Sabbatical’s End

Summer 2026 Blog Entry (after a long break)

When I went on sabbatical last May at the end of the semester, I have to admit: I was burned out. Like, really burned out. I had been teaching for over ten years at that point in some capacity or another, starting in 2014 when I got my first academic job as a graduate student teaching assistant at the University of Texas at Arlington while working on my Master’s Degree in Sociology. I started teaching full-time for the first time in the 2019-2020 academic year; my wife and I lived in different states for several months as I was teaching on a one-year contract, and then of course the pandemic turned everything upside down—we were both fortunate to keep our jobs. Coming out of the pandemic, my university fell on a few years of really hard times, and I saw a lot of good people leave. The university is doing a lot better now, but that last year before I went on sabbatical, public education and science in general faced broad and escalating public scrutiny; and we’re all grappling with the growing proliferation of (addiction to?) generative AI and its effects on teaching and learning. I was just so tired.

People sometimes think a sabbatical is a vacation. And though I joked to that effect at times, it is not. It is a chance to step back from teaching for (in my case) an academic year, to rebuild and decide what direction to take with one’s future (I already taught a class this summer, but this is officially coming back now). I loved being an academic, it was my dream job; but after all that, I admit there were moments when I thought about doing something else with the last couple thousand weeks of my life (noting that 40 years is about 2,040 weeks, and if I am lucky and attend to my health a bit better, I might have that long). Being a public educator and scientist is a really difficult place to be right now. I understand why people in my profession are leaving the profession, though I think we as a country will be lesser without them.

My wife and I traveled to the UK for a few weeks last summer. We saw London and York and Edinburgh up close, and visited a colorful little seaside town called Whitby. Doing that made me realize some of the things I’m grateful for living here in the United States. We live in a little shack in the woods north of Bemidji, a couple of hours from the Canadian border, in one of the coldest places in the contiguous United States. But we can live here affordably, and have a lot of green space around us. The UK often felt so claustrophobic, walkable cities filled with foot traffic and congestion, it was hard to find a space where you weren’t surrounded by other people. Notable exceptions being the Whitby coast in North Yorkshire and the Hampstead Heath in London. This place, Bemidji, feels like home to me now; not sure when that happened, but it would hurt to have to go. And when I look at my day-to-day life, I am fortunate that it’s much more similar than different even after all the upheavals I have been on the front line for over the past several years; and I still have a lot of things to be grateful for, living and teaching here.

But that wasn’t my favorite part about sabbatical. The major highlight would have to go to Tiny, the dog we brought home from the local shelter last October. That’s him in the picture. He has added so much to our lives, and I think we have added to his, giving him a new lease on life after he was found with another dog in an abandoned home and spent almost four months in the shelter before we adopted him. It took me a long time to feel ok with getting another dog after we took Chewie to be put to sleep in January 2023. The week we adopted Tiny, I had a dream in which Chewie seemed to give me permission to move on, which I think could be interpreted in a lot of different ways depending on one’s beliefs, but whatever the metaphysical interpretation, it definitely helped me feel sure that it was the right thing to do.

I also went back to school. Again. Apparently, it’s something I have to do every 13 years; I did it in 2000 for the first time, and 2013 for the second. I took a course in Indigenous Studies in the spring, and an Indigenous Ecology course in Biology over the summer. I think I’m going to get a degree in Indigenous Sustainability after those experiences. This really rekindled my love for learning, and seeing how other faculty do it has been inspiring. If I can’t remain a scholar here, then maybe I’ll complete that degree and see if I can move to some remote part of the Northwest or even Canada and help tend the forests there. But that isn’t the plan, really. I love what I do and want to keep doing it for a living right here insofar as I can; and I think what I am learning will make me better at sociology and better at being a citizen of the North Woods in the long run.

I also wrote my second book over my sabbatical, which involved a lot of reading. I have long thought about things at the intersection of nature and society, and the second book takes some of those ideas that inspired my first book and runs with them in more theoretical directions. The first book, Faiths in Green, is full of data tables and statistics; this second one is all theory, building a lens through which to see sociology, and the events unfolding at present, in useful ways. I am particularly thinking about how to better grapple socially and psychologically with an ever more algorithmically driven world, the seeming political intractability of environmental problems, and a new space race seemingly driven by private economic interests. It has already been through one round of revision and is back out there being reviewed, but I am confident it will be published when it is ready.

I was also elected president of the Sociologists of Minnesota, a state-level organization that brings together students and teachers from our colleges and universities. As president-elect, I am tasked with organizing our annual conference at my home university, Bemidji State, which will take place October 8-10. The theme: Good Neighbors: Local Acts, Global Impacts. I have the big pieces all together but will be hitting the ground running with getting as many of the remaining details figured out as I can next week. It has been eye-opening, not least because I am not the most organized of people, and though I have been in leadership positions this is the first time I’ve sat on a Board of Directors and done this kind of work, which I will continue to do for the next couple of years during my term.

And I created a lot of music over sabbatical too. There were times when this felt melancholy, doomed—I won’t get another sabbatical for ten years or more, and by then, the pain and stiffness that’s already starting to beset my hands will probably mean that I am in the best shape in a long time, and maybe the best shape of my life as a songwriter; and will never reach this point again. But as I am thinking about the end of this sabbatical journey that doesn’t sadden me so much, because I got it in the queue, enough to last through 2028; and because revisiting music made me realize why I love it—and why I did not end up turning it into a career years ago. A lot of what I have done lately is revisit some of the stuff I did in the past, in some cases, decades ago. I have also spent a bit more time playing the piano, and of course I have continued to sing in the Bemidji Chorale as a Bass II vocalist (including throughout this past year), where I have really had the chance to connect with the community, as well as my own voice, in new ways; and to learn what works best for it, as well as how to keep it strong and steady for years to come. Not everything one is passionate about has to be monetized, turned into a career. And I don’t exactly write upbeat stuff—it’s typically dramatic, minor-key, sad and dark and angsty. Some things are better left for the sake of catharsis—when I am feeling that way I have a place to put that so I don’t have to carry it around with me, and maybe others can connect with it and get through bad times too.

I have also started strength training again. I got a new gym membership last fall, and promptly overtrained after a long period of inactivity, injuring myself and being down for weeks. It was hard to get back to it again, but I returned in January and am now back to training three days a week. The older I get, the harder it is to get back into it, and the easier it is to overdo it. I need to stop comparing weight and reps and heart rate to where I was when I was a gym rat in my early thirties, because that’s not going to get me anywhere but hurt again. I also need to not let a little soreness become an excuse not to go at all; better to train lighter or train a different muscle group than to sit it out just because I hurt a bit. I could probably stand to cut down on the beer, fried chicken, and pizza while I’m at it.

So, I learned a lot, traveled, got a dog, wrote a book, got elected to lead a professional organization, made music, worked out. I also read most of Isaac Asimov’s seven-book Foundation series, which is part of what inspired me to study sociology all those years ago. But when I pull it all together, what I really got was renewed direction in terms of being a tenured sociology professor here in the North Woods. And maybe most of my time was spent thinking about how to share what I do; I want people to know what I teach and what I talk about, I want to make clear how important social science is, and how statistics and scientific methods and balancing wonder and skepticism are more generally in terms of what I do, and in creating and sustaining so many of the improvements we enjoy as human beings relative to the past (maybe half the struggle is illustrating the reality of that last bit). I want to investigate the unknowns and the blind spots and the gaps in knowledge in my own field again and contribute to figuring things out just a little more. If public education is facing ongoing heavy-handed public scrutiny, especially people like me who study and teach difficult topics, then I want to be transparent about what I do, and how and why I do it; how we know what we know, what we don’t know yet, and what might be done with this knowledge. And if in the end this becomes a place I cannot stay for whatever reason, I have something that I can take with me and continue to share regardless of where I end up. “It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness,” so they say.

So, that’s been my big takeaway: I abandoned writing a sociology textbook I almost got published once, and have been rewriting my course materials as blog entries, starting with my Introduction to Sociology course, and will be sharing them in the coming weeks and months. I return to Facebook, my website and blog, with a sense that I am communicating the importance of sociology—public education and science more broadly—in an era of many challenges both within and outside the school. To work in the public sector is to provide your knowledge and services to publics. I got frustrated and burned out on social media years ago during COVID—I started out by trying to get a handle on what was happening, confronting misinformation and trying to provide evidence and clarity. I gradually got sucked into the one-dimensional “us and them” ideological conflicts and faced some serious hostility. I also said some things I regret now that I don’t think were helpful. But if a person doesn’t look back and feel a tinge of guilt or regret at what they did back then at times, then they haven’t learned anything new since then.

I am grateful to my institution for the support they have provided, past and present. Coming out of this sabbatical, facing new challenges, I feel ready.

Image: Tiny Szrot, visiting Leech Lake, Walker, MN