Humanities-based geography in a pragmatic age

When I was an undergraduate, I attended a liberal arts college. This was my father's choice, not mine, and made because he wanted a broader education for me than he had received at the Kansas City College of Pharmacy. The adjustment from small-town life in Missouri to the elite faculty and student body at Dartmouth College proved traumatic at times, but ultimately beneficial. Looking back on the experience while in graduate school, I saw how it had bolstered my self-confidence. Some years later I realized that subconscious comparisons between New England and the Midwest had first awakened my interest in geography. Only recently, however, have I acknowledged a third collegiate influence on my professional life: the research emphasis I give to cultural history, values, and perceptions. The humanities issue surfaced for me when a graduate student rejected my suggestion that he write a historical, interview-rich dissertation about coal mining in his home area of West Virginia and proposed instead the application of actor-network theory to the literature of a government-sponsored coal heritage trail. The reason, he said, was "because I want to get a job when I finish." This particular student solved his problem by switching advisors, but I continue to fret. Humanities-based geography is definitely an endangered specialty. Everybody in the academic community has been aware for some time that our departments of art history, English, the foreign languages, history, and philosophy are facing declining enrollments and loss of staff. Business has become the nation's most popular major while the total percentage of graduates in the humanities has dropped in one generation from 30 to 16 (Chace 2009). People seeking explanation for this trend point to the relative decline of private colleges, the traditional bastions of humanities study. They also note how rapid increases in tuition costs and student debt have forced young people to think more about the potential earnings power of various majors. Although many geographers feel sadness about the plight of our colleagues in English and philosophy, this mood has been countered by hopes that our discipline might benefit from a reallocation of faculty slots. At the University of Kansas, for example, we definitely have seen such expansion, moving the faculty count from 16 to 24. Deans were receptive when we told them how new GIS hires would help meet job demands and how atmospheric science people could attract millions of dollars in external funding for research on climatic change. Even my side of the discipline was seen to have possibilities as theorists championed the "cultural turn" in human geography (Barnett 1998). Almost effortless growth for geography departments in Kansas and elsewhere should not blind us to losses, however. Even as we gain in numbers, and even as we probe into previously neglected realms of gender, class and social justice, we are losing ground in other arenas of study. The key declines, predictably, involve the humanities again. In fact, geography is a microcosm of the university in this regard, transforming itself from a tripartite core (science, social science, and humanities) with a few professional units attached (remote sensing labs for geography, engineering schools for the university) into a new, much more businesslike arrangement where the professional units replace humanities in the triad and the arts fade to obscurity. Not surprisingly, the changes within geography have received much less attention than those of universities as a whole. Still, they are important. When the immense potential scope of our discipline--literally writing about the world--is coupled with our always small number of practitioners, we typically have reacted by shrinking the limits of our inquiries (Sauer 1956). Perhaps some of this narrowing is natural, a way to avoid being overwhelmed, but it also has been driven historically by fad and fear. …