The Sabbatical Syllabus, Part III
Making a plan to cure the midcareer malaise
This post continues the theme of sabbatical preparation (read Part I and Part II). I’m sharing my experiences and providing some advice for faculty looking to plan their own sabbaticals.
Once the decks were as clear as they could get, the second phase of preparation was focusing on what I want to accomplish. I have a specific research objective, yes, but there is a broader goal of a sabbatical. This chance to break free from routines will allow me to reconnect with that drew me to the academic life in the first place. I’ll spare readers a lengthy and angsty self-reflection, but the short version is that I’ve become disillusioned and frankly bored with the kind of research that I was doing. From what I’ve read, this midcareer boredom is quite common.
The midcareer malaise
First off, what is the midcareer stage? Well, there is no broad consensus; but, if you will allow me to repurpose the definition of pornography, you’ll know you’re in the midcareer stage when you feel it. In the United States academic context, this stage may start most commonly at the receipt of tenure and promotion to Associate Professor. At the midcareer stage, you are most likely no longer eligible to eligible for “early career” awards, fellowships, or recognition. But you aren’t (yet) qualified for “career achievement” awards either. You have all the responsibilities you had while you fought to earn tenure, but you don’t have any of the protections some institutions offer to their junior faculty, and you have added responsibilities such as mentoring junior faculty, serving on more and more and more committees, and doing more discipline-specific service outside of your own institution. In scientific environments, you may be running a successful lab that includes undergraduate students through postdoctoral fellows, and this means you spend more time maintaining the lab (seeking funding, managing the funding, reporting on the funding) than doing the science. At some point, you may look up from the daily grind and ask youself, “how did I get here?”
The people who are able to maintain their enthusiasm for academia manage it by reinventing themselves, or at least clarifying their focus. I enjoyed Nature Career’s 6-part podcast series on the “Muddle in the Middle” (link goes to the first episode; transcript available).
Institutions can help their faculty, of course. Here is a full report from COACHE about what universities can do to support mid-career faculty. Once I return from sabbatical, and especially as I advance in my career, I will look for service opportunities that will allow me to institutionalize some of these recommendations. But, this year, I’m on sabbatical and away from institutional service, hooray!
Diagnosing & developing a cure for the midcareer malaise
I dreamed of being an academic for a long time. I trained for it for a long time. And I dealt with a whole lot of B.S. on my path to tenure. I am not leaving academia anytime soon. But I’ve also been unhappy for the last few years, and it’s not just because of COVID-19. Parts of my job were no longer serving me. They were not part of the academic ideal. My job, like that of many academics, is formally defined as having three distinct components: research, teaching, and service. Teaching and research each are meant to account for 40% of my time, the remaining 20% should be devoted to service. Figuring out the cause of my malaise—in order to find a cure—required thinking about each of these distinct components.
Of course the administrative burden of being in midcareer is overwhelming, and that is especially true at my institution. And I am really not good at politically-driven administration (I mean politically in the academic politics way). I do not like playing politics, and I don’t like to compromise values. I am probably too Pollyanna-like. But I was finding a way to deal with the service requirements of my job, by seeking opportunities that align with my values, so that wasn’t the primary driver of my midcareer malaise.
In terms of teaching, well, the COVID-19 pandemic upended all of our lives. First there was a pivot to online instruction and then hybrid and then back to full-in-person instruction. We had to support our students, first emerging adults who also were reckoning with a pandemic and the social upheavals of 2020-21. Then we had to support students who basically had never had a “normal” college experience. And now we are dealing with students who did not have a “normal” high school experience. Yes, teaching has been a definite source of stress for all faculty over the past four years. But you know what? I’ve been able to grow as a teacher, and having been forced to leverage instructional technology in new ways has been a great learning opportunity. I am proud of the ways in which I’ve made lemonade out of the lemons of an infectious disease pandemic in the classroom context. Of course, this is not to say that I don’t need a break from teaching—I most definitely do! But teaching is not what is driving my midcareer malaise.
When I was honest with myself, I had to face the fact that a major part of what was making me unhappy was the kind of research I was doing, and how it was contributing to a system that I do not support. (I will write more about this later.) The day-to-day work of research was administrative and task-driven. It wasn’t intellectual, at least not in the ways that made my head spin and my heart soar. It had gotten safe, and I wasn’t learning anymore. But I still LOVE research, and I identify as a scholar who teaches. If the cause of my midcareer malaise is my research, then the cure is a research pivot.
A book with many chapters
I like Kerry Ann Rockquemore’s metaphor of an academic career as a “book with many chapters.” So in the mid-career phase, I am starting a new chapter of my book. And because it’s my book, I can decide what’s in the chapters.
My next chapter
In my next chapter, I am still a research-heavy academic, but the kind of research—the questions and methods and dissemination strategies—is different from the chapters that came before. So I have some learning to do!
In my next chapter, I am still a research-heavy academic, but the kind of research is different from the chapters that came before.
So, as I planned my sabbatical research project, I thought about what I needed to read and learn in order to do the work justice. The result is a bibliography to guide my knowledge and skill development in seven distinct themes:
(1) Writing & Methods. I am a decent academic writer, but I want to be a great writer. I also want to write more accessibly for non-academics. And I want to [learn how to] do ethnography.
(2) Advocacy, Framing, Agenda-Setting, and Social Movements. This literature is grounded in sociological and communication theory and will guide the development of my initial set of research questions and data collection instruments.
(3) Public Health Policy Analysis represents literature from political science and health policy research; this scholarship to develop a better understanding of how policy-making works.
(4) Chronic Disease Epidemiology and Food and Nutrition Policy in Latin America; this body of work includes the empirical evidence for and of the policies that I am interested in.
(5) Corporate Influence on Food and Nutrition Policy. This focus area builds on my expertise in media analysis and my recent publication of a framework of racialized marketing to examine not only the marketing strategies but also the advocacy strategies employed by multinational food and beverage corporations to influence public health policy.
(6) Other Politics. I have selected some recent books written by political scientists or marketed as politics-related that seem relevant because of their topic or methods.
(7) Other general interest and academic trade books. I’m also excited to read beautifully written examples of rigorous scholarship that is accessible to non-academics.
If it sounds like I’m just going to be reading during my sabbatical, well…I am going to be doing a lot of reading during my sabbatical! Making the time to read widely and deeply is possibly the most energizing part of the sabbatical life, at least so far. I do have a tightly curated bibliography within each of these themes, and I will be sharing some of my reading with you as I progress this year.