Junior Faculty at UMass Boston Want and Need a Sabbatical!

This is a way to put real support behind our pre-tenure faculty and their career development, and it will improve the entire university and all its programs as a result.

This will enable pre-tenure faculty to get tenure at an institution with a lot of teaching and service demands.

The expectations for productivity are ever increasing and the least we could do is support our pre-tenure faculty by reducing their course teaching loads so they can write and complete research projects that will ultimately bring great prestige to the institution and benefit students most of all.

This is essential for a research-intensive university.

A sabbatical will help junior faculty and give an impetus to their research. I think the entire university will benefit from this.

Having a junior sabbatical would be a fantastic resource for me and other faculty. I would be able to dedicate my time to three tasks that are difficult to balance with teaching and service requirements--qualitative fieldwork, book writing, and applying for external grant funding. Given the expectations around research productivity and its importance for our teaching and training of students, a junior sabbatical would be a major step in supporting faculty at a research university.

With declining investment in higher education, service and teaching demands on junior faculty have risen over the years. A research intensive sabbatical would allow junior faculty members to focus on scholarship and build strong foundations for long and productive careers at UMass Boston. It would also improve recruitment and retention of talented faculty and, ultimately, the reputation and relevance of our campus in the Commonwealth.

Pre-tenure sabbatical is critical for junior faculty at a research university.

I strongly support this petition. I believe having pre-tenure sabbatical will not only increase productivity, but will also bring more visibility to the university in the long run, not to mention a happier and more engaged faculty.

Junior faculty at UMass Boston both want and need a pre-tenure sabbatical policy. Most research-intensive universities understand that higher demands to publish good-quality research with more frequency require proper conditions to meet those demands, and a pre-tenure sabbatical has proven to be one of the most successful and desirable policies leading towards this goal. It is time for UMass Boston to move in this direction, and create the conditions to become the research-intensive university it desires to be.

I strongly endorse this proposal. Junior faculty at UMB need and deserve research support, just as junior faculty at other universities and other UMass campuses.

If Umass Lowell are having the pre-tenure sabbatical, why cann't we? The goal of pre-tenure sabbatical is to help pre-tenure faculty bringing quality research to the University and as a consequence benefit the University and the graduate researchers.

UMass-Boston expects its faculty to engage in research and get grants at a level consistent with research-intensive universities, yet it does not provide adequate resources to enable faculty to meet those expectations. A pre-tenure sabbatical would help close this gap between expectations and resources and ultimately increase faculty research productivity.

As the university increases its expectations for external grant-funded research, junior faculty will need more "breathing room" to write grant proposals since they take a lot of time and effort but have a high likelihood of yielding no results. The more time we spend on (potentially fruitless) grant applications, the less time we spend writing publications that we need for tenure, so it is a very stressful tightrope walk. A pre-tenure sabbatical would help reduce this stress immensely.

A junior sabbatical would allow me to devote more attention to my research and external grant applications. I am a qualitative sociologists and my research suffers from not having a semester during which I could devote full attention to fieldwork without teaching and service obligations. Many of my graduate school colleagues have pre-tenure sabbaticals, and their productivity reflects that opportunity to focus on research.

Pre-tenure sabbatical would help me focus on research and be better prepared for tenure.