What profs do when not teaching

This fall, I'm on leave. What does that actually mean? Am I lying about, enjoying the golden fall? Or doing some sort of work? Tuition-paying parents and students must sometimes wonder how professors use those regular periods when they don't teach or go to meetings but do collect pay.

Well, at the best of times, leave means that I'm sitting in my study at home, my office or the Department of Special Collections at Firestone, reading primary sources from the 16th or 17th century: books printed on miraculously white and flexible paper, bound in vellum that's still solid and handsome after three or four hundred years, written in sinuous, elaborate Latin. Slowly, as I read, notes fill my computer and ideas take shape — ideas for the last chapter of the book on magic in the Renaissance that I should have finished before this term ever started and for a couple of books on visions of time and history in early modern Europe that I am actually supposed to be working on this year.

Those are the good days and hours, and they're very good. I'm finding my way back into the minds of 16th-century thinkers, coming to better understand how they understood life, the universe and everything. Sometimes I even get their jokes, and if I'm in the library, my cackles disturb the other readers. But not all days or hours can be dedicated to the joys of pedantry. Every day, email streams into my computer — 50 or 60 messages on weekdays, 10 or 20 on weekends. At this time of year, most of the messages are requests for recommendations.

You wouldn't think that writing letters need take much time. Just line up the usual bromides: "Good wasn't the word for her work." "You'll be lucky if you can get him to work for you." Add the ritual last sentence: "I hope it's clear by now that this isn't a routine letter." And off they go.

But in fact, each letter calls for thought, craft and revision. Recommendations matter, again and again, in an American career. They help undergraduates get into law school or graduate school. They're vital for graduate students seeking fellowships and jobs, and they still mean a lot to younger professors, since they need further fellowships to write their books and support in their bids for tenure.

Every letter counts — as long as you take the time to make it vivid and specific enough that the person you're writing for comes alive on the page. So every letter takes time. And I write a lot of them. When I came back to Princeton at the beginning of September, I started storing the recommendations I wrote in a separate directory on my new Mac. It now has more than a hundred items in it — most of them brand new this fall. Sometimes, I worry that I will end up years from now, writing letters to help my onetime students gain places in the hot new nursing homes (or even, as was standard practice in the 15th century, writing them recommendations to show to Saint Peter when they reach the gates of heaven).

When there are no letters to write, I turn to my professional duties. I belong to the board of the American Academy in Rome — a glorious McKim Mead palace on the Gianicolo, where gifted scholars and artists spend a year or two, doing research in the Vatican, welding sheet metal or making a giant cat out of post-its. Right now, we have closed our library. As head of the library committee, I ran a retreat in Rome last summer, where several distinguished scholars spent a week reading dusty shelves. This enabled us to produce a new mission statement and work out revised acquisition policies, and now I'm helping with the search for a new librarian and pleas to donors for help buying more books.

And then there's the American Historical Association — my guild. As a vice president, I spend time worrying about how historians are treated. Last year, I made myself unpopular by urging graduate programs in history to be more frank about student attrition and the job market. This fall I'm looking at how history departments use faculty on short-term contracts. That's a really scary subject. Almost half of all the teachers in American colleges and universities are now contingent employees, off the tenure track. At the same time, we're trying to help the University of Nebraska, which is having trouble getting a visa for a brilliant young Bolivian scholar, and writing up advice on how to run job searches more fairly and effectively.

And then there's the journal, based at Penn, that I help to edit (meetings once a month), the big reference book for Harvard, the textbook for Norton and the book on Egyptian obelisks in the west that I wrote with three friends and that we're hoping to finish this fall. It would all make for a busy life — even if my 'Prince' editor wasn't standing over me, demanding copy ... that, dear readers, is leave. Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History. He can be reached at grafton@princeton.edu.