Who Are We? Redefining the Academic Community

Abstract

This presidential address focuses on how community intertwines with geography. On one hand, geography is the discipline that studies the community as it exists in place. Geography itself is a community—an intellectual, social, and cultural community—that must be supported and expanded. Geography’s strength has been in upholding this community. Today, the discipline of geography suffers from some real challenges. The number of majors has recently declined, and more programs have closed than have opened in recent years. Improving our geographic community can be accomplished through four efforts. First, we need to improve our institutional diversity. Second, we must increase our workforce diversity. Third, we need to attend to expanding our discipline to first-generation students. Finally, we must harness the growth of Advanced Placement Human Geography to improve the status of geography in higher education. These and other efforts will go a long way in expanding the community of geography and in reinvigorating geography as a discipline.

这篇主席演讲, 关注了社区如何与地理学紧密关联。地理学是研究社区的学科。地理学本身就是一个社区——一个知识、社会和文化的社区, 必须得到支持和扩大。地理学的优势在于维护这个社区。当前, 地理学科面临着真正的挑战。近来, 地理专业学生数量下降, 专业取消数量超过新开设数量。可以通过四项努力来改善我们的地理学社区。首先, 需要提高我们的机构多样性。其次, 必须增加劳动力多样性。第三, 需要将我们的学科扩展到“第一代大学生”。最后, 必须借助于人文地理学大学先修课程（AP）的发展, 提高地理学在高等教育中的地位。上述和其它措施能扩大地理学社区、振兴地理学科。

Este discurso presidencial se enfoca sobre el modo como la comunidad se entrelaza con la geografía. Por una parte, la geografía es la disciplina que estudia la comunidad tal como existe en un lugar. La propia geografía es una comunidad –una comunidad intelectual, social y cultural– que debe ser apoyada y expandida. La fortaleza de la geografía ha consistido en conservar esta comunidad profesional. Hoy, la disciplina de la geografía tiene que enfrentar algunos retos reales. El número de quienes cursan la especialización ha declinado recientemente, y han sido cerrados más programas de geografía de los que se han abierto en los últimos años. El mejoramiento de nuestra comunidad geográfica puede lograrse por medio de cuatro esfuerzos. Primero, necesitamos mejorar nuestra diversidad institucional. Segundo, debemos incrementar la diversidad en nuestra fuerza de trabajo. En tercer lugar, debemos ocuparnos de expandir nuestra disciplina a los estudiantes de primera generación. Y, por último, cuarto, debemos tomar ventaja del crecimiento de los programas de Geografía Humana de Nivel Avanzado para mejorar el estatus de la geografía en la educación superior. Estos y otros esfuerzos contribuirán en gran medida a ampliar la comunidad de la geografía y a revitalizar la geografía como disciplina.

关键词:

• 专业学生
• 学科
• 机构
• 专业

Palabras clave:

• disciplina
• especializaciones académicas
• instituciones
• programas

Key Words:

• academic majors
• discipline
• institutions
• programs

I want to begin this article by expressing how honored I was to serve as president of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). Most AAG presidents have come from large flagship universities. As someone from a smaller, non-land-grant university (Kent State University) in Ohio, this was a position I never expected to attain. I was flabbergasted when I was nominated, and even more stunned when I was elected. It was and is the biggest milestone of my professional career.

In fact, my tenure as president was marked by several such milestones. I was fortunate to bring in a new Executive Director, Dr. Gary Langham, to head the AAG. Unfortunately, I also had to contend with the emergence of COVID-19. COVID-19 upended the world and resulted in the first AAG meeting to be canceled in more than seventy years. In retrospect it all makes sense now, but at the time it was a difficult decision (Kaplan and Langham 2022). My eight months as president before the virus became widespread provided a fantastic opportunity to meet with geographers all around the country, to work with the AAG Council (the governing organization within the AAG) on new initiatives, and to get to know the amazing AAG staff. In this period, we were able to establish an international councilor, new undergraduate awards, more help to the regions, and a reconfiguration of the national meeting, among many other initiatives.

A past-presidential address is challenging because we must say something that has not been said before, that reflects geography as a field of study and as a discipline. I knew the power of the past presidents’ speeches from my time as a doctoral student when I looked back at a speech given by past president Glenn Trewartha (1953) on the importance of population geography. In researching my address, I consulted what past presidents of the AAG had already said. Recent presidents have spoken eloquently of topics such as human rights (Beach 2022), climate change (Winkler 2016; MacDonald 2020), globalization (Sheppard 2015), and race (Kobayashi 2014). Some have focused on how best to position geography in the world, through education (Bednarz 2017), internationalization (Pandit 2009), storytelling (Alderman 2019), and by fostering interdisciplinarity (Baerwald 2010). Ken Foote’s (2012) speech on the importance of building community resonated particularly strongly with me. Fortunately, through the magic of YouTube, I was able to watch Ken’s speech again and will use my address to expand and extend many of the things that Ken considered eleven years ago.

Community is a familiar theme for me. Each of my presidential columns was considered as part of a theme in which community was front and center. The columns were also meant to be a warning on the future of geography. It pains me to say this, but after a period of strong growth we are now at a more complicated moment in the history of our discipline. Some of the recent trends in geography, at least within the United States, have not been favorable.

The object of this presidential address is to argue that “community” holds the answers to our current dilemma. There is a strong and enduring relationship between geography and community. On one hand, communities are places, and geography is the discipline to study community as it exists in place. Biogeographers might study plant communities, whereas social geographers study communities of people as they operate in space and place, but geography itself is a community—an intellectual, social, and cultural community. This community of geography must be built and expanded.

Community as Place

Geography is among the disciplines most likely to study communities as places. This reflects our standing as a field most concerned about places and the denizens and activities found within those places. Like so many of you reading this address, I became interested in geography because I wanted to know what was going on at all these different dots that I could see on a map. The map was the canvas displaying all possibilities, whether faraway countries on a world map or nearby towns and natural features on a local map.

It was in the early attention to increasing urbanization and what its consequences were that several urban sociologists began to examine community as a phenomenon to be studied. Tönnies ([1887] 2004) spoke about Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Simmel ([1903] 1950) saw urban life as alienating community, and Park ([1925] 1967) discovered so-called natural communities within some of the largest metropolises.

My interest in community was further sparked by some of the community studies literature, again marked by classics such as Middletown (Lynd and Lynd 1929), Urban Villagers (Gans [1963] 1982), and Akenfield (Blythe 1969). These studies truly dove into the dynamic relationships of people, nearly always contained within a singular space.

As a geographer I came to appreciate the value of a discipline that built on the uniqueness of places, seeing each place as composed of particular sets of relationships. This so-called idiographic approach lost favor in the mid-twentieth century, especially with the desire of geographers to develop more universal spatial laws. It regained respect, though, as “place” was placed once again at the forefront in the 1980s and 1990s (Agnew 1987).

After all, what is place but a means by which to express how a singular location constitutes a specific combination of factors, which cannot be replicated anywhere else? No one place is exactly like another. To live within a “placed” world is to experience geographical distinctions. A “placeless” world, by contrast, has little to distinguish it. Especially with globalization and technology, we might feel we live within a world that is increasingly placeless. Every place feels the same and there is no “there” there. Placelessness connotes a lack of rootedness. Elements of a placeless landscape can shift interchangeably from one location to another. People within such a landscape have no sense of belonging.

When the late Yi-Fu Tuan began writing about place, he incorporated the notion of a “sense of place” (Tuan 1975). In this regard, a person’s attachment to a place has to do with the web of experiences, awareness, and emotions connected to that place. It is difficult to have a sense of place when none of these items are present. For many people, though, the sense of place comes out as a personal orientation to a place. When we say rootedness, we mean that there is some sort of memory tying us to this location. It can be an everyday sort of memory, such as the sense of place in one’s daily shopping rounds, or it can be an intense memory of an activity that changed your life, such as the place where you met your future wife. If no such memories exist, this might be a technical place but there will be no sense of place.

How is it that “place” conflates with community? Certainly, a community conjures much warmer tones, like calling a house a home. There are some practical significations in this terminology, however. A place can be depopulated. A community—at least in the social sense—is always composed of people. A place can be a static layering of attributes in one location. A community suggests the dynamic interweaving of numerous lives. A place contains within it many different attributes. A community is not a container, but describes the interactions and connections between people. Place could be blandly neutral. Community brings forth a distinct feeling. Being part of a community within a place is far different from simply residing within a place. As geographers, we should work on our engagements with our local communities.

It is the interplay of place and community that many urbanists have discussed and how much the physical contours of a place can affect the sense of community. I teach urban planning and have done some research in this area, and one of the major currents of the past few decades has been attending to how urban form affects social interaction. Some urban forms—often conceived as the pinnacle of soulless suburbia, with ranch houses, McMansions, meaningless streets, and cul-de-sacs—suggest a place devoid of real community. They looked to the famous urban planner, Jane Jacobs (1961), who started off her most famous book, The Death and Life of American Cities, by talking about how places had become cultures of “monotony, sterility, and vulgarity” (7). As places had changed physically, they also changed socially and emotionally.

One of the biggest problems with urban planners, as Jacobs and others saw it, was that they reconfigured places without talking to those who lived there. To that end, I am especially heartened to see the development of the Community Geographies Collaborative (2023). The focus of this new AAG group is to do “community geography” by working with people in places near and far. I come from a place—Kent, Ohio—where the relationships between the university and the city were shattered by the events of 1970. Since I have lived in Kent—twenty-eight years and counting—there has been a strong and mostly successful effort to reknit these relationships and to partner with local residents and businesses. The result is a much better environment for all involved.

Social Communities

The other broad sense of community begins as a group of people who share something in common. A social group could be any division of the population marked off by some social indicator. For example, a social group can be defined by relative income. Those living under the poverty line represent one social group, whereas those with incomes over $500,000 a year represent another. We can create social groups out of all manner of criteria. Yet it would be hard to consider these social groups true communities. Simply describing a social group does not make it so. People might be placed within categories but have no sense of a shared identity or a shared purpose.

A community, on the other hand, consists of people engaged in a common cause, brought together by their common identity. No community can simply be imposed from the outside. Instead, community must be formed by the community members themselves. It can be based on shared identity, a shared purpose, or in the simple and continued engagement of people over time, as in a group of colleagues or friends (see McMillan and Chavis [1986] for a comprehensive discussion of relational community attributes).

For a true community to occur there must be a sense of belonging with one another, of some sort of interaction between those who belong to the group. A community of people who live in poverty can only exist if there is some sort of connection between them, perhaps motivated by a call to action. Otherwise, it is just individuals sharing an attribute.

This does not mean that members of this community must know each other individually. Nations are one example of a large community composed of people who largely do not know one another, but who share a common identity, some sense of shared purpose (particularly under a threat), and a sense of belonging. A community could be experienced in a relatively shallow way, but the true aspiration is that this community fulfills the deepest human desire—the desire not to be alone. It fulfills these psychological needs, guarding against a sense of alienation, of anomie.

Beyond cultural, economic, or place-based considerations, there are communities that could be defined by their practices. Such so-called communities of practice are “groups of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn to do it better as they interact regularly” (Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner 2015). This is what defines an academic community as well, especially one focused around a field of study (Bowman 2001). It distinguishes between a mere occupational category where there is no sense of shared purpose to a group fostered by dialogue, collaboration, and conferences.

This does not mean that everybody is engaging with everybody else all the time, but it does mean that there is a sense of belonging bolstered by a true ecology of interconnections. If someone does not feel a part of that ecology—if they are drifting alone—then they do not feel part of the community.

Geographical Communities

The importance of how geographers uncover community on the ground is accompanied by the significance of geography itself as a community. As geographers, we all have an “origin story” for how we discovered geography. Perhaps for those reading this address, you realized that geography was a field of study in high school. More likely this revelation occurred in college or even after college.

On assuming your identity as a geographer, you hopefully understood that you were in more than just an academic discipline. You were in fact in a community, and you could maintain this sense of community by studying and working with fellow geographers. Everybody’s experience is different, but I found that my love for geography was sometimes a lonely pursuit. Once I found out a way to identify it as a subject, it might have seemed odd and a bit out of step. People sometimes ridiculed this interest because they themselves had no familiarity with the field. When I found a community of geographers, though, I recognized that we were all united by our appreciation for this wonderful discipline that arches across so many topics but is always anchored in the devotion to space and place.

These communities that we uncover provide a salve and inspiration. For me, it began when I entered graduate school at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. There I was with about sixty grad students, a couple of dozen new, just like me, and some sixteen professors—all of whom were geographers!

Not much later I came across the much larger community of geographers as represented at the Association of American Geographers, as it was called at the time. I had never before truly encountered a professional organization so this was a first-time experience for me. In my first year a whole bunch of us from the department took one of those big conversion vans and drove it straight from Madison, Wisconsin, to Washington, DC, a distance that spanned some twenty hours.

When I got to DC, I was overwhelmed: so many people—and they were all geographers! It was like a city of geographers, occupying an entire hotel. This was when 2,707 people went to the annual convention, about half the total AAG membership at the time. It was well over 75 percent men, all dressed up in suits, slacks, loud sport jackets, and ties.

There are now over 10,000 members and this year half of them—about 4,500 people—attended the 2023 annual meeting, with another 1,500 attending virtually. Before the pandemic, more than 8,000 people routinely attended the national meeting. We will see what happens moving forward. The pandemic might have permanently altered some people’s willingness to travel, and the AAG has been proactive in offering more virtual options. I expect annual meeting numbers will continue to grow as the pandemic (hopefully) recedes into the background.

Beyond its greater size, the annual meeting differs from what it used to be. Attendees from more countries are represented, there are greater (but still too low) members of historically underrepresented groups, and there is a large increase in the number and proportion of women. And at least from my sartorially challenged perspective, most people dress a lot more casually now than they did back then.

What has not changed is that these geography meetings represent a vivid expression of the community of geography—the coming together of all these people working from their own quirky corners of the world into one large assembly of people. This aspect defines our discipline in ways unique to all academic disciplines. Geographers operate as more than simply an academic group—a type of social group defined as people who practice geography in some form or another. To a great extent, geographers act as a community. Geography enjoys this quality beyond most other disciplines. The idea that geography is a community could also help us consider how to deal with the very real threats being imposed on geography right now.

The Fraying of the Geography Community

It is always surprising to me, as a U.S. geographer, to talk with geographers from other countries. In most of these places, geography is a common field of study, something students are acquainted with from their earlier years. Students can specialize in geography in high school and many go on to pursue geography in universities.

Unlike in the United States, where geography is always a “discovery” discipline, encountered late in a college career, elsewhere geography is a topic familiar to every student. Often students come into a university with a depth of geographical knowledge that would challenge almost all Americans. Everybody, everywhere has some familiarity with geography as a distinct field of study.

Not so in the United States, where geography has long been a distinct underdog. Only 1 percent of all liberal arts majors specialize in geography (Kaplan 2021). This is compared to the United Kingdom, where about 5 percent of liberal arts graduates are geographers (Kaplan 2021). Before the advent of Advanced Placement (AP) Human Geography, very few secondary schools taught geography as a distinct subject (Lambert and Solem 2017).

Even after high school, geography is found in only one out of every ten colleges and universities. It is not very common in private universities—which make up a large and prestigious component of the U.S. higher education landscape (Adams, Solis, and McKendry 2014). A few private colleges have solid geography departments, among them mainstays like Middlebury, Macalester, Dartmouth, and others. The number of doctoral programs in private universities is quite low, however, with Clark, Syracuse, and perhaps a few others with some geographical component.

Even when considering that geography in the United States is primarily a public university endeavor, the landscape is still scattered and far from robust. Most flagship state universities still carry geography programs and geography is found in several other public universities, both large and small. Yet, the disappearance of geography programs in universities has been disheartening. Today, we hear less about new startup programs and more about programs that are closing. In several cases, geography lives on as a major or minor or in the specializations of some of the faculty. Other geography programs have not been so lucky and have been eliminated altogether. Still other programs have been hobbled, with the crisis averted for the time being but with declining faculty and growing administrative pressure. Massive system restructurings, such as what is occurring in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, where six universities are being consolidated into two, can have huge implications for those programs considered to be more marginal.

Some of my own data and the data presented by the AAG in their State of Geography Report show a general growth in the number of majors from the 1980s until 2012 (AAG 2022). Since then, though, the number of majors has declined over 17 percent in just ten years! No matter our research excellence, our success in procuring funding, or our prominence in public discussion, if geography loses its majors, the field as a whole is in peril.

We cannot afford to live with a declining pool of geography majors. There is no fundamental reason why geography should not be a vital and growing discipline throughout the country. We teach students about the connections between the human and natural worlds. We provide them with an exceptional skill base in the types of things companies need. Done right, geography is a discipline that teaches literacy, numeracy, and graphicacy. Students coming out of a geography program have learned the value of critical thinking but also have enough applied knowledge to be valuable to any employer.

The 2020–2022 COVID-19 pandemic and consequent closure of places and contacts showed just how important these elements were in creating communities. At the time, we tried to build virtual communities, and they had some advantages in terms of accessibility and cost. I am glad they remain as another option. For many, though, these have been a poor substitute for physicality, proximity, and fostering our sense of belonging.

The threat to geography, made manifest in the closure of departments across the country and the dismantling of geography, is a blow to our bonds of community. We need to think of ways to expand the community of geography, and we need to commit to implementing these strategies as much as possible.

Expanding the Community of Geography

The way we can resume a position of growth and of vibrancy rests on the recognition of geography as a community and in the rebuilding of the community of geography at two distinct scales. The first scale would be that of the discipline, represented specifically by the AAG but also by the American Geographical Society, the National Council on Geographical Education, and other groups charged with advancing geography as a whole (Kaplan 2023). It is within these groups that we must work to expand our community in tangible ways.

Institutional Diversity

Perhaps the main thrust of my interest lies in promoting more institutional inclusion. As president, I wrote a column on academic inequality (Kaplan 2020). We know there is a privileged class of academics who reap benefits of connection, resources, and much smaller teaching loads (Ray 2018; McGreevy 2019). They are valued members of the association, but it is too easy to overlook geographers who do not have these positions. Smaller departments are important and often it is these places that expend time on undergraduates, bringing them to their first conferences at regional meetings and often sharing research experiences with them.

Community colleges are also critical. We have more than seventy-five community colleges in the United States that offer an associate’s degree in geography. Not only are most undergraduate students enrolled in public two-year institutions, but undergraduates from poorer backgrounds are much more likely to attend community colleges. African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos also have higher representation at two-year colleges (Ginder et al. 2019). Adams, Solis, and McKendry (2014) reported that community colleges accounted for about half of Latino enrollments in 2008. Beyond community colleges, we should look to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) as well as Tribal colleges. These, too, are intrinsic aspects of our geography universe. As we welcome geographers from all institutional backgrounds, we also expand our demographic diversity.

Stand-alone geographers keep geography going in many places—even in some states where geography would never otherwise exist. Especially with waves of mergers and closures of geography departments, we might see more geographers working in colleges where they alone bring geographic knowledge to students and lay the groundwork for building up geography programs if given the opportunity.

The AAG has recognized institutional diversity in key ways (Shabram and Housel 2021). There are affinity groups for stand-alone geographers and community college professors. There is a program excellence award that is reserved for community colleges every third year. There are special travel grants and an effort to diversify AAG Committees.

As with all aspects of increasing diversity, though, this is a continuous challenge. There are a few standout geographers teaching at HBCUs and I love to see this sort of representation, especially in institutions that would not otherwise have any geography. But we need to grow geography at HBCUs, Hispanic-serving institutions, community colleges, and everywhere we can find an opportunity. AAG awards, including the classes of fellows, should make efforts to include geographers who are not at doctoral-granting institutions. Institutional diversity should always be considered in the composition of editorial boards in AAG journals. The last time I checked, whereas professors who teach at non-PhD programs make up well over 50 percent of membership, they constitute only 20 percent of all AAG editorial boards (Kaplan 2020). We need to show how we value geographers at all institutions by our representation and by our actions.

Workforce Diversity

Another way to expand our community lies in reaching out beyond the academy. Many professors are inculcated in the aspirational goals of a tenure-track job. Graduate school is viewed as an apprenticeship to this singular vocation. We advisors are remarkably good at instilling geographical skills in our students. We are not so good at showing them how to go beyond the world of colleges and universities. Many of us marched straight into academic jobs after earning our PhDs. University life is all we really know.

Most of our students, though, will not go into academic careers. Most talented undergraduates find themselves in the workforce right after college and our job should be to get them the right job. Most of our master’s students are not practicing to be PhD students. Many want to use their additional geographic knowledge to find meaningful work in private businesses, government agencies, nonprofits, or K–12 education. And the PhD—the final degree on the academic ladder—is not just training for the professoriate. It is well known that there are about twice as many PhD recipients as there are academic jobs. In geography, we place a higher proportion of our PhD students in academic positions, but still the number of university jobs is far below the number of PhDs granted (Kaplan 2019).

Nonacademic careers are just as valuable as academic careers (Basalla and Debelius 2014). These jobs usually pay better, and the level of job satisfaction can be higher. Nonacademic positions present interesting challenges, stimulating colleagues, and more real-world accomplishments. Such jobs also bring geographical flexibility, allowing people to live with their partners, to stay in a place they like, and to not follow the holy academic grail across the country and the world.

The need for PhD-level training will continue to grow, even if the number of professor slots remains or grows stagnant. I do not believe that we produce too many PhD students in geography. We just need to open a wider world of possibilities and lose the academia-first mentality. Geography not only gives students the human and technical skills predicted to be more valuable—it synthesizes these skills. Past President Sarah Bednarz has described “Geography’s Secret Powers” as the thinking that harnesses spatial concepts, spatial representations, and reasoning as well as applying this knowledge to using various geospatial technologies (Bednarz 2019). These powers can be used throughout the workforce, bringing the value of geography to everybody.

Although we all probably know this in our hearts, we need to do better at communicating this in our associations. Beginning with students, finding ways to help those looking for nonacademic jobs would be a start. The AAG has been attentive to this issue, offering workshops at its annual meeting for those thinking of working in the public sector, the nonprofit world, and in the private sector.

From here, the challenge is to hold these geographers into our community. I recognize that attending a meeting is more difficult for geographers outside of academia. The incentives are not always there. It therefore behooves the geography associations to create more incentives, to open themselves up as places where geographers outside the academy can make connections and get useful information. I appreciate those specialty groups—notably the Business SG, Applied SG, and the Public/Private Affinity Group—that promote the nonacademic world.

In a membership survey, McKinley Advisors (2015) uncovered that about one quarter of all employed members come from either the government, private, or nonprofit sectors. Yet, the same survey also showed that AAG members in the nonacademic world were less likely to attend the annual meeting, and those who did attend did so less frequently. This is a solid base to work from but also a group that should be incentivized to attend national and regional meetings and to partake of many of the other services the AAG has to offer. If we confine our appeal to only academic-bound geographers, we risk limiting the reach of the AAG and cramping the opportunities for current AAG members.

The second scale is in what we can do to build up community within our own workplaces. How do we try to broaden community at the departmental level?

First-Generation Students

We need to understand that for many, the college world is filled with implicit rules and mores that many do not necessarily understand. Foote (2012) talked about making the implicit explicit and I agree entirely. Although there are several groups that are initially left out of the “club”—who did not receive the cultural memo—we should focus on first-generation students, those whose parents did not go to college and who might have scant understanding of what college entails. These are the types of students who might not know how to approach professors, who might find themselves without good study habits, and who feel intimidated in a classroom and frustrated by the university bureaucracy (Rubio et al. 2017; Evans et al. 2020).

I realize that most of us feel this explicitly. Certainly we want to help students! But how best to practice this? We need to think of the experience through the eyes of these students. How available are you? Do you make sure to respond to e-mails? I know so many students who e-mail a professor who just does not get back to them. A lot of first-generation students are too intimidated to try again. How much do you focus on the teaching and mentoring aspect of your job? Even at R1 universities, teaching should come first, and it is essential for us to have a special sensitivity to those less familiar with what a college education entails.

Bringing those not as comfortable with college life into our community is one of the best things we can do. It is a compassionate thing to do, but it is also a wise thing to do for the sake of the discipline. In my experience, geography often thrives in a university because it is known as the department with the most accessible, helpful professors. Building community for these new students—these potential geographers—aligns our moral code with practical interest.

Leveraging AP and Connecting to High Schools

For a long time, geography as its own field of study was nearly impossible to find in U.S. high schools. There were a few exceptions, but geography was folded in with earth sciences or history or social studies. I never had a high school geography course and neither did my children.

AP Human Geography changed all of this. For those of you who don’t know, AP courses allow high school students to gain college credit in a particular subject. AP Human Geography was developed in the 1990s by several people, including Past President Alexander Murphy and the late Don Zeigler (Lanegran and Zeigler 2016). Since then, it has become one of the top ten most popular AP subjects. AP Human Geography stands alone, prospering in schools across the country.

Given this spectacular growth in AP Human Geography, we would expect a similar trajectory for geography majors, with a five- to seven-year lag. This is not the case, though. The number of geography majors has remained flat even as the number of successful AP Human Geography test takers has zoomed. It makes sense for us to discover the reasons why and to try and correct these.

One concern has been that AP Human Geography cannibalizes college geography courses. Incoming students no longer need human geography as part of their distribution requirements. This might be true in some instances, but a larger issue is probably that most students take AP Human Geography in the ninth grade (Jones and Luna 2019). Because they take it so young—far younger than students in other AP courses—they are far removed from entering college.

What can geographers do about this? I suggest that we work to expand the community at the disciplinary and at the local level. Bringing more AP Human Geography teachers into the wider geography community is one place to start. The American Geographical Society invites a number of teachers to their annual symposium in New York (American Geographical Society 2023). The AAG has also initiated a meeting at the national conference, which could also be continued at regional conferences.

Beyond these initiatives, I propose taking steps at a smaller scale. All geography departments are situated among numerous high schools, several of which teach AP Human Geography. The high school closest to me just initiated an AP Human Geography course six years ago and it is quite popular. Yet the links between high school and geography departments do not exist. In an assessment of the AP Human Geography program after just five years, Gray et al. (2006) argued that colleges and universities should engage more with those students coming in with AP Human Geography credit. This is a promise as yet unfulfilled.

We must expand community by forging connections between the AP Human Geography teachers, the students in their class, and our departments. Perhaps we can invite teachers and students to come in for a Geography Awareness Day or ask to talk with their class about what a geography degree has to offer. Programs to connect AP Human Geography high school teachers with geography departments from local colleges and universities could be institutionalized. Because many colleges and universities gain their students from neighboring communities, this early intervention could yield benefits further down the line. Another option is to find those students who have completed AP Human Geography at your institution and invite them to come to departmental events and to consider becoming a major or a minor. These all might seem like small steps, but they could yield big dividends.

Conclusion: Redefining the Geographic Community

This presidential address was delivered at the 2023 AAG national meeting. It had been four years since the last in-person national meeting in 2019. When as president I participated in the decision to cancel the 2020 meeting, little did I realize that we would not get back in person for four long years.

Returning to an in-person annual meeting was truly fantastic for me. It was wonderful to reestablish bonds with so many of my colleagues, to meet up with old friends, to get to meet a whole lot of new people, and to talk in front of live audiences—seeing peoples’ reactions instead of a black box and a microphone on mute. I do realize that one can have community in a virtual space, but to me a physical community—whether it be a group of colleagues, a classroom, a research team, or a conference like this—is enormously valuable. I am grateful that many smaller in-person meetings took place in the last year and half, but this is the biggest and best of them all.

Every time I come to an AAG meeting, I realize that it is more than just a bunch of people interested in spatial relations, human and environmental interaction, the significance and meaning of place and landscape, and the dynamics of various earth processes. These meetings reaffirm that geography is also a true community made up of people communicating, collaborating, and convening at various places at various points in time.

Although I am excited to be past the pandemic, my concern is that the community of geography is getting a bit smaller, a bit frailer. Even before the pandemic, the hearty confidence of the early 2000s had dissipated somewhat. The numbers were not going in the direction we would have liked to see.

Now we are back. We have big challenges, but we also have one big asset. We know that geography is the discipline well positioned to meet the problems of today and to provide our students with strong preparation for tomorrow.

We know geography’s value, but how well do we communicate it? We know the importance of our geographical community, but how much do we want to expand it? Inclusion is a worthwhile endeavor, and my humble suggestion is to broaden the community of geography by broadening the population of geographers within the community. I have outlined four distinct ways in which we can do this at scales large and small. Surely, there are others. The trick is that we need to try. We absolutely must expand the community of geography if we want geography to survive the coming decades. I, for one, would like to see geography thrive. With persistence, commitment, and hope, I firmly believe that it will.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the wonderful AAG Staff, the AAG Council, the community of AAG Presidents, and all of the incredible geographers I have been lucky enough to know over the years. Thanks to Jennifer Cassidento and Brian King for helping me get this article to production.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributors

David H. Kaplan

DAVID H. KAPLAN is a Professor in the Department of Geography at Kent State University, Kent, OH 44240. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include nationalism, ethnic and racial segregation, urban and regional development, sustainable transportation, and the welfare of geography as a discipline.