The
academic sabbatical has hoary antecedents, steeped as it is in the antiquity of
the Old Testament and even further back to practices in ancient Babylonia. In Genesis, God rested on the seventh day, after six days of creation. The Fourth Commandment says, "Six
days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath
… In it thou shalt not do any work."
Israelite slaves were to be released in the seventh year after six years
of bondage. Land was to lie fallow
in the seventh year, without tilling, planting or harvesting. After seven seven-year cycles—the
Jubilee year—land was to be returned to its original owner.
Yet the idea that a paid seventh year of sabbatical leave
should be made available to academics is relatively modern, dating only to the
mid-19th century with the rise of the research university. It arose from the realization that, in
order to do research in the libraries of the world or to conduct field
expeditions and experiments, and to maintain a scholarly intercourse with peers
internationally, such an accommodation had to be made—else the academic would
need independent means to properly pursue his studies. The paid year off was therefore meant
to give professors without such means undisrupted time to keep abreast of their
fields, usually by traveling, so as to bring new vitality to their research and
the university's curriculum. This
was indeed a rest from normal activity, but not a rest from work itself.
The 19th-century rationale still has
relevance, although I suspect it is no longer altogether compelling in the
Internet age, when most of the knowledge of the world is but a click away, as
is video teleconferencing with colleagues. Even for my pre-Internet self, although I did what I felt
was very good research while on the three sabbaticals I
took, I am not sure that I could not have achieved like results without
them. They did, however, satisfy a
signal purpose: new perspective, changed from the insularity I sometimes felt
within the walls of my own university, which could be numbing. At any rate, I did not complain about
the perk.
My first sabbatical, in 1966-67, was enabled by a Guggenheim
Fellowship, which supplemented my sabbatical salary just enough to survive in
all-too-expensive Paris. I was
associated there with the Faculté des Sciences at the University of Paris, located in the Jussieu neighborhood on the
Left Bank, where I interacted fruitfully with its famed faculty of probability
and statistics. I gained a deeper
and more rigorous understanding of their fields, preparatory to writing a book on
the mathematical theory of communication, which was based in part on what I
learned. Engineering had
traditionally taken many liberties with mathematical formalisms, and the 1960s
was a time when many engineering professors, including myself, tried to correct
that.
My wife, our one-year-old son David and I lived in the
western suburb of Saint Cloud, just across the Seine from the Bois de
Boulogne. One of my favorite
activities, even during the frigid Parisian winter, was taking a train from the
beautiful old center of Saint Cloud to the Gare du Nord in Paris, then walking
across the city to Jussieu, stopping half way for a pastry and a steaming
expresso.
My French was, I thought, moderately passable; but it was
deficient enough so that when I bravely tried to give, in Franglais, the first
of a series of lectures on some of my research results, a student gracefully
interrupted to let me know that they all understood English. It was one of many gentle putdowns I
suffered as I stuttered my way through the French language that year. Perhaps that sobering experience made
me decide on Anglophone locations for my next two sabbaticals.
In 1974, I spent a one-semester sabbatical in Hawaii, where
I went to immerse myself in the theory and protocols of the ALOHAnet
digital-data radio network, at the time being implemented within and among the Islands
with the help of the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of
Hawaii. Its groundbreaking
technology inspired the now-dominant Ethernet, which was invented a bit
later. No freezing walks to work
here! After my first foray onto
the campus in Honolulu to give a lecture, wearing a lightweight suit, I
reverted to the Hawaiian style of sandals, shorts and multicolor shirts.
The enervating climate of Hawaii was something of its own
problem, though. We had rented a
lovely apartment directly on Kahala Beach, just to the east of Diamond
Head. I went to the university
just one or two mornings a week.
On the other mornings, I tried to concentrate in the apartment on my
research, while Helen (with David, almost nine, and our daughter Abby, almost
three) went to the beach. It was
very hard to keep at it in that languorous weather, and I soon found myself
joining them earlier and earlier in the day. I never understood how anyone got any work done in Hawaii.
My final sabbatical was in London in 1983. David, in his last year of high school,
was an exchange student just outside of London, and Abby was in sixth grade in
a lovely private school a stone's throw from our apartment in Lowndes Square,
near the intersection of Knightsbridge and Sloane Street. I was associated with the Imperial
College of the University of London, although I spent much of my working time
in our apartment—I was hot on the trail of applying my recent theoretical
research to the emerging cellphone technology.
I have written before of my love for
the Brits and things British, and this was no exception, even in small
ways. When I went to the
university as part of my fellowship with the British Science and Engineering
Research Council, I walked a favored path that ran through the lovely old mews
that only London can boast of; and I was captivated by the still-ongoing
tradition of a faculty-student tea every afternoon. Not exactly a high tea, but a daily opportunity to exchange
ideas in an informal setting.
Despite my latter-day ambivalence about the necessity of sabbaticals in
achieving the substance of academic objectives, I have none about their ability
to revitalize the mind. The
sabbaticals I took indeed sent me back to Berkeley invigorated, full of fresh
ideas, and bearing with me the results of my new research. God set a good example when he rested
from his chores after six days; I'm sure that He too felt refreshed for doing
so, and perhaps gained new ideas on how to oversee his new creation.