with apologies

All Change!

· 3 min read · October 02, 2025 · #academic #cambridge #sabbatical

New (academic) year, new responsibilities. Or more precisely, far fewer responsibilities :)

I’m on sabbatical for this academic year1 and, as a result, have been required to give up almost all the various roles I’ve had over the past few years. I keep being – or perhaps more precisely, revert to being – a professor, of course, I’ll remain a Fellow of Christ’s College, and I’m allowed to remain on the University Council.2 I’ll also retain external roles, like my IPCO TAP membership.

However, University rules mean that I have to give up all teaching, admin and College Officer roles – everything that’s not research basically. I’m allowed to supervise Ph.D. students and remain on University Council, and that’s pretty much it.

So I’m not planning to supervise any Part II/Part III/M.Phil. projects, I won’t be lecturing, Directing Studies, or supervising. Whatever will I do with myself… Well, more on that later perhaps – I do have ideas if not yet actual plans :)

1

I did notice one stupidity in the rules around sabbatical in the course of applying for this one. I had always assumed sabbatical leave accrued at one term in every seven (it does, cf. the sabbath), and that you could never accrue more than one year (~ three terms) leave. But it turns out that’s not quite correct – the actual rule is that reckonable terms (those that count toward sabbatical leave – so six reckonable terms gets you one term of sabbatical leave) expire after six years. In my case I hit an edge case as a result of having taken two terms sabbatical leave back in 2021 (Lent and Easter terms 2021 to be precise). During periods of sabbatical leave, the clock keeps ticking to expire reckonable terms already accrued. The result was that when I came to apply for this year’s sabbatical leave, I was actually two reckonable terms short – they’d fallen off the end due to the expiry clock not stopping while I was on leave in 2021. Fortunately, while HR wanted me to ask my Faculty to “mortgage” two future reckonable terms, there was another route: the Faculty Board can just declare that they’re going to count the expired terms anyway. And, happily, they did.

2

I also remain a member of most of the various committees of Council that I’m on, though I’m exempted from attending meetings. By which it turns out is meant forbidden from attending meetings.