Geography has experienced a decline in enrollments nationally since the early
to mid 1990s, going from ~4,000 bachelor's degrees granted annually to ~3,500
by 2000.
PPT 2 Data
from the Chancellor's Office of the California State University System show a
parallel decline from a 1992 peak of geography major enrollments of nearly
1,200 to 829 by 2002. There has been a partial comeback, however, with CSU
geography major fall enrollments rebounding to about 910 in F/05.
PPT 3 At
my institution, Cal State Long Beach, fall major enrollments dropped even more
sharply, from 107 majors in 2000 down to 60 by F/00. Since then, however, our
majors have nearly doubled to 116 majors as of F/05. We have rather suddenly
found ourselves the largest undergraduate geography major in the CSU.
PPT 4 Our
share of geography enrollments in the CSU shows similar trends, dropping to 7%
of all CSU geography majors by F/2000 but then rebounding sharply up to 13% of
the system's geography majors by F/05. Indeed, two-thirds of the systemwide
growth in undergraduate geography majors took place on our campus.
PPT 5 a
possible clue is offered by examination of our students' ethnic diversity. We
have been able to attract a new group of students. Generally under a quarter
of our reduced number of majors were minority students through the late 1990s
and early years of this decade. This was puzzling to us, since CSULB is a
minority-dominated campus. Since F/02, however, our major has increased
substantially in number and markedly in ethnic diversity, such that over a
third of our greatly increased majors are now ethnic minority students. The
expanded number of both traditional white students and the even more dramatic
growth in underrepresented students suggest that our major has found a healthy
new direction for growth.
PPT 6
Another sign of the health of our department is our master's degree program.
Graduate enrollments have held steady at roughly 50 graduate students under
active supervision for the last decade. There has been a shift in the
composition of our incoming graduate classes, however. We no longer depend
nearly exclusively on our own undergraduate students to stay on as graduate
students with us. The incoming class of F/05 of 12 students was evenly split
among out-of-state students, UC students, and CSU students. This broadening
of source programs promotes a stable, healthy graduate program.
Our faculty lines have grown from about 9 in 1999 to 12 today and 14 in F/07.
Our major growth is being accompanied by faculty line growth. Our searches
are attracting phenomenal new faculty, as a quick examination of a few faculty
distinctions makes clear: A Glenda Laws Award recipient (Vincent Del Casino),
a Nystrom finalist (Christine Jocoy), a Commonwealth Scholar (Deborah Thien),
two Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral
fellows (Bipasha Baruah and Deborah Thien), and a visiting Fulbright Scholar
(Thomas Blaschke) in F/06! The result is that our research productivity per
year has exploded 500-700% since 1999. The Department's faculty are very
active in applying for and often receive extramural funding from such sources
as NSF, NASA, the National Park Service, METRANS, and many local
municipalities and agencies. We are able to provide modest support for
several graduate and undergraduate students, which may be a factor in
attracting more of them. Grant indirect is shared quite reasonably on our
campus, giving PIs and the Department quite a bit of discretionary resources
for our students and professional projects.
PPT 7
We have often tried to figure out what it is, exactly, that we're doing, so
that we can keep on doing whatever it is. Among the points brought up in
these discussions is the very civil culture that this department has enjoyed
for several decades. We are not factionalized by the kind of geography we do
or our ages or genders or whatever axes have produced tension in other
programs we know of. The faculty, new and old, are quite aware of this
unusual quality and everyone is interested in perpetuating it.
We try to create an environment that students enjoy. They have set up a
bistro outside our computer labs, which has become quite a hangout. We have
effectively mentored the student club. Our internship program holds two or
three "jobs in geography" colloquia every semester for our largely job-centric
students. We actively look for resources to support students and their
activities and have built up a pool of indirect to do so. We really work on
cultivating faculty and students at the "feeder schools." And I spend a lot
of time publicizing all this, especially through the web, campus publications,
and e-mail.
At this point, I'd like to focus on just three of these health-promoting
factors. These are student-centeredness, diversity, and the feeder schools.
PPT 8
Two particularly salient aspects of our student-centered activities are
advising and the student club. On our campus, we pretty much have to have one
designated advisor who has to go through very time-consuming trainings to use
our PeopleSoft databases. This is Paul Laris, who has interests in all three
aspects of geography: technical, physical, and human. He advises the club
actively. He lives nearby and is highly available to students and works to
make our bewildering bureaucracy manageable. He has come up with these "five
step" programs to complete the B.A. or certificates, actively encourages
Environmental Science and Policy, Economics, and International Studies
students to double-major in Geography. We worked out an idealized GE pathway
that would reonforce geography preparation for those few students who declare
early. We also made a presentation to Academic Advising, which handles
undeclared major advising on our campus. They said we were the first
department ever to seek them out and give them useful materials and that they
would encourage students to take our GE courses (in fact, one class went from
120 expected students to 225, much to the surprise of the instructor).
The student club has blossomed in the last three years or so. Paul and I
stress to the student leaders how important it is to identify promising
juniors and get them into leadership positions. The club runs Geography
Awareness Week/GIS Day events (they got Associated Student monies to bring in
a band this November), does field trips, cultural nights out, and their
educational wine-tasting fundraisers for students going to do a
mini-international exchange to Austria. They have even created a needs-based
scholarship to help their peers going through rough patches!
PPT 9
Diversity is a major initiative of the department. In the Presidential
Plenary this afternoon, I'll discuss the Geoscience Diversity Enhancement
Program, an NSF-funded partnership among Geography, Geology, and Archaeology
at CSULB and several local community colleges and high schools. This program
ran during the summers of 2002 through 2004, and the upsurge in the diversity
of the geography major cooncided and followed on the GDEP summers. More than
the few majors we picked up from among the 29 student participants in GDEP, we
as faculty learned a lot better the kinds of challenges poorer and minority
students face in their daily lives as they seek higher education, and we think
the most lasting impact of GDEP will be the alteration of our own paedagogy
and way we relate to students.
PPT 10
One of our most active concerns is deepening ties with the many community
colleges in Southern California. Geography is typically a late-bloomer major,
and we at CSULB are quite dependent on whatever is going on at the community
colleges. Very importantly, too, underrepresented students are
disproportionately likely to start and perhaps confine their collegiate
ambitions to the community colleges. We are trying to build a Southern
California geography community in which community college geographers are full
and active partners, helping us reach out to potential majors and encouraging
minority students to hang in there and aspire to a bachelor's degree,
hopefully in geography. Some of the ways we do this include GDEP and
Geography Awareness Week/GIS Day. We invite all Southern California community
college faculty to these events and we host a community college geography
luncheon during the week. Our faculty have made themselves available as guest
speakers for community college and K-12 events promoting geography, and a few
have taken us up on it. Since the CSU depend so much on adjunct faculty, I
have been able to recruit three tenured community college faculty to
"moonlight" at The Beach. The daily or weekly contact this generates among
all our programs has helped us dovetail our curricula, share educational
materials, and head off misunderstandings over CSU articulation policy.
PPT 11
So, to the extent that one institution's experiences can be generalized to
others who may be facing different problems and opportunities, it is possible
for a geography department to become healthy. Our health seems to reflect the
following factors:
an open and non-factionalized culture, a research-active faculty who involve
graduate students and undergraduates in their research activities and try to
find funding for them, a respectful attention to the community colleges in the
region on whom we depend for transfer majors and access to a more diverse pool
of students, a culture of interdepartmental collaborations as with GDEP that
has headed off much of the inherent rivalry among departments and connected us
with feeder schools, and cultivating the general education advisors on our
campus.
PPT 12
