Funds, Fellowships, & Sabbaticals

Professional Development

The heart of the college is a full-time teaching faculty of just over 200 men and women. Selected on the basis of pedagogical and artistic/scholarly ability, the faculty are encouraged and enabled to be innovative teachers and scholars of their disciplines. Denison maintains policies and programs that encourage faculty to expand their scholarly and creative work, and thus fostering greater value in their own services for Denison.

Among Denison’s faculty development opportunities are sabbaticals, fellowships, funding for teaching workshops and seminars, professional development accounts, career enhancement grants and initiatives, and the Denison University Research Foundation (DURF).

A few highlights of Denison’s faculty development program include:

• Professional Development Accounts provide each full-time, tenured or tenure-track member of the teaching faculty (who is not already being supported by some other professional development account) with an account of $3,000 a year to support teaching and research. This account is unique among Denison’s professional development funds in that it is a quick-access account that decentralizes the process and makes access to the funds easy.
• Full-time members of the tenured teaching faculty are eligible to apply for sabbatical leaves after six years of teaching at Denison, excluding any time spent on leave without pay.
• Pre-tenure fellowships consist of one semester of released time from teaching for untenured faculty normally in the fourth year at Denison. They are available only to faculty occupying full-time, tenure-track positions at Denison.
• DURF funds support equipment needs, research materials, travel, fees to attend institutes, book subventions, student assistants for faculty research, and the like. Awards in this category normally range from $1000 to $8000, and preference is usually given to faculty with continuing contracts at Denison.
• Denison provides a 36-month interest-free loan of up to $2,500 for full-time teaching faculty to purchase home computers.

For more details, please consult the Faculty Handbook.