From the Wotcester Telegram & Gazette
Tuesday, April 25, 2006Who gunned down geography?
It’s a cold case, a mystery as baffling as your average papal assassination.
Geography was alive and well through World War II. Three years later, it was on its deathbed, shot through the heart by a known assassin who lived to a ripe old age without paying for his crime.
Now the patient is recovering and demanding justice, but the case was never solved … no motive established … no accomplices named …. no indictments served.
• The Lone Gunman Theory. Everybody knows who fired the first shot. The late James B. Conant, president of Harvard University from 1933 to 1953, acted in plain sight, openly declaring, “Geography is not a university subject,” as he pulled the trigger. The wounded geographers were driven from Harvard, and a nationwide purge began.
Some say Mr. Conant’s motive was pure ignorance compounded by petty jealousy. Some say it was a hate crime against one professor rumored to be gay. Surely, the ruling don of American science would need more justification to gun down a discipline that had been part of his university since 1642.
• Conspiracy Theory. Next came a spree of killings across the U.S. (Stanford, Yale, Chicago, Columbia and Michigan) and across the border (Windsor, Concordia, McMaster and Alberta). The mindless rampage soon exterminated every geography department in the Ivy League except Dartmouth’s undergraduate program. Refugees fled to the academic hinterlands, mostly state universities, where they survived in exile, recuperated and later returned to prominence.
Perhaps the killers really were just copycats aping Harvard’s bad example, but the MO was suspiciously similar in every case. Plus, the second gunman, Stanford provost Fred Terman, was a known associate of Mr. Conant.
• Posse Comitatus. Was there a sudden, unanimous consensus that geography just didn’t deserve to live? That happens sometimes, you know, as in Skidmore, Mo., where townsfolk gunned down Ken Rex McElroy, and nobody squealed.
American geography was never the Skidmore Bully of science, but townsfolk may have confused Isaiah Bowman, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s geographer who did much good, with Karl Haushofer, Adolph Hitler’s geographer, who gave geopolitics a bad name. Mr. Conant should have known better, though, since Mr. Bowman was educated by those same Harvard geographers then looming in his sights.
•Spontaneous Combustion. Another popular theory claims these weren’t murders at all, but rather an outbreak of suicides. The argument goes that geographers burned themselves with environmental determinism, a theory once popular but then disgraced, and finished themselves off with departmental squabbling. Most of the deaths occurred at a time, however, when American universities were expanding faster than ever before or since. You’d think enterprising administrators would have brought out the fire hoses even for obvious cases of self-immolation.
A vicious smear campaign followed. Geography was portrayed as not a science at all but rather a child’s game called “States and Capitals.” A mini-Dark Age descended on America. For half a century, exiled geographers preserved the scrolls of geographic knowledge as Irish monks and Arab scholars did a thousand years before.
Meanwhile, geographic ignorance became the principal driver of foreign policy. In 1949, for instance, Mr. Bowman had warned “we can lose our shirt in the swamps and canyons of the hinterlands” of Southeast Asia, but that scroll was lost, and America bungled into Vietnam. Also lost was a priceless old bullet-riddled tome entitled “Mesopotamia.”
Mr. Conant thus has on his hands the figurative blood of geographers and the real blood of soldiers killed in Vietnam and Iraq. Some die from policy errors, others because they themselves do not understand the foreign cultures and terrains where they fight.
Reparations are in order but we’ll settle for getting our old jobs back. Reinstate geography at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Columbia and other top universities. Geographers there can change America’s political culture; exiled geographers cannot. Support them, listen to them, and, for God’s sake, don’t shoot them.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: ClarkUniversity’s Graduate School of Geography in Worcester is the oldest sustained program of geography and has awarded more Ph.D.s than any other geography program in the United States. It was established as a graduate program in 1921. The undergraduate program was established in 1923.)
Jerome E. Dobson, a professor of geography at the University of Kansas, is president of the American Geographical Society.