It’s time to establish a geography department

“Climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world, and it presents significant national security challenges for the United States.” So concludes the 2007 report, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change, published by the Center for Naval Analyses. As the CNA report indicates, the challenges facing humanity in the 21st century are as complex as they are severe. But is UR preparing its graduates to lead on these challenges?

Perhaps, but I believe it could be doing more. During a recent visit, I was impressed to learn of UR’s new programs on sustainability and international relations. Clearly, programs such as these are vital for training graduates to rise to humanity’s new challenges. But as the case of climate change and national security illustrates, when  such programs are merged, the result can be much greater than the sum of the parts. To benefit from the great synergies that exist across disciplines, UR should establish a program capable of performing broad synthesis of human knowledge. Geography is precisely such a program.

Geography as an academic discipline can be hard to define, but it generally revolves around two themes. The first theme is space and place, emphasizing local particularities of natural and social patterns and processes at different scales. The second theme is nature-society interactions, including both how society affects nature and how nature affects society. Through these broad themes, geographers conduct research and teaching that span the natural and social sciences and often includes engineering and the humanities as well.

Why geography? As I have learned as a Ph.D. student in geography at Penn State, geography is the rarest of breeds: a truly interdisciplinary field. In a geography department, you might find an ecologist, a sociologist and a computer scientist collaborating on methods for presenting deforestation data to local communities in ways they can relate to. Or you might find a climatologist and a political scientist collaborating to study — you guessed it — climate change and conflict. Because they share some common training and interact so often, these seemingly disparate researchers gain the basic literacy in each others’ fields necessary for smooth collaboration. Likewise, geography education routinely presents students with these diverse perspectives and emphasizes the interconnections between them. Society needs this ability to put the pieces together if it is to handle our complex challenges.

If you are unfamiliar with academic geography departments, it is likely because geography departments are uncommon in the United States. This is not the case in much of the rest of the world, where geography is often as common in universities as history or economics. But — and this is important — the U.S. does feature a modest and active geography community. The Association of American Geographers, now in its 105th year, features 10,000 members across over 200 universities and colleges nationwide. UR could draw on this resource should it opt to open a geography department.

If UR is to launch a geography department, its timing couldn’t be better. Interest in the themes geography teaches and researches is strong and growing. Meanwhile, recent economic events leave many talented geographers searching for employment (staring down my own graduation, I am all too well aware of this). Thus, if UR can find the requisite resources, it would have an unusual opportunity to form a talented faculty.
Establishing a new department is no small undertaking. But through its programs on sustainability and international relations, UR has already demonstrated its willingness to push the University forward in order to meet major world challenges. Establishing a geography department would be another step in this most important of directions. Doing so would help position UR and its graduates as leaders on these challenges, benefiting the University and the planet alike. 

Baum graduated as a member
of the class of 2003.