aka Teaching Release Blocks

Early each fall, full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty with a 6-block teaching responsibility will be invited to apply for a faculty development (teaching release) blocks to be awarded for the following academic year. The one-block reduction in teaching is intended to support faculty research and scholarship.

Please see the Sept. 2025 call and application form on the Dean of Faculty Internal Grants page.

Goals: The award supports completing critical stages of research or creative projects, producing research results for publication, and/or undertaking work that leads to submission of an external grant. This includes the scholarship of teaching and learning, but not course development per se. The grant may also support deepening one's sustained national and international scholarly profile by serving in a leadership role on an academic society’s executive committee or as a journal editor, as well as to pursue an ambitious public scholarship project to augment one’s scholarly activity. Faculty members who have recently experienced heavy demands on their time from teaching and service are encouraged to apply.

Award: This award provides a one-block reduction in teaching in 2026-27 and is not accompanied by additional funding. If an awardee is unable to take the release block in 2026-27 because they no longer meet eligibility requirements or for other reasons, the award cannot be “banked” for a future year. This is not a paid-leave block, remote-work block (work-related travel is permitted), or a vacation—faculty are expected to be in residence and to fulfill normal responsibilities of a non-teaching block (e.g., advising, department meetings and events, communicating regarding work, departmental and college service).

Eligibility for 26-27: Full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members with a six-block teaching responsibility in 2026-27 are eligible. Faculty with a chair’s block or CEC/FEC/FRC chairing blocks are eligible. Faculty with other faculty-development or research-related teaching reductions in 2026-27 (e.g., sabbatical, grant- funded releases, professorships, other internal releases) are not eligible. Those who will receive faculty-development or research-related teaching reductions in 2026-27 or have received them in any of the last three years (academic years 25-26, 24-25, 23-24) will receive lower priority but are eligible.

Review: Similar to the sabbatical application process, department chairs will receive a copy of the release-block application and will provide a brief evaluation addressing the proposal and the departmental impact, and then the whole application will be reviewed by the R&D Board formed from the divisional executive committees.

Deadline: typically third Friday of Block 3

Application instructions: Applications will be submitted online. We recommend that you prepare the application in a word document and cut and paste it into the online form. You will need to upload a CV.