Why the Waywardness of Academic Geography Matters

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | October 22, 2025 | Robert C. Thornett

[karpov]

For over 75 years, geography departments have been nearly nonexistent at so-called elite colleges in the United States. Most Ivy League schools, as well as Stanford and the University of Chicago, once had geography departments. Now, the only one with a geography department is Dartmouth. Having taught college geography for over eight years, I can attest that most American college students never take a geography course. They graduate without ever having to demonstrate that they know anything about the physical or cultural landscapes of other countries, let alone their own.

American geographic education took a massive step backward in the wake of World War II, when Harvard shut down its geography department in 1948 and most other U.S. colleges with geography departments followed suit. But while geography went out of style among the elites, since the 1980s it has made a major resurgence, especially in the land-grant universities, where greater emphases on energy, agriculture, and natural-resource management provide a demand for geographic knowledge.

However, with this ongoing expansion of geography in American higher education has come a shift away from the field’s proper foundation: the study of the regions of the earth. Geography is the yin to history’s yang. As Kant pointed out, these two fields are the broad, synthesizing fields that perceive empirical reality through complementary lenses, space and time. Geography explores places in space, history events in time. Each contains a substantial bit of the other: History textbooks are full of maps, and geography textbooks are full of histories of places. Just as the period is the fundamental organizing unit for packaging events in history, so the region is the fundamental unit for packaging places in geography.

[glennaro]

The study of history without proficiency in geography is a tough task, indeed ... especially when it comes to making sense of associated events when they occur in different locations. Cheers!

[sopo]

Weak ending to an interesting thesis. Mother Teresa leaves Macedonia to go to Calcutta? What a punch line about geography. Quoting Gandhi to close, weak; why not quote Sir Francis Drake? The author sounds caught between two worlds , so to speak, doesn’t seem to want to bring in the dead white men (though Gandhi was Caucasian) that advanced geography through their explorations and cartography over the centuries.

[redangus]

Again, probably another calculated attempt to keep people ignorant of the world they live in to make it easier to propagandize. It’s hard to understand history and geopolitics if don’t understand geography. I doubt that is unintentional.

[Buttons12]

I’ve seen some vintage geography textbooks, plus old editions of encyclopedias.
College today, they’re too scared to say anything whatsoever about cultures. Someone might be offended.
Same with a lot of comedy now.

[sauropod]

Review

[Lizavetta]

I remember taking a geography class in college with fondness. The teacher was a Louisiana gentleman and he made the class interesting because he tied the landscape and topography into the economic and political ... and how all of it contributed to the fate, good or bad, of the people who lived there.

I wish I could remember his name. Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in the 1980s.

[Lizavetta]

College today, they’re too scared to say anything whatsoever about cultures. Someone might be offended.

Good point.

[Sirius Lee]

LSO was once respectable. So was Notre Dame. Even me Alma Zmata. Generations ago.