The graduate students I have the honor and privilege to work with all contributed an essay to the series What is geography? Over the past few years, the students and I have discussed this many times. For us, geography remains an essential frame in which to think about and, more importantly, analyze contemporary environmental and social problems. And yet, geography as a discipline remains in peril. The University of Montana has initiated a plan to dissolve its program by 2026 due to low enrollment. The Northwestern geography program recently closed. Both these programs had only one or two faculty running the program. The University of Nebraska Kearney geography program has failed to graduate sufficient students and plans to close its program, too.
These trends raise questions about geography as a major and discipline in the rapidly changing higher education landscape. But geography has had a precarious position in higher education going back decades. Harvard, famously, closed its geography program in 1948. Columbia shuttered its program in 1986. What accounts for these historical and contemporary trends? Sadly, I do not have the answers but do have some perspectives.
I did not receive formal training in geography, instead received degrees in environmental studies and sciences. But, as a PhD advisor always told us, “geography is the original environmental studies.” This has to do with the disciplines long legacy and focus on environment/society relations. Such a focus lends itself to analyzing contemporary crises. But most high school students do not take classes in geography and too many people still associate the discipline with state capitals. When I tell people I teach in a geography program most reply immediately that they love rocks! Such misperceptions speak to the challenges that we face in engaging young people and try and persuade them to enroll in our major. Those and other challenges certainly make it difficult to engage the public and potential students but other problems endemic to the discipline also deserve attention.
Many people within geography see it as a bifurcated discipline. They reside on either the physical or human side dividing the discipline. From this perspective, physical geographers study the earth and human geographers study people. This mischaracterization has bedeviled the discipline for generations. In addition, the more recent focus on technology, namely GIS and remote sensing, has further polarized programs. This arbitrary divide weakens programs and makes it difficult for potential students to see themselves as geographers, instead focusing narrowly on technical attributes. But geography remains interdisciplinary, bringing together views informed by natural and social science in a way that provides a novel and increasingly urgent means by which to understand our current crises. And yet, many geographers, and programs, remain wedded to outdated perspectives on who we are and what we do.
Geography does not have an identity. Misunderstood by the public and students, departments and the discipline, more broadly, has not taken our current predicament seriously enough, at least not collectively. Some programs continue to thrive, melding social and natural science approaches to engage students around problems and solutions to societal needs. In my classes, students consistently resonate with framing our challenges in ways that integrate approaches drawn from natural and social sciences. Deforestation has ecological consequences but stems from social causes. Geography stands alone among the disciplines in its ability to genuinely engage these questions from a novel perspective. And yet, our discipline remains mired in narrow disciplinary channels, creating outdated, narrow programs that do not have the dynamism students increasingly seek out.
Perhaps disciplines no longer make sense in the 21st century. Personally, I prefer melding scholars with diverse disciplinary training into programs that bring a broad perspective to teaching and learning. That approach, unfortunately, does not have much staying power with programs, administrators, and faculty with disciplinary training. Given that support does not exist for reimagining higher education around multidisciplinary perspectives, how might we rethink geography programs to make them more attractive?
Again, I do not claim to have all the answers, but my experience makes clear that we need to change. Focusing on cities as social ecological systems represents a promising starting point. Rather than focusing on planning from a narrow, insular perspective, we should engage students around cities as social ecological sites. Most humans live in cities and the local level remains the scale at which most people engage democracy. We could still train people to enter the planning profession but could do so in a way that engages cities and planning from a broader perspective. GIS has many applications and students have an interest in the field. But we too often train technicians, not people who can insert themselves in the democratic process with GIS skills. These may sound like subtle changes but they have profound implications. We need to engage students around their interests in the crumbling society they perceive around them and give them skills to insert themselves. Instead, we give them skills and assume they can figure out how to use them around the interests they have. That approach does not have a strong track record.
I hear time and time again that students appreciate learning about the world from a geographic perspective, one that analyzes how we produce space and how that sets in motion relations that affect social and ecological outcomes. We have great potential as a discipline to reach students and energize them to learn about society and then find their place in it. Geography has skills to offer and approaches that have relevance across society. We have failed to make this argument persuasively. As the students contributing to this series have made clear, geography has much to offer. It remains to be seen if the discipline can rise to the challenge and persuade potential students and society that it remains relevant and necessary. I hope it can.
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