisconsin.
“In particular, there’s one project with the Wisconsin docent community who are advocating for reinterment rights to ancestors that are in the University of Wisconsin skeletal collection,” Fleskes said. “Spending some time with that community to understand the fabricating for their relatives in this collection would be a great use of time.”
More than a decade after his last sabbatical, Sargent said he is interested in taking a leave abroad, both to travel — there are researchers in Sicily and Greece whose academic profiles have piqued his interest — and to focus on his current work involving the benefits of electronic cigarettes for smokers.
Ultimately, sabbaticals provide faculty with a valuable opportunity to step away from the classroom and immerse themselves in their research, new collaborations or different cultural environments.
