Sabbaticals

• Sabbatical Overview PowerPoint
• Sabbatical Application
• Sabbatical Report
• Sabbatical FAQ's

Full-time faculty members, including professional assistants, on continuing appointment are eligible for sabbatical leave after each six years of full-time service since joining the faculty (for a first sabbatical) or since returning from a previous sabbatical (for a second or later sabbatical). If your last sabbatical was seven years ago, you're eligible.

A call for sabbatical applications is sent out by administration each fall, and applications are due October 15. The secretary of the FA, who co-chairs the committee with the Vice President for Academic Affairs, hosts sabbatical workshops every September to help eligible members understand the application process.  

The sabbatical guidelines are not intended to be restrictive; they are intended to encourage a broad range of academic and intellectual pursuits. The contract states, "Sabbatical leaves may be granted for one or more of the following: graduate study, writing a significant work for publication, doing a significant research project or dissertation that complies with the permitted purposes for a sabbatical and is within the context of professional review, developing a new curriculum or program which is consistent with college plans, or other significant academic or intellectual projects." Bear in mind that the above examples are not meant to be all encompassing.

The application form has four main areas:

• abstract for Board of Trustees resolution (needed if sabbatical is awarded)
• narrative on the sabbtical activity
• demonstrated professional benefit to the applicant (discuss how the activity will make you a better teacher, professional, or scholar)
• demonstrated benefit to the college (discuss the specific impact your sabbatical may have on carrying out your professional responsibilities, e.g. to teaching; to student learning; to programs, courses or curriculum development; to retraining; or to an institution-specific project).

In addition to existing criteria, applicants must demonstrate that the proposal will involve activity at least equivalent to a full-time teaching/work load and is beyond the professional activity expected to be performed concurrent with full-time duties.

Nine full-year sabbaticals (at half pay) and nine half-year sabbaticals (at full pay) may be awarded in each academic year. The conversion provision applies, which means that every two full-year sabbaticals left unawarded can convert to one half-year sabbatical.

Applications for sabbatical are reviewed by the sabbatical committee, which is composed of four members appointed by the FA president and four members appointed by the college president. All applications are blind, and the committee recommendations for sabbatical awards are based upon merit, by majority vote of the committee. If a sabbatical recommended by the committee is not supported by the college president, the president will provide reasons, in writing, to the committee for the omission.

To give applicants a sense of what kinds of sabbaticals have been approved by the college president in the past half decade or so, below we share some successful applications' narrative statements, shared with permission of the applicants (more will be shared as permissions are received).

• Biology — Fall 2023 — I propose to create a data-driven catalog of humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) observed off Montauk by the Coastal Education and Research Society of Long Island (CRESLI) between the years of 2012-2023. Photographs of individual (identified) whales will be married to data collected during the encounters and organized into a single database, easily accessible by researchers. GPS-encoded data will also be organized in ArcGIS to display the information as layered attributes on a sightings map of the region. As data are organized, I expect to produce and submit abstracts describing the comparative data to regional organizations/conferences with the potential of publishing relevant, significant findings in a peer-reviewed journal.
• English — Fall 2022 — I will complete a full-length play, which I will then submit to various play-development conferences and workshops for the next step of revision before production or publication. I will also make major revisions in form and structure to individual poems in a 100-page poetry manuscript, readying the manuscript for submission to my publisher, who has asked for the right of first refusal. In addition, I will submit finished pieces of writing (poems, book reviews, essays) to peer-reviewed journals for consideration and draft the outline and possibly first chapter(s) of a textbook I’m coauthoring with a colleague at SCCC. 
• History — Fall 2021/Spring 2022 — During this sabbatical leave, I intend to conduct research and write a biography of the 16th century Spanish conquistador/explorer Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, who in 1510 founded the first permanent European settlement on the mainland of the Americas and in 1513 led an expedition across the Isthmus of Panama and discovered the Pacific Ocean. The work I propose is an important undertaking in the discipline of history as, since 1953, no dedicated biography of Balboa has been published in English. It is my intention to write a book-length biography of Balboa which examines his life and times in greater detail than has heretofore been undertaken, informed by recent scholarship in the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and historical analysis of primary and secondary source documents.
• Visual Arts — Fall 2019 — I am applying for sabbatical leave to create an ambitious installation that combines a large-scale, three-dimensional artwork with a virtual reality interactive artwork. I will also use the sabbatical leave to take courses to learn how to create the virtual artwork. This project will allow me to expand the series of artwork that I have been creating that addresses the throwaway culture that spreads packaging waste world-wide. The creation of this powerful interactive environment will enable viewers to recognize the impact that wasted plastics have on the environment, the ocean, and their future. The virtual reality project will be available to experience with an HTC Vive headset and will able to be able to be downloaded for use with a smartphone and Google Cardboard, making it widely accessible to a large audience.