Reinhardt’s VPAA Mark Roberts informs us that the university has a new trustee: Reinhardt graduate Jerome Dobson, Professor Emeritus at University of Kansas and former President of the American Geographical Society. Roberts draws our attention to a speech of Dobson’s entitled “Geography: Use it or Lose it,” which he gave in DC in 2010:

Geography is to space what history is to time, and I think very few people think of it that way. Geography is a spatial way of thinking, a science with distinctive methods and tools, a body of knowledge about places, a set of information technologies, old and new, contrary to a lot of ‑‑ a lot of people think it’s just a new thing we have GIS, but geography has always led in technology, from Eratosthenes measuring the earth on forward. People think of it as place-name geography, but if you look at the deeper parts of the iceberg, spatial thinking, place-based research, scientific integration, GIS and so on, not just place-name geography.

Geography is about understanding people and places and how real world places function in a viscerally organic sense. It’s about understanding spatial distributions and interpreting what they mean. If we look at the specialties of American geographers, a lot of people outside geography think of it as a physical discipline, but as you see here only 10 percent of geographers claim a physical specialty. Far more, about well over half, claim some sort of human geography as a specialty. And, one-fifth, more than one-fifth, claim geographic information science as a specialty.

Interesting stuff. Reinhardt does not have a geography program but we in history are proud to sponsor HIS 210: World Geography. Perhaps the new trustee will inspire us to deepen our course offerings in this area.