Michael Gartner: YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK

For more than 125 years, universities have been giving “sabbatical leave” to teachers. The goals are to help the teachers become better teachers, to add to the luster of the institution, to further research into areas of keen concern to the public, and to produce broader and better-educated graduates.

Usually, the universities give a teacher full pay for taking off one semester. In Iowa, proposed sabbaticals for teachers at the University of Iowa, Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa must be approved annually by the state Board of Regents. No one can recall the board ever rejecting a request, though the universities themselves turn down some requests before they reach the Board of Regents.

Since virtually all of the universities’ operating funds come from state appropriations or from tuition paid by students or their parents, the sabbaticals really are paid leaves subsidized by the state or the students. Yet few people outside academe ever look at the issues being studied. Some of the sabbaticals are for important study in the physical sciences, research that helps lead to innovations that help explain the world and help students explore that world.

But some seem less urgent. Here’s a batch of the latest approved paid leaves:  

Corey Creekmur, an associate professor of English at the University of Iowa (fiscal 2012 salary: $79,300) will complete his book on “the first full-length study of the representation of the British Raj in popular Indian cinema.”        

Armando Duarte, a professor of dance ($71,500), will “write a book on the choreographic aspects of the renowned and culturally important samba processions of Brazil.”          

Michael Moore, an associate professor of history ($70,200) is writing a book that “explores the gruesome posthumous trial of Pope Formosus in 897.”          

Roland Racevskis, a professor of French and Italian ($92,500), “will prepare a book manuscript on a largely unexplored topic, the significance of material environments for the human experience in works of seventeenth-century French literature. The focus throughout the book is on the urgent question of humanity’s relationship to the nonhuman world....”          

Carol Severino, a professor of rhetoric ($100,744), “will pursue second language writing research,” in which she will “identify and classify word choice errors and their sources in drafts submitted by Chinese students whom she will also interview.” She will also “write a follow-up travel essay to two previous pieces about her encounters with Quichua people and language in Ecuador, focusing on communication failure from word-choice error.”          

Katherine Tachau, professor of history ($105,177) will spend the spring semester completing “the research and writing of a book concerning the interaction of painters and academics in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Paris.”          

Donald Simonson, professor of music ($65,791) at Iowa State University, “will work in several locations during his assignment, including Denmark and Norway, where he will research, write, and compile the Norwegian section of the book, ‘Scandinavian Song: A Guide to Diction and Repertoire.’”          

Maximilian Viatori, associate professor of anthropology ($65,758) at ISU, will travel to Ecuador and Germany, “where he will analyze public discourses of national unification.”

Here are a few from a year ago:

Marybeth C. Stalp is an associate professor of sociology, anthropology and criminology at the University of Northern Iowa -- a university that was going through a financial crisis so severe that the faculty voted “no confidence” in President Ben Allen because he was trying to solve the issue strategically.

Stalp earns $60,000 a year. She spent the spring semester collecting her salary in southern Ireland, conducting “ethnographic research on women’s quilting and knitting efforts.” Quilting is “an important means of autonomy and identity development for midlife women,” the summary of Stalp’s application says, and in her study Stalp said she would focus “on the meaning-making processes in women’s cultural production efforts, examining finished work from the perspective of the maker as well as exploring a more complex definition from within a sociological perspective of what constitutes art.”          

How will this help UNI students and the state in general? “Iowa citizens, and specifically quilters and knitters, can learn about similarities and differences with Irish women.” As for UNI students, “she will infuse her Sociology of Gender and Sociology of Culture classes with this newfound international comparative research, and her Qualitative Methods course will improve with the additional research experiences of this project.”        

Of course.          

Her application also notes that since 2006 “she has given eleven guest quilting lectures to lay audiences.” That’s almost two lectures a year.

Meantime, the University of Iowa’s Scott Schnell, an associate professor of anthropology, said he planned to spend the fall semester in rural Japan studying the “traditional hunters of bear and other animals in the forested mountains of Japan’s interior.” This work will “promote better understanding of Japanese culture,” and “the Japanese case example, whether positive or negative, will inform people’s approaches to similar problems at home in Iowa and will promote interdisciplinarity.” Schnell earns around $70,000 a year.

Professor Schnell’s colleague, Associate Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication Frank Durham, said he would spend the fall semester “analyzing news coverage of partisan news ‘pranks’ by conservative media activists Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe.” The study will ask: “Who controls sourcing, how has the process of cultural meaning production changed, and what does partisanship mean for the news as a site of consensus?” With not a little bit of boasting, Durham says “the study will gain prominence within national professional and scholarly media circles.” Breitbart, incidentally, died the other day. Durham earns around $75,000 a year.

Two years ago, Kimberley Marra, a professor of American Studies at the University of Iowa, was approved for a sabbatical so she could write a chapter of her book, “Fashioning the Thoroughbred Ideal: Show Women and Show Horses on New York Stages, 1865-1930.” This book will be “a cultural study of how human interactions with horses both empowered women and enduringly shaped dominant race, class, gender and sexual ideologies in the period when women entered the sport of riding in large numbers for the first time in the United States.” She will “use this material to enrich her courses in the curriculum of the newly merged units of American Studies and Sport Studies as well as her performance history courses in Theatre Arts.” Marra made $97,240 annually at the time.

Four years ago, the Regents sent University of Iowa associate professor Michael E. Lomax to the Philippines for his sabbatical to study how billiards “has been perceived as an alternate route to upward social mobility among young men” in that country. On his return, according to documents on the Board of Regents Web site, Lomax reported he “examined the Philippine experience in billiards. . . . He conducted an extensive review of the literature on sport and globalization and Philippine history, collected several primary sources on Philippine pool players. . .  He also constructed an analytical framework to conduct oral interviews of Philippine pool players. [Read: talked to some guys.] These activities will promote his research effort to analyze the ways in which the emergence of several Philippine pool players to an elite level contributed significantly to billiards evolving into a global enterprise.” The report does not explain how the study will “contribute to the improvement” of the university, as board policy requires. Lomax at the time made $63,200 a year.

Clearly, these teachers now are better teachers, the institutions now are more lustrous, the public is better informed about these key issues and Iowa's students are broader and better educated because of these sabbaticals.