The Other Side of Easter
I haven’t been reading my work email for a few days as I’ve been working from home during the recent Easter mini-break and wanted to catch up on a few things without too many distractions. Having to return to campus tomorrow, however, I decided with some trepidation to see what had accumulated in my inbox while I wasn’t looking and got a rather pleasant surprise.
Just before Easter I mentioned that I had been granted a half-year sabbatical for next academic year. Well, reading my email this morning I found a letter saying that it had been decided to change that to a full year, which is what I originally requested:
The period of sabbatical leave granted is from 1st September 2023 to 31st August 2024.
So having spent a bit of time thinking about how to spend the reduced period, I’m now back to square one (but in a good way). I’m not sure why the powers that be changed their mind on this. Perhaps they’re even keener to get me out of the way than I thought?
The revised schedule means that I will still be around in Maynooth for the August repeat examinations (and marking thereof), but I hope to leave shortly after that is all done and dusted. I’m sure I will miss the teaching next year, but I’m looking forward to being able to concentrate on research and to working in a different environment for a time.
All this means that we will shortly have an advertisement for a sabbatical replacement lecturer in the Department of Theoretical Physics at Maynooth University to cover my teaching while I’m absent. Watch this space. Obviously I will help advertise the position, but I can’t play any further role in the recruitment process.
Anyway, the immediate focus of my attention will be the remaining three weeks of teaching for this Semester. I have a couple more Computational Physics laboratory sessions to organize, as well as the final batch of lectures for Advanced Electromagnetism. That will be followed by an intense period of grading project work, revision lectures, and finally correcting examination scripts. The Examination Period in Maynooth starts on Friday 12th May, but the two with which I am directly involved take place on Thursday 18th and Saturday 20th.
But for now, back to my inbox…
In the Dark 
April 16, 2023 at 9:37 pm
Congratulations! That is nice news
April 17, 2023 at 2:51 pm
Nice news for you, Peter. But I’m a bit disturbed by the proposal to replace you by a fixed-term (presumably) substitute. This is something we don’t do at Edinburgh: the assumption is that at any given time roughly 10% of the academics will be on sabbatical, so the body of staff is at least 10% greater than it might otherwise be and colleagues pick up duties shed by staff going on sabbaticals. And it’s not so much a question of taking on a course just for a year, as triggering a turnover of who teaches what – which is healthy in itself. I appreciate that we have the luxury of a larger body of staff than Maynooth, but taking on a fixed-term lecturer is problematic. Whoever does the job will have zero time for research, so that’s probably the end of their career in that direction, meaning they risk a future of further short-term teaching contracts. This is an approach that the UCU is rightly opposing. A more practical reason we don’t do it, though, is probably a legal one: I’ve always understood that a fixed-term lecturer could sue for being dismissed at the end of their contract, on the grounds that the function of teaching continued to be needed in the university.
April 17, 2023 at 4:14 pm
I would prefer not to have a fixed-term lecturer replacement, but we only have six full-time teaching staff in Theoretical Physics and without it, everyone remaining would have to increase their teaching by 20% to cover my sabbatical.
Having said that, the replacement lecturer will have exactly the same teaching workload as any lecturer (including myself) so it’s not going to be a teaching-only job that is offered.
Anyway, this is not a one-off policy for my case. It’s the standard operation of the entire sabbatical scheme at Maynooth.