Call for chapter proposals: New AAG Book on Rocky Mountain West
One of the most anticipated items when I began attending AAG meetings was the annual edited book that came in our packet. This would be a special volume dedicated to the city and region where the meeting was held. Within it would be chapters detailing all kinds of interesting aspects of the region, written by geographers with expertise and wisdom. I still have a large collection of these regional geographies on my book shelf. The AAG was poorer when we stopped producing this regional compendium and we need to bring it back.
So I am delighted to announce that, for the first time since 2001, the American Association of Geographers will be introducing an edited book entitled Denver and the Rocky Mountain West. It will be edited by Michael Keables, with an editorial board of local experts.
This will be a fully produced, peer reviewed book, available as a pdf to every conference attendee. It can also be purchased as a spiral-bound copy for a small fee.
Consider this a call for chapter proposals for anyone who would like to contribute to the excitement of the Rocky Mountain region. Consider this also a chance to provide all of our attendees with your unique insights about this region.
If you are interested in contributing to this new book, please contact Michael Keables at michael [dot] keables [at] du [dot] edu. The timeline is short. Mike will need a title and abstract by October 15. Final submissions will be due by January 15.
— Dave Kaplan
AAG President
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President's Column
The Mental Health Challenge or Relieving Anxiety and Depression for Students and Faculty
About 18 years ago, one of my Masters students calmly mentioned that she had been undergoing a tremendous amount of anxiety, and had seen a doctor about it. I was floored! This particular student exemplified “no drama.” She was motoring through her Master’s thesis research and writing while effectively assisting me on one of my research projects. To think that Carol (not her real name) was suffering this sort of debilitating stress was a revelation. And then she said, “But Dave, everybody I know is suffering.”
I remember stress from college, graduate school and as a professor. High levels of tension were considered a badge of honor—some sort of endurance test—but these types of “masculinist” environments can leave some people unnecessarily wounded. Five years ago, past-president Mona Domosh described how her early experience of job uncertainty and loneliness opened up bouts of depression. The inability to talk about these issues only prolonged her despair.
Far more undergraduates reportsevere psychological disorders to counselors, including depression, anxiety, hopelessness, suicidal thoughts, eating problems and substance abuse. Stress begins early, as high school students suffer from “achievement pressure,” overcoaching, and a need to load college applications with all manner of activities and plaudits.
Graduate students can be overwhelmed by mental distress. A recent survey of mostly Ph.D. candidates showed that 39 percent were moderately to severely depressed, with slightly higher rates for women and much higher rates among transgender students. These incidences greatly surpass the general U.S. population, which are within a percentage point or so of most other countries. Students are hurting. The reasons behind their stress are obvious: overwork, strained relationships with advisors, feeling a lack of support, worries about the future, and a reluctance to talk about these problems. In one tragic case, a graduate student committed suicide because he felt bullied into publishing work that was incorrect.
Faculty also suffer. This is especially true of those still awaiting full-time employment, working under precarious conditions as adjuncts. Yet professors everywhere contend with pressures to produce as the bar reaches ever higher. Lawrence Berg and others liken this to the anxiety instilled in the neoliberal university, where conditions of competition, inequality, and economization of labor prevail. Faculty may have once been free to define their own scholarship, but there is now a greater focus on differentiating winners from losers. A report from the U.K.—where this economization of faculty is further along—discusses the unrelenting pressure to procure grant money and to publish, publish, publish. The increasing use of metrics all around only aggravates the burden.
Mental health challenges, and the tensions that produce them, will only worsen. It seems that we live in a more competitive age. Social media exposes too much information, flagging our inadequacies and failures. I can only shudder at the thought of how people applying for graduate school and for faculty positions can witness, in real time, the experiences of every other applicant.
Strong mentoring relationships help ease the burden of anxiety and depression. (D.A. Peterson, U.S. Department of State)
A toxic academic culture that looks the other way when students and colleagues are harassed engenders feelings of worthlessness and saps motivation. Cases in geography and in academia as a whole have exposed the perniciousness of what used to be acceptable behavior. The AAG has developed its Harassment Free guidelines, and we seek better ways to address the problem at conferences and in workplaces. But of course this only covers a small part of the terrain. Eradicating harassment wherever it occurs should be the goal.
Departments should instill a culture of friendliness. In my view, there are few people so important, or who are engaged in such significant research, to be allowed to get away with being nasty or even indifferent to others. Yet we seem too willing to forgive jerks, particularly those deemed “successes” because they are well-known in their field or bring in a lot of grant money. Such values, whether propagated by chairs, advisors, professors, or fellow students, are inimical to a healthy academic culture. People should observe certain norms of civility, treating everyone with a level of respect and also providing a level of accessibility. While it is hard to change human behavior and everybody lapses once in a while, our collective mental health would improve tremendously if people were just a bit kinder.
So much of the stress of academic life comes from the high incidence of rejection. Students and junior professors are under the gun to publish articles and get grants. They look around and compare themselves to what seems an unending string of successes. But much like Facebook displays a carefully curated collection of congratulations, cute children, and exotic travel experiences, a senior professor’s cv does not represent the real struggles she has endured. A so-called “failure cv”—proposed a few years ago—is a way to remind us of the hard and often unrewarding work we do. If made public, it also shows that there are no glide paths to success.
Professors must set standards and educate students in the best way they know, and these challenges can be made easier with clear access and instructions. I recall too many professors who would spring something on their class, not for any purpose but because they had not gotten their act together. A student’s well-being is supported by instructors who are prepared for each class, show reasonable flexibility, and express sympathy and openness. Yet a recent survey showed that only half of college graduates reported having any meaningful relationship with faculty or staff. I always try to remember that many students worry about contacting their professor, or intruding on her time. Closing the door, either literally or figuratively, because more important work must be done sends a signal of relative value. Of course it is necessary to sequester ourselves at times, but we must make sure we are available, responsive (yes—even on weekends when the need and anxiety on the other side is great), and caring.
To that end, we need to publicize our understanding, sympathy, and availability. Last year, a colleague in another program sent around a message that she suggested we share with our students. I and several other faculty followed up with emails to students saying we understood that the end of the semester can be stressful, that it was important for students to take care of their mental and physical health, that we would be available to speak anytime to anyone with problems, and to refer them to someone who could help. The email really struck a chord. Students felt that they were not quite so alone.
Mental health is complex, and some issues are severe enough that they need to be tackled professionally. But would it not help everybody, those simply stressed and those truly in despair, if they could feel the meaning behind these words? We are here. For you.
Changes in our Annual Meeting: Fees, Structure and an Unfortunate Oversight
In this brief letter, I describe some changes to our registration fees and meeting structure. I would also like to address the unfortunate overlap of our spring meeting with Passover and Good Friday.
Fees: Many members have complained to me and others about registration fees for the annual meeting. Setting registration costs is always a contentious issue, and we have to consider all of the constraints. You may hear that our AAG meeting fees are no higher than most other academic meetings. While this may be true, we should always try to do better and to increase the value to our members, particularly those with less ability to pay.
Rest assured that we are looking at changing and hopefully improving our registration costs. This is tricky because it must be done in such a way as to not overly diminish the AAG’s revenue. But we will keep trying. One step, which we introduced at our Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, was to lower the cost for people presenting posters or simply attending rather than presenting. A next step, which we are introducing at the AAG meeting in Denver, is to sharply reduce the cost of a one-day pass for people who attend the conference for a single day. This can bring in more people from the local community so they can see what geography is all about. This option is reflected in our new registration fee schedule. Later next spring, I hope to announce a further set of adjustments to make the annual meeting even more affordable.
Session Length: A second big change lies in the structure of the paper sessions. We are adjusting our paper length from 20 minutes to 15 minutes. This is in part related to necessity. As you are no doubt aware, the program committee, Oscar Larson, and other staff struggle to fit in all of the papers and other sessions. It is also difficult to find rooms for other ad hoc meetings that attendees try to schedule during the Annual Meeting week, as typically no extra rooms are available.
Shorter sessions increase our flexibility. They decrease the length of session blocks. They also allow for some longer lunch periods and more time in the evening without sessions. The new structure will allow session organizers to reserve some of their time for discussion. We understand that there may be problems in adapting to the shorter session times and so Council decided to hold this as an experiment for the Denver Meeting. If our members hate it, we can return back to the way it has been.
Holiday Oversight: Finally, I want to address a big problem about our upcoming meeting—one that members have brought to my attention in the last few months. When we scheduled Denver several years ago, it coincided with Passover and Good Friday. We really laid an egg on this one and I am deeply sorry for this unforgiveable misstep! As a small gesture, we have assembled a group to find alternatives for our members who would like to both participate in the meeting and celebrate Passover. We will be flexible with scheduling and we are also making arrangements with a local synagogue to host a Seder on Wednesday evening. Since the Annual Meeting ends on Friday, this should not be as large a problem for those observing Good Friday, but please let me know if it is.
I realize that these steps cannot make up for this blunder, but hope that it will mitigate at least some of the damage. And we will make sure that this does not happen again.
Putting together an annual meeting of the scope of the AAG spring meeting is a Herculean task. AAG staffers and member volunteers spend countless days creating a meeting we can all be proud of. But it is all so worthwhile. For many of us, the annual meeting is a highlight of our year. I look forward to seeing you in Denver.
Introducing the Themes for the 2020 AAG Annual Conference
Each year the AAG president helps to identify a few themes for the AAG Annual Conference. While any topic is accepted for presentation at the annual meeting and participants are encouraged to develop their own special sessions, themes encompass a few specific points of interest for our Annual Conference and are used to organize a series of sessions, to focus discussion, and to highlight key events during the conference.
The AAG is pleased to announce three themes for the 2020 Annual Conference to be held in Denver from April 6–10: The Changing North American Continent, Ethnonationalism and Exclusion around the World, and Expanding the Community of Geography.
The Changing North American Continent examines how the land and people have been transformed from pre-history through history. A meeting in Denver, the capital city of the U.S. West, allows us to focus specifically on the transformation of the western landscape, the effects of climate change, indigenous rights, new immigrant geographies of the West, the perils to our ecosystems, water scarcity and distribution, the West as a social laboratory, and other related aspects. We seek papers and other forums that address these topics and that otherwise fit within this broad rubric.
Ethnonationalism and Exclusion around the World describes and interrogates new political movements based around a more exclusive form of national identity. These movements often draw on race-based appeals, target immigrant populations, and may be violent. While ethnonationalism has been present within every society throughout history, modern-day ethnonationalist movements have given rise to several strong political movements contributing to the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, the rise of populist parties in Hungary, Poland and Brazil, and the election of U.S. President Donald Trump. An exclusionary nationalist identity has also led to the hardening of borders as well as the vicious repression and destruction of minority groups, such as the Uighur people in China and the Rohingya in Myanmar. As part of this theme, we seek papers and other forums that are broadly concerned with nationalism, ethnic-inspired terrorism, racism, immigration, genocide, borders, populism, electoral geography and other related aspects.
Expanding the Community of Geography looks at how we can increase the active participation of geographers, at the AAG and elsewhere, who may have otherwise felt excluded, moved away from geography as a discipline, or may not realize their kinship with geography. One factor of this exclusion lies with geographers who work in often underrepresented institutions. This includes stand-alone geographers, community college stakeholders, those who work and study at Historically Black and Tribal institutions, and geographers who work outside of the academy. Most people who go on to get a Masters or Ph.D. in geography do not end up working as academics. They may have drifted away from the AAG, and we need to find ways to increase their contribution and interest in our society. As part of this theme, we seek papers and other forums that involve coping with limited resources, enhancing geography at minority serving institutions, community engagement, outreach to geographers beyond the academy, alternative ways of knowing, fostering interaction among stand-alone geographers, and many other related aspects.
Since the AAG first introduced themes for the annual meeting, they have been used to emphasize a particular set of interests. These three themes speak to the significance of our meeting’s location in Denver, the political era we find ourselves in, and the need to foster a larger and more inclusive geographical community. Future presidents will focus on different sets of themes and this is as it should be.
If you find that your interests intersect with one of these three themes and would like to serve on a committee, please contact me directly at dkaplan [at] kent [dot] edu. And if you find that your session, poster, or paper corresponds with a theme, please consider adding it to the lineup for our 2020 AAG meeting in Denver.
— Dave Kaplan
AAG President
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President's Column
Who’s sorting who? Or the explosion of metrics and how we can take back control
For those of us still working with paper student evaluations, we receive our spring semester results during the summer. It is a time of mixed emotions for many of us. While I heard one lucky young professor describe opening up her student evaluations as tantamount to Christmas, I am probably not alone in likening it to Halloween, where the tricks far outnumber the treats! Too hard, too boring, does not provide enough guidelines or makeup opportunities, not what I expected—the list goes on and on for the types of complaints students can and will make anonymously. As professors and grad students, we have seen them all.
I am at a point where these student evaluations mean little to my career. However there are plenty of instructors and junior professors—particularly those in precarious circumstances—who have to worry about each little bump and dip in their average. Colleges and universities, particularly those more oriented to teaching, rely on student evaluations to make tenure decisions. And less than super-positive evaluations can be used to bludgeon contingent faculty.
Student evaluations may have some place in assessment. There is no other way for students to provide anonymous feedback about a course or an instructor. However, the problems with this sort of measurement are legion. For one thing, research has repeatedly demonstrated that many students evaluate female instructors more harshly than male instructors (see the accompanying figure). Even the words that students use are different. Racial bias is also present, as is bias against foreign-born instructors. Nervous professors have figured out that the best way to receive more positive evaluations is to grade more generously. High grades are clearly correlated with good evaluations, though long-term studies have shown that students in courses given lower ratings learned as much if not more than students in courses with higher ratings. I remember an instructor who always plied students with pizza and cookies during evaluation day. Turns out, he was helping boost his evaluations significantly.
Summertime is also when many of us who work as journal editors receive an evaluation of another sort: the yearly impact factor. For those of you who have spent the last couple of decades in monastic solitude, a journal’s impact factor measures the mean number of citations each article garners over the course of a year. So an impact factor of 1 indicates that the average article during the measurement years attracted an average of one citation per year. The calculations can be done in several ways, and while it is not possible to bring pizza and cookies to all potential citers, there are still means of manipulating the process. For instance, some very unscrupulous journal editors will insist that accepted publications include recent citations to their very own journal.
As with student evaluations, journal impact factors have come to rise up and conquer all of academe. Originally meant for life science and medical journals, the impact factor now is used in all fields. The quality of one’s scholarship is also conveniently “measured” by the impact factors of journals that people list on their CVs. The numbers are easily grasped and can be a proxy for a journal’s research and scholarly reputation. I myself watched in dismay as journals I had long held up as models, both in and out of geography, were dismissed by their relatively low impact factors while some niche journals rapidly scrambled their way up the scholarly ladder. Even more dismaying is how these impact factors are used to box in scholars—rapidly quantifying and sorting what should be careful decisions. Taken to its extreme was a recent ad for a postdoctoral position in process engineering (gratefully, not in Geography), where applicants were required to have published in a journal with an impact factor above 10 or they “will get a rejection.” It is not as if impact factors suddenly became calculable; it is just that they became terribly urgent.
Journal impact factors have multiple biases. They favor journals composed largely of review essays or “debates.” They clearly slight some fields. For instance, only two journals in all of History rise above a journal impact factor of 1 and then just barely. Impact factors also screen out many varieties of scholarship, notably books. They can be “gamed” by editorial policy. And as I have found myself, a journal’s impact factor may ride on just one or two well-cited articles. Many new and innovative journals may not have an impact factor at all. To me the oddest thing of all is just how significant journal impact factors have become in an age where scarcely anybody physically handles an entire printed journal. Most of us download relevant articles, no matter what the journal. The well-known deficiencies of journal impact factors have sparked a strong backlash, culminating in the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, which recommends that universities, potential funders, and publishers “not use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.”
What is it about these measures? We have rankings of departments, of universities, and even of individuals. The United Kingdom has long undergone yearly research assessment exercises, and the state of Texas embarked several years ago on a program to evaluate the value added for every faculty member. Is this a needed corrective to professorial deadwood? Or is it yet another cudgel with which to intimidate and mold the professoriate?
PreviousAAGpresidents have weighed in on the explosion of metrics, while other academics on social media lament “the mushrooming of metrics and their influence on student, academic, and other university professionals’ lives.” My own view is that most metrics can be useful—after all, I employ them myself in research and evaluation. But they are inherently obtuse and contain all manner of biases. Because they are perceived as objective, they end up hiding their role in slighting certain groups and particular practices. Because they themselves become the desired objective, they lead to a warped process. Much like a company that only wants to maximize its quarterly earnings, too much reliance on metrics can lead to timid teaching and overly opportunistic scholarship. Exclusive use of these metrics cannot possibly account for all people do to forward the enterprise—the unplanned service, the approachable demeanor, the helpful hearing out of a student’s or colleague’s research ideas, the emotional labor—in other words, the soul of many a department and the types of things that should be valued more but are so egregiously overlooked.
So what can we do? For starters, it could help to work within your departments and institutions to ensure that teaching evaluations are used only within the appropriate safeguards, if they are used at all, with due respect to their inherent and discriminatory distortions. Beyond this, you can urge institutions and publishers you work with to join signatories to the San Francisco Declaration of Research Assessment as a way to scale back the reliance on misleading measures of research quality.
Professors like to say that we are not producing widgets, and I would agree. Many bemoan the corporatization of the academy. I agree with this as well. Metrics can be a form of empowerment as they provide alternative means of assessment outside the purely subjective. But they reduce a great deal of complexity to one simple and misleading number. Keeping our academic autonomy and retaining the purpose and dignity of our profession means putting these metrics in their place.
* Gender Disparities in Student Evaluation Scores. Figure from Lisa Martin.
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President's Column
Welcome to our new Executive Director
I have said before that as an organization, the AAG punches well above its weight. It is among the healthiest of the academic membership associations and it has done wonders in reflecting and guiding geography. Much of the credit goes to the quality of the AAG staff, incredible people who churn out helpful materials, engage with us on social media, and put together a massive and delicious conference every spring. Heading the staff is the executive director. Since I have been a professional geographer, as a graduate student and faculty member, there have been only three executive directors: Robert Aangeenbrug, Ron Abler, and Doug Richardson. These capable individuals have provided remarkable stability and have propelled the organization forward. From when I first joined the AAG in the 1980s, we have tripled the number of members, quadrupled the annual meeting registrants, and vastly expanded our budget and operations.
Now our organization will be directed by Dr. Gary Langham. Gary will leave his position as Vice President and Chief Scientist at the National Audubon Society on August 15th to join us as the new AAG Executive Director. This works out wonderfully since the AAG follows the rhythms of the academic year as new officers and councilors begin on July 1st, regional meetings take place in the Fall, and everything culminates in the big annual meeting in the Spring. Gary will be here for all of this, aided by the capable AAG staff.
While I realize that the search process was laid out for you beforehand, it might help to provide a postscript to this detailed and successful journey. Over the years and thanks to the growth of the AAG, the Executive Director position has become quite complex; most academics would not be equipped to take this on from the start. We required someone who already managed large budgets, acquired new funds, oversaw several staff members, interacted with thousands of members, and was accustomed to the world of non-profit organizations.
The AAG retained the search firm, Storbeck-Pimentel, to flush out potential candidates for the position. A Search Committee was then established, led by past-president Glen MacDonald and including councilors and past presidents, to make decisions on each of the applicants. Storbeck-Pimentel consulted a wide range of members to gauge what the AAG was looking for in an Executive Director. They then contacted 239 individuals which yielded 57 active candidates. Of these candidates, the Search Committee chose 23 to be rigorously evaluated, and out of this pool, 10 candidates were selected for interviews. Finally four finalists were brought to Washington, DC to be interviewed both by members of the Search Committee and by the AAG Council. Demographic diversity was stressed throughout the search process. The initial 23 candidates included eight women and six people of color. The 10 semi-finalists included five women and three people of color. And our final pool had three men, one woman, and two people of color. The AAG Council met in a special session in mid-June to make the final selection and found Gary Langham to be the best candidate for the job. An informal offer was extended that very day.
Gary comes to us from the Audubon Society where he has been since 2007; Audubon is a vast member-driven organization with dozens of chapters. His PhD is in ecology, and he double majored in both English and Biology. One of the key aspects of Gary’s current job is preserving bird habitat and providing the necessary policy tools with which to accomplish this. Gary’s job has taken him around the world and he is most proud of his efforts to link how climate change affects bird habitats in North America.
What impressed the Council the most was the degree of innovation and energy Gary would bring to the association. He wants to invigorate AAG regional divisions, increase our targeting of HBCUs, get college students involved at an early stage, and make the AAG more attractive to non-academics. He sees the core mission of the association as looking after its members and providing the types of services that matter the most. At the same time, Gary is mindful of the need to grow strategically, through increased grant acquisition and further broadening of our geographical network.
The AAG has become the necessary organization for geography, not just in the United States but around the world. We demand an outstanding executive director. I think that you will agree, after seeing Gary in action, that the Search Committee and the AAG Council made the right choice.
Should we be worried? Or how to maintain and expand the number of geographers in our schools.
As geographers, we all know the value of geography. Right? It is a field that provides a unique perspective, an appreciation for particularity, an opportunity to synthesize. But as much as we affirm geography’s value to each other, we also need to look at how geography is perceived outside of our community.
In this regard, the last year or so has been sobering, at least for Geography in the United States. Geography degrees have been closed in someuniversities, including Boston University, whose Geography Ph.D. program did so well in the last National Research Council ratings. Geography has been threatened (but ultimately spared) at others, despite reorganization and faculty layoffs. Then, to add insult to injury, a recent report in Inside Higher Education (highlighting an even more precipitous drop in History) showed how the number of Geography majors had also declined in the last six years, falling about 7 percent. No matter our research excellence, our success in procuring funding, our prominence in public discussion – if geography loses its majors, the field as a whole is in peril. This was a point expressed many years ago in Ron Abler’s classic column “Five Steps to Oblivion.” Ignoring majors is a sure-fire path to program destruction and, as we know full well, we can never take geography’s position in the curriculum for granted.
So should we be worried? We should at least be guarded. The trends of major loss in the last few years are real, but there are other countervailing forces on which geographers should capitalize.
Compared to the other liberal arts, geography in the United States is a distinct underdog. We are the smallest of these traditional disciplines, just a bit under geology, physics and anthropology, and dwarfed by the likes of psychology and biology. Only 1 percent of all liberal arts majors specialize in geography. (By comparison, geography is squarely in the middle of the pack in the United Kingdom, comprising 5 percent of all liberal arts.) Geography has not been commonly taught in U.S. high schools. It is further hamstrung by its absence in most colleges and universities, relying on the larger state schools, some community colleges, a sprinkling of private colleges, and a very few private universities to provide the courses. Where geography is present, the departments tend to be small and most student majors arrive after their sophomore years.
Yet as a discipline, we punch far above our weight. Much of this is thanks to the AAG. Our membership of 12,500 rivals fields such as history, sociology, and political science. Our activities involve collaboration with geographers and other scientists around the world, many of whom look to American geography as a beacon, to the AAG as the one necessary organization, and to our annual meeting as the place to convene. About one-third of our membership is international, buoying our disciplinary footprint. Other strong organizations, like the American Geographical Society, the National Council for Geographic Education, and the Society of Women Geographers also help lay a foundation for geography outside the academy and in the schools.
A closer examination of the major numbers in the United States also shows that our recent decline may be a short-term phenomenon. Between 2007 and 2013, the number of geography majors grew 22 percent, and even with the decline in the last four years, we are still up nearly 10 percent over the last decade. But we may still look at how these recent trends could be reversed — a project that could involve seeing where the declines were sharpest and identifying possible areas of growth. (Liberal Arts as a whole has also suffered small declines). That we are in a better position in regard to majors than we were 11 years ago is a positive sign, but still worrisome.
One very encouraging sign is in the expansion of some of geography’s closest cognates — fields like meteorology, environmental studies, area studies, and the like. These are fields commonly folded within geography departments and so almost always can count as a “geography” major. The table below shows the most important of these:
Pursuing such strategies entails the teaching of geography by other means. Students want geographical knowledge, they gain this by taking classes in these close cognates — often with geography professors — and they come out with much greater exposure to geography than would have otherwise been the case. Some of these incorporations may be acknowledged by renaming and Five Steps to Oblivion; other times the department may keep its name and just promote its diversity of offerings. To be sure, some of the traditional quasi-geographical specializations such as landscape architecture and area studies have declined. But there has been an explosion in environmental studies and global studies, with more modest growth in some of the other close cognates. If geography departments can capture those majors, the path toward sustainability becomes much clearer. At my department for instance, we were able to create an environmental studies major precisely because there was nothing like this available on campus. As a result, we have tripled our “geography” major numbers within the last two years. Other departments may pursue other strategies. Middle Tennessee State University, for instance, has a vibrant Global Studies major.
The last point I want to make also has potential to be the greatest opportunity. Since its inception, the Advanced Placement Human Geography high school course has exploded. Thanks to geographers like past President Alec Murphy, David Lanegran, and others, we were able to create this AP course in the 1990s and it has continued to defy all expectations. Out of the 38 AP exams given, AP Human Geography ranks in 10th place. (Environmental Science ranks 13th). The most striking aspect is its growth. Human Geography has grown by about 450% since 2008, far ahead of any other subject. And all signs indicate that this expansion will continue, as AP Human moves into other parts of the country.
Unfortunately, this phenomenal growth has yet to translate into major gains in college majors. AP courses/tests should make a positive difference in later specialization. Whether they just confirm existing intentions or open up new possibilities is still in question. But some worry that they end up eating into introductory course offerings. But there can be no doubt that this is a city-sized opportunity available to us. We need to devise ways as a discipline to turn these high school learners into college majors. The AP Human Geography exam and other AP possibilities will be the subject for a future column.
So despite some reason to worry, longer-term trends in the last decade are still positive, some of our closest cognates are growing briskly, and the expansion of AP Human Geography has been nothing short of phenomenal. The long-term health of the discipline is not assured, but it is within reach. We must exploit our advantages.
If you have gotten this far, let me extend my gratitude to all of you for giving me the chance to serve as president of the American Association of Geographers. I am humbled in succeeding people like Glen MacDonald, Derek Alderman, and Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, not to mention all the luminaries who served before them. I look on these columns as an opportunity to shine light into some of the various features and problems of our discipline. Among these will be columns on creating a more inclusive academic culture, the internationalization of the AAG, the explosion of metrics in our discipline, publishing paradoxes, encouraging great writing, managing mental health, promoting opportunities beyond academia, and rethinking the regions. I hope that each column helps to further a dialogue, as there are rarely easy answers. We just need to keep trying. Please email me at dkaplan [at] kent [dot] edu with your thoughts.
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One of the most anticipated items when I began attending AAG meetings was the annual edited book that came in our packet. This would be a special volume dedicated to the city and region where the meeting was held. Within it would be chapters detailing all kinds of interesting aspects of the region, written by geographers with expertise and wisdom. I still have a large collection of these regional geographies on my book shelf. The AAG was poorer when we stopped producing this regional compendium and we need to bring it back.
About 18 years ago, one of my Masters students calmly mentioned that she had been undergoing a tremendous amount of anxiety, and had seen a doctor about it. I was floored! This particular student exemplified “no drama.” She was motoring through her Master’s thesis research and writing while effectively assisting me on one of my research projects. To think that Carol (not her real name) was suffering this sort of debilitating stress was a revelation. And then she said, “But Dave, everybody I know is suffering.”
In this brief letter, I describe some changes to our registration fees and meeting structure. I would also like to address the unfortunate overlap of our spring meeting with Passover and Good Friday.
Each year the AAG president helps to identify a few themes for the AAG Annual Conference. While any topic is accepted for presentation at the annual meeting and participants are encouraged to develop their own special sessions, themes encompass a few specific points of interest for our Annual Conference and are used to organize a series of sessions, to focus discussion, and to highlight key events during the conference.
For those of us still working with paper student evaluations, we receive our spring semester results during the summer. It is a time of mixed emotions for many of us. While I heard one lucky young professor describe opening up her student evaluations as tantamount to Christmas, I am probably not alone in likening it to Halloween, where the tricks far outnumber the treats! Too hard, too boring, does not provide enough guidelines or makeup opportunities, not what I expected—the list goes on and on for the types of complaints students can and will make anonymously. As professors and grad students, we have seen them all.
Now our organization will be directed by Dr. Gary Langham. Gary will leave his position as Vice President and Chief Scientist at the National Audubon Society on August 15th to join us as the new AAG Executive Director. This works out wonderfully since the AAG follows the rhythms of the academic year as new officers and councilors begin on July 1st, regional meetings take place in the Fall, and everything culminates in the big annual meeting in the Spring. Gary will be here for all of this, aided by the capable AAG staff.
As geographers, we all know the value of geography. Right? It is a field that provides a unique perspective, an appreciation for particularity, an opportunity to synthesize. But as much as we affirm geography’s value to each other, we also need to look at how geography is perceived outside of our community.
