Sabbaticals and Leaves Are the Faculty Data Most Institutions Track the Worst
Every institution should be able to tell you, with confidence, who’s up for promotion this cycle. Most can tell you, with reasonable accuracy, who was hired last year and when their contract renews. Far fewer can tell you, without someone manually checking, exactly who is currently on sabbatical, when each is due back, who is eligible for sabbatical, or whether someone delayed or canceled their sabbatical. Sabbaticals and leaves sit in an odd blind spot in faculty data management: widely offered, individually significant, and somehow rarely tracked with the same rigor institutions apply to appointment, promotion, or tenure.
Part of the reason is structural. Sabbaticals and leaves don’t map cleanly onto the categories most faculty information systems are built around. They’re not a hire, not a promotion, not a straightforward status change with a clear beginning and end date that triggers an obvious workflow. They’re a temporary departure from an ongoing role, often with conditions attached (a research plan, a reporting requirement, an expected return date) that someone needs to track over a period of months, sometimes longer, without the natural checkpoints that keep other faculty processes on a schedule. The result, at many institutions, is that sabbatical and leave data lives where administrative data goes when no system was built for it: email threads, a department administrator’s personal spreadsheet, and institutional memory that depends on someone specific still being in the role.
The Faculty Data Nobody Built a System For
Sabbaticals, Leaves, and Returns Don’t Fit the Usual Categories
It’s worth being precise about what’s actually being lumped together here, because a sabbatical and a leave of absence are genuinely different processes with different rules, even though institutions often end up tracking them the same loose way. A sabbatical is typically planned well in advance, tied to service or tenure milestones, and includes a research or scholarly plan the faculty member proposes and the institution approves, often with a reporting requirement upon return. A leave of absence, by contrast, covers a broader and more legally regulated category, medical leave, parental leave, personal leave, often triggered with little advance notice, governed by FMLA or ADA requirements rather than a department’s sabbatical policy, and carrying no research expectation at all.
What the two genuinely share is a structural blind spot, not a shared process. Most of the structure in a faculty information system exists to support processes with a clear, repeatable shape: an appointment has a start date and a set of approvals. A promotion has a packet, a committee review, and a decision. A tenure case follows a defined sequence that, while complex, is at least consistent from one case to the next. Neither a sabbatical nor a leave of absence maps cleanly onto that kind of standardization, for different reasons in each case, which is why both tend to be tracked informally rather than with the same rigor applied to hiring or promotion.
That variability is exactly why both tend to get handled ad hoc rather than systematically, even though the specifics differ. Take a sabbatical: a request typically needs to clear both the department chair and the dean, often against a specific submission deadline set well before the sabbatical term begins. Once approved, someone makes a mental note (or an email note) about the expected return date and moves on. Because a sabbatical covers a defined period, the faculty member must return at the scheduled time, so the real risk isn’t whether they intend to come back. It’s whether, once they’re back, someone actually confirms they’ve been reinstated into their full prior responsibilities: courses reassigned, committee seats returned, coverage arrangements properly closed out. A leave of absence follows a different, more legally sensitive path, often requiring documentation, defined notice periods, and compliance with federal or state leave law, and unlike a sabbatical, a leave’s end date can shift, which means coverage arrangements may need to be extended rather than simply closed out on schedule. Both still land in the same place operationally: tracked by whichever administrator happens to be handling it, rather than by a shared system. None of this is complicated in isolation. It becomes a real risk only in aggregate, across dozens of faculty on some form of leave at any given time, tracked with wildly inconsistent rigor depending on which department administrator is paying close attention.
Leaves of Absence Are Rising. Tracking Hasn’t Kept Pace.
This blind spot is becoming more consequential, not less, because the underlying volume of leaves of absence specifically is growing. A survey from employment law firm Littler Mendelson found that 67% of U.S. employers saw an increase in mental health-related leaves of absence and accommodation requests over the past year, with the figure climbing to 74% among large employers, following two consecutive prior years of similar increases. This is a leave-of-absence trend rather than a sabbatical trend, since medical and mental-health leave is legally protected and largely unrelated to research sabbaticals, but it reflects the same underlying pressure: HR teams across sectors, higher education included, are working harder than ever just to keep pace with rising leave volume, a dynamic that applies to faculty every bit as much as it applies to staff.
Higher education also carries a complication that makes this harder than in a typical workplace. Faculty roles routinely blend teaching, research, clinical duties, and administrative responsibilities in ways that make leave calculations and coverage planning genuinely difficult, and that complexity varies enormously by discipline. A humanities professor’s leave might mean rescheduling a seminar. A clinical faculty member’s leave can mean reassigning patient care responsibilities, adjusting a residency teaching schedule, or finding another attending physician to supervise students in a hospital setting, none of which can simply be handed off the way a lecture might be. None of this is unique to sabbaticals specifically, but it illustrates why leave management as a category resists one-size-fits-all tracking, at precisely the moment institutions can least afford to be tracking it loosely.
| Rising Pressure | Applies To | Why It Matters for Tracking |
| Leave of absence and accommodation requests increasing | Leaves of absence | More faculty on leave at any given time, harder to track manually |
| Mental health cited as a major driver | Leaves of absence | Requests less predictable, harder to plan coverage around in advance |
| Blended faculty roles (teaching, research, clinical, admin) | Both | Coverage planning varies enormously by discipline, not a simple one-to-one substitution |
What Gets Lost When Leave Data Lives in Email and Spreadsheets
The practical cost of loose sabbatical tracking shows up in a handful of predictable places. Course coverage arrangements made verbally or over email are easy to lose track of when the person who made them changes roles or simply forgets the details months later. A faculty member’s expected return date, if it exists only as a department administrator’s calendar reminder, can slip by unnoticed until a student or colleague asks where they are. Reporting requirements attached to a sabbatical, common at institutions that expect some accounting of what the leave accomplished, can easily lapse when no system prompts anyone to follow up. This isn’t a new or isolated observation. A long-standing review of sabbatical leave research found that institutional accountability for sabbatical outcomes has been a persistent, well-documented gap in higher education, one significant enough that most existing research on the subject remains qualitative rather than data-driven, precisely because so few institutions track sabbatical outcomes systematically enough to study them any other way.
None of these individual failures are dramatic. A missed reporting requirement rarely makes headlines. But collectively, they represent an institution’s inability to answer a basic question about its own faculty workforce: who is actually available to teach, advise, and serve on committees at any given moment, and who isn’t. That’s not a minor administrative detail. It’s foundational information that department chairs, deans, and the provost’s office need to plan a semester or a clinical assignment, and when it lives in scattered personal records rather than a shared system, everyone downstream works from an incomplete picture without necessarily realizing it.
Key Takeaway: An institution that can produce a clean promotion packet on demand but can’t reliably say who’s currently on leave and when they’re returning doesn’t have a faculty data problem in one area. It has a faculty data problem in the one area nobody built a system for.
The Return Is Often Harder Than the Departure
Sabbatical and leave tracking tends to get the most attention when a request is approved and the least when someone is supposed to come back, regardless of the leave type. That’s backward, in a sense, because the return is often the more operationally complex half of the process. A faculty member’s course load may need to be reconstructed. A committee seat that was temporarily filled by someone else may need to revert. For a sabbatical specifically, whatever conditions were attached to the original approval — a research report, a check-in with a department chair — need to be confirmed as fulfilled rather than quietly assumed. For a leave of absence, the return often carries its own compliance requirements, confirming the leave was properly documented and that any legally required accommodations remain in place. None of this is difficult individually, but it’s exactly the kind of multi-step follow-up that gets lost without a system prompting it at the right time.
This matters more, not less, as leave volume rises across the sector. An institution managing a handful of sabbaticals a year can probably track returns manually without much risk. An institution managing dozens, spread across departments with inconsistent internal practices, is relying on individual administrators to catch every return, every coverage reversal, and every unfulfilled reporting requirement without a shared system flagging any of it. That’s a reasonable bet when volume is low. It becomes much riskier as volume grows, which is precisely what the data suggests.
Treating Leave and Sabbatical Data Like Any Other Faculty Record
The fix here isn’t complicated in concept, even if it requires deliberate effort to implement. Sabbatical and leave data deserves the same structured tracking institutions already apply to appointments, promotions, and tenure: a clear record of who’s on leave, why, for how long, what conditions apply, and what needs to happen when they return, visible to everyone who needs it rather than held in one person’s inbox. This hasn’t happened everywhere because institutions don’t see the value. It’s that sabbaticals and leaves don’t fit the standard templates most systems were built around, so they’re handled as an exception rather than a first-class category of faculty data.
Institutions that close this gap aren’t just reducing administrative risk, though that matters. They’re giving department chairs and deans a genuinely complete picture of faculty availability at any given moment, which makes every downstream planning decision — course scheduling, committee assignments, workload distribution — more accurate than it can be when a meaningful slice of the faculty workforce is tracked informally. That’s precisely the kind of configurable workflow SmartPath is built to support, giving institutions a structured, visible way to track sabbaticals and leaves with the same rigor as every other faculty process, from approval through return.
Want to see what structured sabbatical and leave tracking could look like at your institution?
Sources cited in this post:
- Littler Mendelson survey on rising mental health leave, via Becker’s Behavioral Health
- Kang & Miller, “An Overview of the Sabbatical Leave in Higher Education,” via ERIC
