President's Column

On Teaching, Mentoring, Balance, and Service

With summer almost here, I’m about to head into my last year as an academic. I’m “retiring” June 2022, although in truth I’ll work full time running my family’s winery and nonprofit, both built around the mission of providing training, jobs, and community for those with disabilities. As I transition from academics, Andrew and I are encountering many things we didn’t know were part of running a small business. This transition has prompted me to reflect on my transition from student to faculty member and, in turn, on how we prepare our graduate students for major life and career transitions.

In my case, I was fortunate. Judy Olson, my PhD advisor at Michigan State from 1996 to 1999, was and is amazing. Those three years were life-changing; Judy gave me one of the greatest gifts of my life—the courage to think. Her advising style was respectful and quietly demanding. She didn’t give answers, but provided guidance on how to discover them. Judy also instilled in her advisees the importance of service, something she epitomizes herself. I would not be AAG president if she hadn’t steered me in that direction. Judy and my department also gave me the opportunity to teach my own class, a large multi-section beast of a GIS class that was a major learning experience for students—and for me.

I was lucky to receive so much guidance, support, and preparation. Even so, I was thoroughly unprepared for life as a faculty member. Almost overnight, I went from being a student, focusing only on my own research, writing, and limited teaching to mentoring many students, teaching multiple classes, having much higher research expectations, juggling work-life balance in a whole new way, and… the service. So much service.

As I reflected on my major career transitions, I became curious about the student-faculty transition of others and whether those of us in PhD-granting programs are adequately preparing our students to launch into successful careers. So, I contacted multiple individuals in different positions and institutions (thank you all!) and asked them two questions: “What experience in your PhD program best prepared you for your career?” and “What didn’t you learn that you wish you had?”

Intriguingly, almost no one mentioned research training or field expertise in response to either question. Perhaps that’s because most people feel that their PhD program prepared them for future research and expected that to be the primary focus. Instead, answers focused on the preparedness (or non-preparedness) in two main areas: Teaching and Balance. I’ll provide some very brief highlights below. For a thoughtful and much deeper discussion of mentoring, see Kavita Pandit’s 2020 article Mentoring graduate students in an era of faculty career restructuring.

Teaching: While teaching loads vary by type of institution (e.g., teaching vs. research intensive, community college vs. 4-year college, etc.), all faculty I know teach. Moreover, even at a research-intensive institution, I spend more time talking with colleagues about teaching than I do about research. Likewise, I spend much more time working with graduate students than I do conducting literature reviews or launching new research. And, yet, most PhD students receive little to no formal teaching training, and many PhDs do not even experience teaching our own class until we become faculty members.  This almost inevitably leads to us dusting off our old syllabi and notes taken as students, frantically updating content-related notes right up until class starts and—only occasionally—emulating what we believed were the best practices to help students learn.  As one of my friends said: “I had no teaching experience. I mean none. The first time I taught was when I walked into a classroom of 80 students.”

There was one exception in the answers: a friend said he received an intense amount of formal pedagogic training. In summarizing his experience and its impact, he stated, “The professors were professional educators and the students were in-service teachers. Wow. I learned about pedagogy, good reflective teaching practice, and the language of assessment (student learning objectives, rubrics, normalizing grading expectations, etc.).”

What a show-off.

But… that really should be the standard we set for training the graduate students who will be the future educators in higher education.

Recent years—and particularly the Covid-year-of-teaching-remotely—have added a major issue that makes preparing graduate students for teaching far more complex. It’s true that I spend more time talking about teaching with my colleagues than I do about research. But, lately, I’ve spent even more time talking about issues of mental health and how to help guide students who experience issues across the spectrum of mild anxiety to catastrophic breakdowns. Thus, in addition to preparing our graduate students to use best learning practices, organize stimulating class materials, and prompt discussions, they now need to understand that their roles as teacher/mentors extend well beyond the basics of pedagogy. For many faculty, engaging with students as fellow humans brings challenges that can seem to blend roles of teacher and counselor. One of my friends summed up this challenge brilliantly: “Mental health training–this is, quite simply, the biggest challenge of my career. Teaching is care work, and yet we are rarely (if ever!) equipped with the adequate skills or support networks to deal with a range of mental health challenges in our students and colleagues.”

Let me be clear; I am NOT advocating that we be mental health professionals. But we must prepare our graduate students to know how to direct students with mental health issues to the appropriate people and centers and, equally important, how to avoid being personally ensnared in trying to solve those problems for the students.

Balance: Nearly everyone I know, including most of my friends and colleagues who responded to my email request for input, struggle with work-life balance and time management.

Achieving work-life balance has been a priority for me for about 10 years. I’m pretty much failing. But, here are the four things that I regularly try to accomplish:

  1. Set boundaries and work hours. I’ve actually been pretty good at this one because it involves cocktails. When Andrew first started as Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, I implemented evening cocktail hour.  This is the moment when work stops.
  2. Make time for yourself, family, and friends. I’m super bad at the first, pretty good at the second, and marginal at the third.
  3. Work a job you love. This is absolutely one of the most important things. Because, even if you have achieved work-life balance, if you don’t like your job, you’re not in equilibrium. And, if you do find yourself out of balance, at least the time demands are something that you enjoy.

Finally, 4. accept that there is no constant nor perfect work-life balance.

The last one is especially important for me to focus on as I sit here at 5am working on my column because there’s not enough time in the day.

Solutions: Ideally, the teaching and work-life issues are ones we should be addressing within our programs.  But in truth, most of us learn about these professional expectations and options by observing rather than through any formal training. Even observing is not effective in many cases. Many PhD programs are within R1 universities, but most PhD students get hired in other types of institutions; graduate students thus have little if any opportunity to learn about the kind of careers into which they will arrive. As a friend said, “Getting hired at a R1 and reproducing your advisor’s career is not possible or desirable for everyone.”

But we don’t have to do it all—there are external resources available. In fact, the AAG has taken a lead in providing something that is missing from most graduate programs: professional development.

Here’s where I will shamelessly plug an AAG program which a friend described as “miraculous and life-affirming.” The AAG’s Geography Faculty Development Alliance Early Career Workshop begins this week. If you miss it this year, be sure to put it on your calendar for next year. You will receive 5 days of formal training in pedagogy, professional development, and work-life balance.

The AAG also has taken a strong role in providing opportunities and training elsewhere. Both career workshops at annual and regional meetings and seminar series, such as the recent remote series organized by Ken Foote, provide excellent resources. In addition, more and more universities are providing workshops and resources on these topics for graduate students or new faculty; for example, the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon funds many of its new faculty to attend a year-long program run by the National Center for Faculty Diversity and Development. We thus don’t always have to develop these programs in our departments, but we should at a minimum make sure we are directing our graduate students or new faculty to these areas of training and learning.

On a different note: This is my last column as the virtual AAG President. Occasionally, people have asked me what it’s like being AAG President. Here are the top 3 Pros and Cons.

Pros:

  1. I have had a chance to get to know some amazing people, especially AAG staff.
  2. I have surprised myself in how much I enjoyed writing these columns (and working on them with Andrew, who is a phenomenal editor). They have been a turn from my usual guarded privacy.
  3. I have learned so much more about geography, geographers, and programs around the world. I’m very grateful for all of the experiences that people have shared with me (even when the experiences weren’t positive).

Cons:

  1. It didn’t help my time management or work-life balance. But, I loved the work.
  2. Email.
  3. As I’ve shared with some people, my biggest regret during my term as President is that I never met another AAG member face-to-face (excluding my husband and UO colleagues). What a strange year to be in this role. I VERY much look forward to seeing a lot of you at future meetings

With my last column words, I’d like to thank everyone for trusting me with this position. I especially want to thank Dave Kaplan for sharing so much knowledge, patience, and time with me. You are a good mentor, Dave.

It’s been an honor to serve as AAG President.

—Amy Lobben
AAG President and Professor at University of Oregon
lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0093

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.

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President's Column

Opening Up the Possibilities for an Accessible AAG

Many of us “went” to the AAG annual meeting last month, scheduled to take place in Seattle. Of course, we all attended virtually from separate isolated locations. I attended from my living room, my kitchen table, and my bedroom floor. Though just to insert some sense of the old days, for one committee meeting, I invited one of my University of Oregon colleagues (Alec Murphy) to the “Presidential Suite” (my kitchen table). I mistakenly thought the meeting was scheduled for later in the day and in my email invite, I offered to serve charcuterie and wine. Alec corrected my timing mistake and suggested that 8am might be too early for wine. I’m not so sure.

President Lobben opening up “the Presidental Suite” (her table at home, and a laptop) at AAG 2021.

Keeping with my personal mission and my conference theme of Access, now is a good time to discuss how we all can participate in enhancing inclusion of attendees with disabilities at our meetings, whether they be national, regional, or in our departments. And wouldn’t it be nice if we all could be disciples, each carrying this message forward into our sister organizations when we attend meetings in cognate disciplines? My hope is that this column will be useful going forward, in particular for people who are as yet less familiar with disability and other accessibility issues, not just at AAG but at other conferences as well.

Let me start with a bit of background. Over its lifetime, members of the Disability Specialty Group have spent significant time and effort working on issues of access, inclusion, and optimal integration at the AAG Annual Meetings. These efforts have included advocating for accommodations, sending advance scouts to venues, reporting on mobility strategies, and developing guidelines for conference assistants (for example, identifying an accessible route between the Marriott Wardman Park and the Omni Shoreham Hotels in Washington, D.C; it’s certainly not a direct one).

These efforts are beyond helpful—they are necessary for many of our members. But, these are not the sort of activities in which AAG Specialty Groups should have to engage in on their own. Imagine tasking members of the Water Resources Specialty Group with mapping access to safe drinking water at each conference.

As a result, AAG Council approved the creation of an Accessibility Task Force to ensure structural foregrounding of accessibility for all in all AAG’s operations. While I hope that this Task Force will continue to work on additional issues of accessibility, the initial charge was to address physical barriers to access and inclusion in the AAG. The first report has been drafted and submitted to Council and focuses on three issues: the website, Meridian Place, and the annual conference. AAG staff are already working on implementing nearly all of the report’s recommendations. Task Force members and I are thrilled by this progress and applaud our AAG leadership for taking these steps.

While I hope that this Task Force will continue to work on additional issues of accessibility, the initial charge was to address physical barriers to access and inclusion in the AAG.

But there are substantial barriers to access—socially situated barriers—that AAG cannot legislate or manage centrally. The social model of disability recognizes that disability manifests in cultural attitudes embedded in social practices. It’s the social model that suggests our society has to change to remove disabling barriers to access.

At the AAG annual meeting, many of these socially constructed barriers to access are created by other attendees. This is something that is in your control.

If you want to take small, individual and significant steps to foster inclusion, consider making the following social and behavioral changes outlined in the table below. This list is put together from a short survey I sent out to members of our Task Force and from my own personal experiences. It is by no means inclusive of all the measures we can take, and does not touch on other sets of measures that would help inclusion for other marginalized groups, but it is a starting point. And it is often taking that first step that opens us up to being more aware of how our actions affect others.

  • Don’t block ramps.
  • Adjust microphone heights as necessary.
  • Ensure equal integration in spaces (don’t relegate people with mobility devices to areas just for them or to the margins of the room).
  • Don’t move chairs around and block access corridors.
  • Avoid wearing scents.
  • Respect independence.
  • Don’t pet service animals unless invited to do so.
  • Talking louder doesn’t improve clarity. Be clearer rather than louder.
  • Don’t use flash photography or other strobe-like devices.
  • Avoid low lighting. It’s not safe for anyone, but especially unsafe for people who are blind or have low vision.
  • When communicating with someone using a sign language interpreter don’t talk to the interpreter, talk to the person with whom you’re communicating.

I want to spend some time contextualizing four important issues: judging others, bathrooms, language, and presentation guidelines.

Judging others: We all know that we’re not supposed to judge others based on appearance. And, yet we do. People who are visibly different from the majority of others that are present in a space are judged differently and assumed to be unable (or able). It’s an age-old adage: Don’t judge people by their appearances. This is especially true in the world of ability.

Bathrooms: I have to admit, I’m obsessed with bathrooms. They seem to be the battleground for so much of our collective history and ongoing exclusions – notably also around gender non-conformity and transgender rights in present times.

I also have deeply personal experiences navigating public toileting with my son with cognitive disabilities. Many of his and our experiences have not been easy, nor dignified. There have been many times when assisting my son has involved both of us finding ourselves on filthy public bathroom floors because public bathrooms are not designed for adults in his situation. Fortunately, my son can now use the family bathrooms or men’s bathrooms with Andrew (my husband). If Andrew isn’t with us, he and I go to the women’s bathroom. That often incites negative comments and critiques from others.

I’ve been asked not to use profanity in my columns. Too bad. If I could I’d be able to convey what I think about the judgement of others in the women’s bathroom in those circumstances.

But, my obsession with bathrooms isn’t really about the bathroom itself. It’s about how we have designed and legislated our bathrooms to control access to public space. From Victorian-era gender discrimination (which extended far beyond just public bathrooms), to Jim Crow racially segregated bathrooms (also extended far beyond bathroom spaces), to recent battles over transgender people’s rights to bathrooms (think North Carolina’s HB2 law), it seems that people only want to drop drawers in spaces that include people who only look like them or suspect they are like them.

The ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) ensures that public bathrooms provide accommodations for people with disabilities. But accommodation is not inclusion. ADA laws mandate separate spaces, including bathrooms (but also: building entrances, classrooms, hiring process, educational practices, work environments…). You’ve seen these bathroom spaces on campuses and in civic venues, airports, and conference settings–rows and rows of stalls for non-disabled people and merely one or two “disabled stalls.”

I’ve paid attention to our public bathrooms at the AAG annual meeting venues. Without exception, the gendered public bathrooms at our venues have been airport style; only one or two stalls for people with disabilities, but rows for non-disabled people.

Until our society implements universal design and access for our public bathrooms, in our future meetings, attendees can focus on two key things to ensure dignified access to bathrooms: 1. when both an accessible stall and standard stall are available, use the standard stall if you don’t need the accessible stall; and 2. avoid judging others for seemingly inappropriate use of an accessible stall; you cannot judge by appearance alone who needs to use those stalls.

Language. We must condemn the use of derogatory slurs about marginalized groups, and that includes words that are considered “metaphors” (e.g., “stupid” “crazy” “lame”) but really point to ableist thinking. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review provides a good overview on the use of ableist language.

I don’t think that most people are intentionally derogatory about or towards disability when they use such words. But, these are not used as words of praise, and their usage upholds stigma for many groups with cognitive impairments and/or mental health diagnoses.

For a handy guide on when it’s OK and not OK to words like those above, consult the chart below (which I developed from a chart from the Military Special Needs Network).

Adapted from the Military Special Needs Network

The National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/style-guide/) lists some excellent guidelines for referring to people with disabilities. To paraphrase:

  • Refer to a disability only when it’s relevant to a conversation and when knowledge of the disability is certain (e.g. not based on appearance alone).
  • Be sensitive to preferences for people-first or identify-first language. For example: “People who are blind…” rather than “Blind people…” This is intended to emphasize an individual’s personhood rather than their disability. However, there are critiques against the use of people-first language, including that it is often imposed by non-disabled people on disabled individuals and that the use of people-first language does not address the social injustices faced by the disability community. Also, many disabled people prefer identity-centric language because their disability is an important part of their identity and because it facilitates activism based on identity. In any case, people have the right to refer to themselves however they want.
  • When possible, ask the individual how they would like to be described.
  • Avoid made-up words like “diversability” and “handicapable” unless referring to them in a quote, a movement, or an organization.

None of us can be perfect and language preferences are subject to change. In fact, the very term “disabled” is contested as pejorative and biased. But we can all try to be better in how we use language around ability. Be open to self-correction.

Presentation Guidelines. One of the primary goals of our annual meeting is to exchange scholarly findings and ideas. We mostly use an audio/visual format for that sharing. Yet not everyone uptakes audio/visual presented information in the same way. Fortunately, presenters have a few options for enhancing the accessibility of their presentation and, happily, these guidelines by the APHA will improve the effectiveness of presentations more generally. Moderators and organizers must also stay aware of the needs of all of their presenters with regard to disabilities and access.

Going back to the inclusion diagram I referenced in the March column. We all decide what sort of Annual Meeting we want to host and attend. We can reject the medical models that suggest that disability is a personal problem and can only be ‘fixed’ by medical intervention. Instead, we can embrace universal access, and a space, a culture, and an annual meeting that moves beyond individual accommodation so as to be truly inclusive.

If you’re wondering which disability model you embrace, answer this question: What do you think needs curing, the body or the society?

Thank you to the Accessibility Task Force for their efforts in drafting the first report: Audrey Kobayashi, Deborah Metzel, Katherine Ericson, Sandy Wong, Hamish Robertson, and Leonor Vanik. Thank you to several others who shared their conference experience with me as I gathered input for the foundation of this column. And thank you to Sandy Wong, Diana Beljaars, and Stephanie Coen for their feedback on initial drafts of this column.

—Amy Lobben
AAG President and Professor at University of Oregon
lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0091

FURTHER INFORMATION

AAG 2021 sessions on disability, mental health, and access (for registrants’ view until May 11)

Accessibility Guidelines for Presenters, American Public Health Association

Disability Language Style Guide, National Center on Disability and Journalism

Knowledge base, including chart of definitions toward inclusion, Think Inclusive

Why You Need to Stop Using These Words and Phrases, Rakshitha Arni Ravishankar, Harvard Business Review

Military Special Needs Network and EFMP Coalition

Disability Justice, from Showing Up for Racial Justice, including these Google Docs:

Disability Home Manners,

Disability Justice, anti-ableism and access resources, and

Nuts and Bolts of Disability Access.

Is there a resource you’d recommend? Email us at newsletter [at] aag [dot] org.

 

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.

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You Baby

With summer almost here, I’m about to head into my last year as an academic. I’m “retiring” June 2022, although in truth I’ll work full time running my family’s winery and nonprofit, both built around the mission of providing training, jobs, and community for those with disabilities. As I transition from academics, Andrew and I are encountering many things we didn’t know were part of running a small business. This transition has prompted me to reflect on my transition from student to faculty member and, in turn, on how we prepare our graduate students for major life and career transitions.

In my case, I was fortunate. Judy Olson, my PhD advisor at Michigan State from 1996 to 1999, was and is amazing. Those three years were life-changing; Judy gave me one of the greatest gifts of my life—the courage to think. Her advising style was respectful and quietly demanding. She didn’t give answers, but provided guidance on how to discover them. Judy also instilled in her advisees the importance of service, something she epitomizes herself. I would not be AAG president if she hadn’t steered me in that direction. Judy and my department also gave me the opportunity to teach my own class, a large multi-section beast of a GIS class that was a major learning experience for students—and for me.

I was lucky to receive so much guidance, support, and preparation. Even so, I was thoroughly unprepared for life as a faculty member. Almost overnight, I went from being a student, focusing only on my own research, writing, and limited teaching to mentoring many students, teaching multiple classes, having much higher research expectations, juggling work-life balance in a whole new way, and… the service. So much service.

As I reflected on my major career transitions, I became curious about the student-faculty transition of others and whether those of us in PhD-granting programs are adequately preparing our students to launch into successful careers. So, I contacted multiple individuals in different positions and institutions (thank you all!) and asked them two questions: “What experience in your PhD program best prepared you for your career?” and “What didn’t you learn that you wish you had?”

Intriguingly, almost no one mentioned research training or field expertise in response to either question. Perhaps that’s because most people feel that their PhD program prepared them for future research and expected that to be the primary focus. Instead, answers focused on the preparedness (or non-preparedness) in two main areas: Teaching and Balance. I’ll provide some very brief highlights below. For a thoughtful and much deeper discussion of mentoring, see Kavita Pandit’s 2020 article Mentoring graduate students in an era of faculty career restructuring.

Teaching: While teaching loads vary by type of institution (e.g., teaching vs. research intensive, community college vs. 4-year college, etc.), all faculty I know teach. Moreover, even at a research-intensive institution, I spend more time talking with colleagues about teaching than I do about research. Likewise, I spend much more time working with graduate students than I do conducting literature reviews or launching new research. And, yet, most PhD students receive little to no formal teaching training, and many PhDs do not even experience teaching our own class until we become faculty members.  This almost inevitably leads to us dusting off our old syllabi and notes taken as students, frantically updating content-related notes right up until class starts and—only occasionally—emulating what we believed were the best practices to help students learn.  As one of my friends said: “I had no teaching experience. I mean none. The first time I taught was when I walked into a classroom of 80 students.”

There was one exception in the answers: a friend said he received an intense amount of formal pedagogic training. In summarizing his experience and its impact, he stated, “The professors were professional educators and the students were in-service teachers. Wow. I learned about pedagogy, good reflective teaching practice, and the language of assessment (student learning objectives, rubrics, normalizing grading expectations, etc.).”

What a show-off.

But… that really should be the standard we set for training the graduate students who will be the future educators in higher education.

Recent years—and particularly the Covid-year-of-teaching-remotely—have added a major issue that makes preparing graduate students for teaching far more complex. It’s true that I spend more time talking about teaching with my colleagues than I do about research. But, lately, I’ve spent even more time talking about issues of mental health and how to help guide students who experience issues across the spectrum of mild anxiety to catastrophic breakdowns. Thus, in addition to preparing our graduate students to use best learning practices, organize stimulating class materials, and prompt discussions, they now need to understand that their roles as teacher/mentors extend well beyond the basics of pedagogy. For many faculty, engaging with students as fellow humans brings challenges that can seem to blend roles of teacher and counselor. One of my friends summed up this challenge brilliantly: “Mental health training–this is, quite simply, the biggest challenge of my career. Teaching is care work, and yet we are rarely (if ever!) equipped with the adequate skills or support networks to deal with a range of mental health challenges in our students and colleagues.”

Let me be clear; I am NOT advocating that we be mental health professionals. But we must prepare our graduate students to know how to direct students with mental health issues to the appropriate people and centers and, equally important, how to avoid being personally ensnared in trying to solve those problems for the students.

Balance: Nearly everyone I know, including most of my friends and colleagues who responded to my email request for input, struggle with work-life balance and time management.

Achieving work-life balance has been a priority for me for about 10 years. I’m pretty much failing. But, here are the four things that I regularly try to accomplish:

  1. Set boundaries and work hours. I’ve actually been pretty good at this one because it involves cocktails. When Andrew first started as Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, I implemented evening cocktail hour.  This is the moment when work stops.
  2. Make time for yourself, family, and friends. I’m super bad at the first, pretty good at the second, and marginal at the third.
  3. Work a job you love. This is absolutely one of the most important things. Because, even if you have achieved work-life balance, if you don’t like your job, you’re not in equilibrium. And, if you do find yourself out of balance, at least the time demands are something that you enjoy.

Finally, 4. accept that there is no constant nor perfect work-life balance.

The last one is especially important for me to focus on as I sit here at 5am working on my column because there’s not enough time in the day.

Solutions: Ideally, the teaching and work-life issues are ones we should be addressing within our programs.  But in truth, most of us learn about these professional expectations and options by observing rather than through any formal training. Even observing is not effective in many cases. Many PhD programs are within R1 universities, but most PhD students get hired in other types of institutions; graduate students thus have little if any opportunity to learn about the kind of careers into which they will arrive. As a friend said, “Getting hired at a R1 and reproducing your advisor’s career is not possible or desirable for everyone.”

But we don’t have to do it all—there are external resources available. In fact, the AAG has taken a lead in providing something that is missing from most graduate programs: professional development.

Here’s where I will shamelessly plug an AAG program which a friend described as “miraculous and life-affirming.” The AAG’s Geography Faculty Development Alliance Early Career Workshop begins this week. If you miss it this year, be sure to put it on your calendar for next year. You will receive 5 days of formal training in pedagogy, professional development, and work-life balance.

The AAG also has taken a strong role in providing opportunities and training elsewhere. Both career workshops at annual and regional meetings and seminar series, such as the recent remote series organized by Ken Foote, provide excellent resources. In addition, more and more universities are providing workshops and resources on these topics for graduate students or new faculty; for example, the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon funds many of its new faculty to attend a year-long program run by the National Center for Faculty Diversity and Development. We thus don’t always have to develop these programs in our departments, but we should at a minimum make sure we are directing our graduate students or new faculty to these areas of training and learning.

On a different note: This is my last column as the virtual AAG President. Occasionally, people have asked me what it’s like being AAG President. Here are the top 3 Pros and Cons.

Pros:

  1. I have had a chance to get to know some amazing people, especially AAG staff.
  2. I have surprised myself in how much I enjoyed writing these columns (and working on them with Andrew, who is a phenomenal editor). They have been a turn from my usual guarded privacy.
  3. I have learned so much more about geography, geographers, and programs around the world. I’m very grateful for all of the experiences that people have shared with me (even when the experiences weren’t positive).

Cons:

  1. It didn’t help my time management or work-life balance. But, I loved the work.
  2. Email.
  3. As I’ve shared with some people, my biggest regret during my term as President is that I never met another AAG member face-to-face (excluding my husband and UO colleagues). What a strange year to be in this role. I VERY much look forward to seeing a lot of you at future meetings

With my last column words, I’d like to thank everyone for trusting me with this position. I especially want to thank Dave Kaplan for sharing so much knowledge, patience, and time with me. You are a good mentor, Dave.

It’s been an honor to serve as AAG President.

—Amy Lobben
AAG President and Professor at University of Oregon
lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0093

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.

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Want a Thriving Department? Focus on Undergraduate Success

I cannot think of a person in higher education who has not felt the pressure of maintaining and growing undergraduate enrollments. Undergraduates, who make up the large majority of the student body, are the people we devote most of our instructional efforts toward, and—as administrators constantly point out—are university’s primary source of revenue through tuition and fees. At public institutions, undergraduate success is also the primary focus of state legislatures looking at higher education metrics and state funding. Geography departments may literally live or die depending on their ability to maintain robust undergraduate enrollments and recruit majors.

I don’t think it’s pessimistic to suggest that a geography faculty member can’t control national economy, demographics, or tuition costs. So, what is a geography professor or department to do? The answer is simple:

Focus on undergraduate student success.

While many faculty seem to intuitively know how their programs can adapt to changing student needs and are able to naturally connect with undergraduate students, some of the rest of us get stuck in the culture and traditions of how we approach undergraduate education and interaction. So, I sought some pointers from the experts: undergraduate advisors (especially Dr. Leslie McLees, Undergraduate Program Director in Geography at University of Oregon). We identified some key ways in which faculty can address changing needs of students, through curriculum, advising, and experience. I don’t have room to adequately address overall student experience, so I’ll focus on the two areas in which faculty and undergraduate students formally interact.

Curriculum for a Changing Discipline

Students want to know that their degrees matter, and rather than dismissing the question of relevance, we need to embrace it. If we cannot justify why our degree matters, how can we expect students to do so, much less parents and legislators?

To prove relevance, we should teach students about geography and how to be professional geographers. We can continually adapt curriculum to the changing discipline and needs of students through modernized geography classes and sequences, professional development courses, and flexible, personalized major tracks.

Like it or not, a current trend seems to be the blurring of traditional discipline boundaries in favor of problem-based programs. A modernized geography curriculum represents current and future trends in the discipline, the changing physical and human landscapes of our planet, and ways to be professionals addressing the problems and opportunities posed by those changes.

One of the things that frustrates me is holding on to previous curricular sequences and class names. There has recently been a robust conversation about this on the AAG listserve that challenges holding onto course names such as: Human Geography, Geomorphology, GIS… The anthropology department on my campus has an introductory course titled: Pirates and Piracy. What do you think sounds more interesting to an undergraduate student, Pirates and Piracy or Introduction to Human Geography? When my sons were UO students, they took the anthropology version.

A focus on undergraduate success is vital for geography departments. [image: Tamarcus Brown]
Another way to translate the need for a four-year degree is to integrate professional development or career management into the curriculum.

Don’t bristle. We’re not talking about vocational training.

Rather, we’re suggesting professional development through traditional routes such as internship or research experiences. Or, streamlined and direct experiences through a professional development course geared towards geography students. We have such a course in our department at the University of Oregon and it has been popular and successful. Moving beyond simply writing resumes and cover letters, it requires critical reflection on skills that students develop at college, training on how to tell their stories about developing those skills, practice in reaching out to people in the workforce, and development of a portfolio that forces them to articulate their proposed career paths. Think of it as a new-age capstone course that requires students to translate the sometimes lofty and theoretical content taught and learned in traditional geography courses into thinking about what it means to BE a professional, paid geographer.

And choices! Our undergraduate students have grown up with more choice than I could have even imagined. Recently, my husband Andrew and I were discussing network TV. Specifically, we were both complaining that our parents never let us stay up late enough to watch the entire episode of Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday night (turns out we both had to go to bed by 8:30pm). What’s half of the Wonderful World going to do for us? So, we both opted out. Our 8-year old minds couldn’t even imagine on-demand TV. And, yet, that’s how our kids have grown up.

That availability of choice has translated to demands for flexibility in our majors and curriculum choices.

Many colleges and universities are responding and offering programs with: enhanced flexibility, personalization (almost a design-your-own-major), and the absence of bottlenecks (i.e. removal of intense vertical integration that keeps students from completing specific required courses).

Advising and Experience Go Together

Approaches to advising vary considerably, but there has been a national trend towards centralized campus advising, which offers an opportunity to connect students to the many resources available on campuses, ranging from mental health and spaces for minoritized groups to financial aid, as well as classical guidance on major choice and requirements to obtain their degree. However, generating excitement about a relatively unknown discipline—which is unfortunately where geography usually lives—is difficult for a central advisor who lacks knowledge in the discipline and understanding of how a specific student’s interests can integrate with the major to provide skills that help them beyond their degree.

That level of advising takes place in departments.

Many geography programs designate an Undergraduate Director who is the face of the program for undergraduates. This UD is the ambassador and advocate both around campus and within geography. Maintaining strong connections with centralized advising not only helps those central advisors learn more about geography, but also helps identify our majors early, which means less time-to-degree, better within-major advising, and earlier connections with faculty and peers. Within the department, the UD not only understands the curriculum in-depth, but also moves advising beyond the checklist of classes to take. They are able to help students translate their course experiences into real-world relevance.

For many, the advisor is one of the closest relationships students will develop with faculty. Advising is more than classes. It is listening to a student and to students in general, hearing their concerns, and communicating with them to empower them to take charge of their learning and their future.

More than any other discipline, geography represents the dynamically changing physical and human planet. But, faculty and academia have…a bit of a pace problem. If we want geography to continue and thrive, we must keep up. We may have to let go of our ideal traditional geography program and the way we have always advised students.

In exchange, we may find ourselves building rather than simply teaching. And…launching alumni into the world who can think critically, engage responsibly, connect synthetically, and question routinely.

In other words, they’ll become geographers.

But, there is no “they” out there who will do it for us. As one of my senior colleagues once told me,

We are the They.

 

I’d like to thank Dr. Leslie McLees for providing ideas for this column (particularly in the area of advising). Contact her if your department is interested in learning more about integrating professional development into your geography program or discussing the possibilities of supporting a strong undergraduate program. lmclees [at] uoregon [dot] edu

—Amy Lobben
AAG President and Professor at University of Oregon
lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0086

 

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.

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Advocate for Geography in Austerity – Part 2

This is Part 2 of a two-part column on what geography departments can do (and should not do) to advocate for their work in budget talks, which are all the more crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic. These points are largely derived from answers I received from geographers in upper administrative positions at universities.

As I noted in my last column, I receive many requests about what the AAG can do to help departments demonstrate their relevancy to key stakeholders and avoid losing positions or being out on the chopping block. I therefore sought input from an expert group of key stakeholders – geographers who are upper-level college and university administrators.  My request was fairly simple: “From the perspective of a dean or provost, please list your ‘Top 3 Dos’ and ‘Top 3 Do Nots’ in order to be a highly effective, impactful, and well-functioning geography department.”

Last month, I focused on what Geography Departments should not do. This month, I summarize some of the strategies departments should pursue to remain relevant to students, the public, and university and college administration.

  1. Do… Align Strategies with Institution Priorities. Most, if not all, colleges and universities have published institutional visions. Long-term, sustained goals often revolve around increasing the university’s ranking, increasing undergraduate enrollment, bolstering external research funding, expanding extension, and/or improving student success. Shorter-term initiatives and/or goals often focus on hiring initiatives around key topical interests. For example, a quick web search revealed many university Data Science Initiatives (U Oregon, Harvard, U Michigan, Brown, Northwestern, Rice, Stanford, Purdue,…). And almost every university in the nation is scrambling to increase the diversity of its faculty. At the University of Oregon, the Institutional Hiring Plan (i.e. the process by which departments submit faculty hiring requests) explicitly references institutional hiring initiatives and requires departments to identify positions that align with those priorities. Clearly, aligning faculty and department priorities, goals, activities, and—when reasonable—faculty requests to these priorities is strategic.

As summarized by one of the administrators providing responses to my query:

“So, if a university has as its aim the increase in externally funded research, then the geography department must contribute. If, as is the case for a place like […] College, the goal is student majors and student satisfaction, then concentrate on that. If the university is trying to advance its international image, then geographers should participate in international collaborations with partner universities, teach synchronous or asynchronous courses with international partners, etc. In other words, whatever the strategic plan of the university it, the geography department, needs to track how it can and does contribute.”

As I mentioned last month, administrators don’t necessarily know (or care) about all of the trajectories within disciplines. They’re concerned about the health, mission, vision, and initiatives of the entire institution.  And, they’re the ones who allocate faculty lines. Aligning departmental priorities with institutional priorities is not only strategic in the short term (i.e. getting the faculty lines, extra space, or other resources); it’s also strategic in the long term to position the department and new faculty as partners in helping the university achieve its goals.

  1. Do… Listen and Communicate Effectively and Respectfully. I am constantly working on how to be a better communicator. I mostly don’t talk much, unless my role requires it. I’ve always felt that I learn more by listening than I do by talking. But, being a good listener also means being a good discourser (much to my displeasure). Check out this posting (thank you Kavita Pandit for sharing this), which contains some excellent tips for developing listening skills.

Effective communication is important both within the department and with administration. A small section of a single column is completely inadequate to discuss effective communication. As a brief summary, some strategies departments/organizations as well as all faculty can deploy (or avoid) include:

  • Avoid the seductive lure of callout. Faculty members will likely not always agree with administrators’ (or others’) decisions, especially around goals and resource allocation. But…Callouts are one-way screeds that, by design, don’t allow for productive conversation.  Much has been written about the callout-culture. One of the most eloquent voices is Loretta Ross (I am anxiously awaiting the publication of her forthcoming book, Calling In the Calling Out Culture: Detoxing Our Movement). Callouts do provide the potential to have your voice and opinion heard and gather allies from around campus. But, if the goal is to advocate for your department, students, faculty, staff, or change decisions and behaviors, a respectful two-way conversation is usually a more effective approach.

Even in this fractious time we find ourselves, I remain hopeful that academics will continue to commit to a culture that is informed, deliberative in judgement, charitable in spirit, and open to debate. And to achieve that…

  • Do disseminate relevant information to your colleagues. There are few things that are more frustrating to faculty than not knowing about upcoming deadlines, initiatives, institutional priorities, or opportunities.
  • Do brag about your faculty’s accomplishments. Regularly share with your Dean the achievements in your department (faculty, students, and staff). In that same vein, also support/nominate department members for university and external awards.
  • Do present a unified front in supporting department decisions, whether they’re made by vote or consensus. Obviously, not everyone is going to always agree with group decisions. While complaining is sometimes cathartic, there is little (if any) strategic benefit in airing dirty laundry in public. Assuming that it’s done through a respectful and democratic process within departments, respecting rather than undercutting the process of decision-making preserves collaboration.

Remember; today’s adversary is tomorrow’s ally.

  1. Do… Be Central to Institutional Partnerships. Participate actively in the initiatives, goals, interdisciplinary education, and research of the college or university.  As one of my senior colleagues said to me many years ago, don’t underestimate the importance of being a good department, college, and university citizen. I would add disciplinary citizenship.  Good citizenship is especially helpful in the face of slides in metrics (i.e. declines in enrollments, majors, research productivity…). As one of the deans responding to my request said: “Building a quality faculty that is willing to roll up sleeves and help the college overall is very much appreciated…”

Serving on college/university-wide committees allows geographers to highlight the accomplishments of our colleagues, show the value of our discipline, and foster diplomatic relations with other units. It also provides a gateway to information, allowing departments to stay ahead of changes in the institution as well as identify upcoming initiatives, goals, or priorities.

  1. Do…Be Productive. Nearly all of the responses I received from administrators identified metrics as one of the most important criteria for faculty and departments to pursue. Some metrics are specific to an institution, but many are similar across institutions.  As one geography administrator said, “Deans of most large research universities use metrics. This is partly because the provost/president also demand performance measured in terms of student credit hours produced, numbers of majors, amount of external grant funding awarded, and recognition of the scholarship of the faculty.”

Metrics are central to relevancy. The savvy and successful faculty and departments understand the metrics by which their institutions evaluate them. One of my respondents put this very succinctly:  “Set high expectations for department faculty members and enforce high standards. Departments that attempt to promote individuals who do not meet the standards of the university (or college) bring negative attention to the unit. On the other hand, when departments promote very high functioning individuals, the entire department is viewed more positively.”

There are many more “Dos,” just as there were many more “Don’ts” that could have been listed in last month’s column. But this list does highlight the major themes raised across the administrator I queried and provides a good starting point for advocating for geography.

Thank you very much to the experts who responded to my request and provided valuable input: Duane Nellis, Risa Palm, Kavita Pandit, JP Jones, Diana Liverman, W. Andrew Marcus, Alec Murphy, and Bob McMaster.

The dual crisis facing academia that I introduced in last month’s column is concerning at the very least. But, this also could be a great time for strengthening the impact, if not the resolve, of geographers and geography. I believe that this is not so much an opportunity as it is a necessity. We need to make sure that we’re ready to continue leading in all of the issues facing our planet and its inhabitants.

Live long and prosper Geography.

—Amy Lobben
AAG President and Professor at University of Oregon
lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0083

 

 

 

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.

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Advocate for Geography in Austerity

This is Part 1 of a two-part column on what geography departments can do (and should not do) to advocate for their work in budget talks, which are all the more crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic. These points are largely derived from answers I received from geographers in upper administrative positions at universities.

At the end of October, the Chronicle of Higher Education covered the looming budget woes for colleges and universities across the country, with many states expecting 10% budget cuts. Public higher education likely will be disproportionally affected by state budget cuts as they face “two crises: the impact of Covid-19 on their operations and a downturn in state funding brought on by the current recession.” In addition, as reported in a June article in Nature, the response to the Coronavirus pandemic will also force universities to address growing challenges in higher education, such as mounting tuition costs, public perception of relevancy, and a demographically driven decrease in numbers of graduating high school seniors.  Yet, as we know, tuition increases are a direct result of more than a decade’s worth of states balancing their budgets on the backs of public colleges and universities that were once the lifeblood of the U.S.’s affordable higher education.  Further, in an article just released in Inside Higher Ed, the coronavirus pandemic has caused more than one-third of prospective college students to reconsider higher education (see Doubts About Going to College).

In short, the COVID-19 crisis has aggravated problems we have known about for some time. As a 2019 Gallup poll showed, there was already a marked decrease in public confidence in higher education in the U.S. going into this pandemic as a result of soaring tuition and barriers to access.  If 2020 has taught us nothing else, it is that geography is a crucial discipline for grasping and addressing the dire issues our earth faces. Yet in a year that has demonstrated our value, some of our geography departments continue to struggle for relevancy on university campuses.

What’s a Geography Department To Do (or Not Do)?

While geography departments do not control university budgets, we can think and act strategically to remain relevant to students, the public, and university and college administration. In this light, I have received a growing number of requests from department chairs as well as individual members asking for AAG assistance in demonstrating geography departments’ relevancy to key stakeholders. Those requests have varied, but range from advocating for lost positions to requesting brochures/videos to show to administration to demonstrate geography’s relevancy. I reflected on my experience as department chair and I was fairly certain that deans, provosts, and presidents wouldn’t be swayed by (or even take the time to view) brochures or videos from AAG.  I also knew that the time to act is before positions are cut, not after.

I therefore drafted an email and sent it to several geographers in administrative positions around the U.S.  My request was fairly simple… “please list your ‘Top 3 Dos’ and ‘Top 3 Not Dos’ in order to develop highly effective, impactful, and well-functioning geography departments (from the perspective of deans and provosts).”  The responses were remarkably consistent.

I’ll go in reverse order and start with the “Top 3 Don’ts,” mostly because these are relatively straightforward and require little additional discussion—the “Do’s” will have a column of their own next month.  Some of these Don’ts harken back to Ron Abler’s Five Steps to Oblivion.

1.  Don’t Prolong and Disseminate Department Conflict and In-fighting. Unless you’re a one-person department, you can’t escape departmental politics, one of the primary dynamics in academic departments. In a broader sense, conflict is an unavoidable and sometimes-necessary aspect of academic life. Yet persistent, unresolved in-fighting is not healthy for departments and, if tolerated, will hurt your department’s chances of success in budget battles. As one of the respondents to my request said: “No provost or president wants to become embroiled in personnel problems in a department.  I had the very negative experience of being an external “visitor” at a major university to look at the issues in a particular department (not geography).  The department members had done almost everything they could have done to bring negative attention to themselves and place themselves on the cutting block.”

While we have our moments, I’m fortunate to work in a functional and collegial department.  But I’ve experienced and heard tales about departments that are not as fortunate…slamming doors, stomping out of meetings, pouting, insulting…  Is this behavior rooted in academics’ quest for intellectual discussion, our passion for our sub-disciplines, or because we care so much for our students?

No.

Clearly, some conflicts can be helpful.  For example, conflicts around marginalization because of disability, race, or gender are necessary for departments to grow.  The  destructive conflicts, however—the ones that divide departments—always seem to be personal.  Petty turf wars, feelings of being slighted, resentment about small merit pay differences, irritation at office assignments, frustration over teaching assistant selection, and on and on.  We all know the many examples.  Airing these grievances may offer temporary relief and validation, but can in the long term crowd out the space for collaboration where the exploration of healthy, generative differences can be daylighted and lead to stronger visions for a department that addresses different views about direction, vision, power, and the future of the discipline.  Worse yet, airing these grievances outside the department creates a large billboard to the world stating “This department is dysfunctional.”

In short, work out difficulties and leave the personal battles at the door when visiting your dean or provost with requests on behalf of the department.  As intelligent, hyper-educated academics, we should know better than to pee in our own pool.

2. Don’t be unrealistic in demands for central resource investments. In my experience, this issue often arises when departments discuss graduate student support and new or replacement faculty lines. I’m always surprised when I hear something along the lines of… “central administration has to know how important it is for us to replace our position in fill-in-the-blank sub-discipline.”

No, they don’t have to know that.  In fact, they may not even care about disciplines; their focus is on the overall health of the home institution.  It’s our job to collect, analyze, and summarize the data and demonstrate the relevance of our needs to the entire university, not just to Geography.  Usually, but not always, university budgets are rather immobile.  And inadequate.  It’s strategic and realistic to realize that a finite and inadequate budget is applied to all units across campus.  Departments should continue to be visionary and ambitious, but recognize the broader realities and adjust arguments accordingly.  Every other department on campus is also asking for resources.  And, many colleges and universities have precarious structures which are not designed to withstand the level of disruption that the collective COVID response has thrown at them.

3. Don’t whine. 

The them-versus-us paradigm between faculty and administrators plays out across campuses throughout the world.  Faculty complain about the familiar issues: poor student preparation, equity in teaching loads, poor facilities, lack of equipment, competition for inadequate resources, underfunded initiatives…  This paradigm has become its own social construct in which faculty often see administrators as obstructionists.

Yet, often the reality is that both faculty and administrators care deeply about the students and institution.  The disconnect comes because administrators are the policy and budgetary gatekeepers, with the unappealing task of trying to stretch inadequate resources across an entire campus.  They are often (but not always) aware of the shortfalls that result.  Departments and faculty, then, often feel that they’re at the bottom of the hill, shoveling the proverbial dung.

While it’s important to advocate for the needs of our departments to higher administration, perpetuating institutional cynicism is not strategic.  One of the best lessons I learned from all of my years serving on review panels throughout the National Science Foundation is the importance of positively stating negative critiques:  “this proposal would be improved if the PI did…”.  I shamelessly borrowed this approach from NSF during my time as department chair, making the argument to the administration that specific productivity and metrics would be enhanced with identified allocation improvements.

Don’t bring a problem to your administrators.  Bring a solution.

.  .  .

In hindsight, I realize that the lists of Dos and Don’ts I received rather mirror each other.  But, I parsed them out and summarize the Don’ts above.  Next month, I’ll share the Dos.  As a preview, the three Dos, which have been expanded into four Dos, include: strategic alignment, communication, partnership, and productivity.

—Amy Lobben
AAG President and Professor at University of Oregon
lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0082

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.

Featured Image: “Better Days Ahead” painted in a bright blue arrow directly on a street. Photographer Ian Taylor, Unsplash

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Vote for Geography

No matter what happens with this week’s election, the United States will pivot.

Four years ago, most people in my life expressed horror, shock, and disgust following the presidential election in the United States. The day after the election, I shared with my husband my apprehensive relief following the results. I’ll explain.

I grew-up in Atlanta. Looking back, it seems that I may never again live in a place with such diversity. I spent my primary, secondary, and post-secondary school life living in a world of open sexism and racism. Then I moved, first to East Lansing, Michigan and then to Eugene, Oregon. My children mostly grew-up in Eugene. While beautiful, I often say that my biggest parenting regret has been raising my children in a loaf of Wonder Bread—white, white, white—slice after homogeneous slice.

I realized that once out of the south, sexism and racism still exist. They’re just packaged differently. Their insidiousness is delivered with smiles and well-meaning comments. I have had different versions of this conversation many times:

Person: “Oh, you’re from the south. They’re so racist down there.”

Amy: “Yes. But, there’s racism here too.”

Person (a counter argument, usually centered around a sentiment like): “How can we be racist when there aren’t many Black people here” or, “I am color blind in my beliefs.”

How indeed can we participate in “-isms” if our gut, our heart tells us we are not that way? Remember Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness”? Try googling it if you do not.

That’s when I realized that the most sneaky and powerful form of racism…the one that perpetuates it…is the one that refuses to be acknowledged: the denied racism.

I’ve heard some people argue that the reason behind denied racism, denied sexism, denied ableism, and denied other-isms is as simple as not having the lived experience. Maybe Harper Lee sums it up well: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.” (Atticus to Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird).

My proposition for the real reason behind denied bias is less merciful. The denial of racism, just like the denial of sexism, ableism, and any other “-ism” is what gives those biases their core strength. We know that denial is not merely human nature. In fact, the human brain uses denial as a way of helping us process difficult truths, such as when we experience a traumatic event. We are literally programmed to use denial as a tool to protect ourselves from the reality that is happening in our lives.

Denial of existing biases is about identity. Denial allows us to look away from reality and see what we need to see. We use denial so that we don’t feel bad about our own identify, our self-respect, our global understanding, and our society. Confronting such deeply-entrenched denial requires something extraordinarily powerful to happen.

So, thinking that the election results may be the extraordinarily powerful event to wake people from their denied-bias slumber, I experienced apprehensive relief following the 2016 election. Relief because the election would reveal, finally, how broadly and deeply rooted many forms of bias are in America. Apprehensive because pulling off that big ugly bandage would uncover a festering and extremely painful wound.

Four years later, it is now critical to ensure that another denial doesn’t take hold—the denial of root causes and our responsibility.

There are so many specific events over the past four years for which we can be angry with current leadership: hideous comments about women, refusal to condemn white supremacy, overtly racist practices, publicly mocking people with disabilities…there have been so many atrocious acts these past four years that it’s impossible to provide a complete list. But…

I believe that anger at leadership for causing these rifts is largely misplaced. Our current leadership did not create the painful wounds of bias: racism, sexism, ableism…fill-in-the-blank-ism. Rather, our current leadership simply reflects America’s long-standing EverythingOtherThanAbleBodiedWhiteMale-ism. Leadership merely gives voice to a widely accepted set of beliefs based in collective biases.

It is those shared biases that deserve our introspection and disgust.

In moving forward, the emotional healing process includes four to seven stages, depending on whom you ask. Regardless of the source, stages present in a sequence similar to this: 1) Denial, 2) Anger/Expression, 3) Reflection, 4) Transformation, and 5) Corrective Experiences.

Our current leadership has been very effective in starting the process to move us out of Stage 1 and into Stage 2. And, now his work is done. We need a new form of leadership to continue. The next Stages are harder. We held on to and denied our biases for too long to think that they will magically transform to Corrective Experiences. For those difficult Stages, we need leadership that demonstrates decency, maturity, integrity, grace, strength, and empathy.

We need leadership who understands that we cannot stay in the Stage of Anger/Expression without causing new wounds. We also need leadership that understands interconnectedness of social foundations, and that moving toward Corrective Experiences has to happen through strong societal infrastructure.

But that is not all. Just as compelling (especially for geography) is the need to vote for science. In the past four years, science has experienced a marked uptick in interference, contempt, dismantling of research data, personal attacks, and an overall assault on validity of scientific research from our leadership. Much of the American public has followed.

Now, read that paragraph once more and substitute “education” for “science.”

Again, leaders don’t create EverythingOtherThanAbleBodiedWhiteMale-ism. Rather it’s the persistent existence of -isms that creates leaders who mirror those biases. Voters choose leaders who best represent their beliefs. In response to outcries of racism- and sexism-motivated voting in the last election, how often did you hear angry, defensive words such as “I voted for leadership because of x,y,z policy. I don’t support their sexist, racist, ableist views.”

Bullshit.

Acceptance of sexism IS sexism. Acceptance of racism IS racism. Acceptance of ableism IS ableism. And…voting for a sexist is sexism. Voting for a racist is racism. Voting for an ableist is ableism.

So, regardless of the outcome of this election, we will pivot—backward or forward.

The bandage has already been yanked off. We don’t need to go back.

I plan to…Vote for science. Vote for education. Vote for decency, empathy, grace and intelligence. Vote for geography.

—Amy Lobben
AAG President and Professor at University of Oregon
lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0080

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.

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An Interview with AAG Executive Director Gary Langham (Part 2)

Last month I shared Part 1 of an interview I conducted with AAG’s Executive Director Gary Langham to help the membership learn a bit about his perspectives, goals, and personal history that led him to AAG.

We met on August 19, close to the one-year anniversary of his first week in this role—half of which has been during the coronavirus pandemic. The interview lasted for over an hour, generating far too much to publish as a single column. This is the second part, which has been edited for content and clarity.

AMY: What drew you to AAG?

GARY: For the last nine years, I had worked for an environmental and conservation non-profit, the National Audubon Society, where I was Vice President and Chief Scientist. I managed a similar-sized budget and almost twice as many staff. Staff was spread all over the country and worked in different research programs, ranging from marine conservation to climate change research. Many people like birds, but they’re also great for setting conservation priorities and monitoring environmental health. You can use science to show policymakers the connection between bird populations and protected areas, like marine reserves. If the fish-eating birds like puffins aren’t doing well, then the fish stocks aren’t either.

It was a great job with great staff, so the truth is I wasn’t looking for a new position. The AAG’s headhunters called, and they asked me who I thought would be right for the job. So, I gave them some recommendations, and then they said, how come you’re not applying for the job? And I said, what? I’m not a geographer. And they said, no, you should look at the job description again because of your experience—with management, media, fundraising, policy, and non-profits—is what they’re looking for. And I realized that as a trained ecologist, I really am a physical geographer of sorts—I should have been going to the Annual Meeting all along!

AMY: So we had some good headhunters. Excellent! Let’s just stay within the vein of AAG. This is a question that I never really thought about until I took on my current role. AAG just sort of seemed opaque to me until I stepped in as vice president. So what does the AAG Executive Director actually do?

GARY: That’s a great question. My job is to lead our fantastic staff: to help them succeed if they need it and stay out of their way when they don’t. I also oversee our budget and enter into contracts. Council approves the annual budget. It’s my job to keep revenues and expenses in line, develop and maintain partnerships, and ensure that staff is enacting the strategic plan and the long-term vision set by Council.

Those are the nuts and bolts of the job, but I also think about the value proposition for members. How can AAG be the best organization possible for all geographers? For 100 years, it was enough to hold the Annual Meeting and deliver the journals in the mail every month. AAG is at its best when it connects members to each other and to the rest of the world—public, professional, and government. We can help them make connections at any stage of their careers and provide professional services. Our members’ research and ideas are essential to shaping a just and diverse world. AAG must ensure that geographers’ interests are represented in conversations about ethics, policy debates, public perception, and higher education. Geographers are influencers. And, we need to expand our membership base.

AMY: Well, a new model, depending on how it’s structured, would do exactly that: expand and broaden the membership base. As an aside, I have to admit one of the things that I used to love so much about my AAG membership was exactly what you mentioned—getting the journal in the mail. I loved that. But, then that journal just turned into a stack of guilt because I would get them in the mail, and I‘d say, “I’m reading this cover to cover today.” But, eventually, I would put it on top of the previous one, and they all just became this stack of guilt. I still always loved getting it in the mail.

I don’t want to put words into your mouth, so correct me if I’m wrong. But, it sounds like over the past year, you have been thinking that there need to be new models, new approaches to modernize the AAG, so it can be relevant to more groups of geographers. Currently, what do you think that we’re doing well, and where is there an opportunity to grow?

GARY: We have to continue fostering the multi-generational sense of belonging to the AAG. The glue that seems to hold us together is the bonds between mentor and student stretching back in time. We represent 364 academic departments, and I want us to consider this our core to protect and maintain. At the same time, we can offer more to professional geographers and grow our base. When I was interviewing and reading everything online about AAG to understand it, I noticed significant growth in membership numbers over the last 15 years. I thought it must be GIS professionals, and I was shocked to learn that wasn’t true. Instead, it was our international expansion, another area where I think we have lots of growth potential. My biggest regret by far is that I haven’t been to an Annual Meeting yet. So many members to meet and sessions to attend. I can’t wait to do that.

AMY: Okay. Let’s pivot a bit. I’m going to give you the question that I, along with, I assume, many academic geographers get from students and parents. And I’m curious how you answer it. What do you say when someone asks you, “what do geographers actually do?”

GARY: I think of geography as the intersection of people, place, and the environment, though it doesn’t have to be all those things all the time. Truly, you can’t understand anything in this world, past, present or future, without understanding places and spaces. Part of what makes geography so compelling to me is the endless number of ways to explore place and space—you can never run out of new things to learn.

That question and answer then naturally progressed to a discussion about academia and the relevance of geography. I will bring some of the remaining discussion into future columns, though not as an interview transcript. Until we can all meet again in person, I hope that these two parts of the interview allow you to know a bit more about the person who is now running the American Association of Geographers.

—Amy Lobben
AAG President and Professor at University of Oregon
lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0079

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President's Column

An Interview with AAG Executive Director Gary Langham (Part 1)

While the AAG membership elects some of its governance (i.e. president, vice president, Council), the temporal constant in leadership is the Executive Director (ED). Historically, his tenure spans multiple presidents and many dozens of councilors. Since COVID-19 has prevented our new ED, Gary Langham, from meeting the membership and vice versa, I decided to interview him as an introduction into learning a bit about his perspectives, goals and personal history that led him to AAG.

We met on Wednesday, Aug. 19, which not coincidentally is the one-year anniversary of his first week in this role—half of which has been during the coronavirus pandemic. The interview lasted for over an hour, generating far too much to publish as a single column. So, I will cover the interview in two columns beginning with this piece as a summary of his path that led him to AAG. I have edited my questions and Gary’s comments below for brevity and clarity.

AMY: Let’s just start with some basics, like your background, the area of your formal training, and your experiences that led you to AAG.

GARY: I grew up in Sacramento, CA, within an academic family. My dad was a Ph.D. botanist and his father had a Ph.D. in plant genetics, so acquiring my own Ph.D. seemed natural to me. Looking into the future one could never know, but in hindsight this makes sense.

My dad and grandfather had interesting backgrounds. My grandfather, originally an Iowa farm boy, had to find a new path when the family farm was lost during the depression. Eventually, he ended up at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, in the early 1930s where he was the first Ph.D. recipient in plant genetics. Upon graduation, the government of Venezuela asked him to move there and lead a program for crops and genetics. He agreed and asked my grandmother, then a nurse, to marry him. They decided to go, despite speaking no Spanish at the time, and had four children there over the next 20 years.

During this time, he also became known as the father of the sesame seed. Sesame lays down its seed in pods that shatter when ripe, making it very time consuming to harvest. My grandfather was the first to find a variety that would open enough for machine harvesting, but not enough to lose the seeds. This side of the family continued researching and perfecting varieties of sesame for many years.

In addition to his scholarly abilities, my grandfather had an entrepreneurial spirit. Soon after he got there, oil production was booming in Venezuela, leading to a massive economic boom. He founded four large plant nurseries, supplying the growing numbers of businesses, hotels and factories around the country.

My dad was born and raised in Venezuela working in his dad’s plant nurseries. When my dad was 15, he went to the United States for the first time to finish school and later attend college. Inspired by what he learned from my grandfather, he sought his Ph.D. in plant biology and ecology. My father then taught at California State University in Sacramento for 38 years. He preferred teaching much more than research. I had the good fortune of growing up accompanying him on his botany and ecology field trips. We were around college students all of the time. During the summers, they would visit one day a week, so I grew up immersed in his love of teaching.

When I was seven years old, my dad discovered birding. He had been playing semi-pro ice hockey for fun, but he was getting too old and he wanted something else to do. He was also tired of the students asking what all the birds were on the field trips. So, he took this bird watching class. And it sounds silly to go from hockey to birding, but there is a whole world of competitive birding. Who knew?

What that meant for me, because he was so competitive, is whether I felt like it or not, I was in the back of a car going to look for birds every weekend from age seven to 13, and going all over the country traveling a lot with my parents. It was a lot of driving though, and I didn’t always love it. And of course, when you’re a kid, you absorb everything that you’re exposed to. So, now I was getting exposed to people, showing slides about birds and these professors would come over and they talk about their trips around the world. And, it was a great way to grow up. When I was 15, I started going back to Venezuela with my father. That was the first time my dad had been back in 30 years, and I kept going back for at least a month every year for the next 20 years.

Soon, he and I started leading birdwatching tours. Surprisingly, many people want to see birds bad enough that they will hire experts to show them all the species. Because I had spent so much time doing this, by the time I was 18 I was able to do it professionally. That’s how I put myself through college, leading trips all summer and over winter break. And, I did that for many years. When I came to my own schooling, I started off as an English major, finished that coursework and thought I was going to go to law school and do environmental law.

So, I was doing these birding tours, often with lawyers, and they’re like, “yeah, don’t do law school. Don’t do what I do. You should do birds or something like that. You should do ecology or conservation.” And, so I stayed on in college for a whole other major in biology. And, because I was putting myself through school with these tours, I could. I wasn’t in a hurry because I was getting paid to travel four months a year. In your twenties that’s really fun. Then I went back to college and took a class in, say, mammalogy, and then went all over the Americas seeing the mammals in the field. We were working all over the Americas: Canada, Costa Rica, and California in summer, and seven different trips in Venezuela that would rotate three per year over winter break.

This was an awesome way to grow up and go to college. But, eventually, I thought I’m just going to get a Ph.D. too. And what was great is because I had so much experience in South America already, it was easy to convince my advisers that I could go off and do research in South America because I’d already been doing it, essentially, for years. And it didn’t sound like a big risk. So, I got lucky and got into, arguably, the best ornithology program in the world at Cornell University. That was just a great experience. Although my Ph.D. is in ecology and evolutionary biology, I studied birds in South America.

Ecology spoke to my wide range of interests. And, just like with geography, you can never get bored with it because there’s so many different facets to it. After seven field seasons in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Peru, I wanted to go somewhere else. So, I did an NSF bioinformatics postdoc through UC Berkeley, with two years in the field and Queensland, Australia doing climate change research in the Wet Tropics and then a year back at Berkeley. Finally, I started working at Audubon, bringing birds, biology and policy together in conservation. Audubon was my job for 12 years before I started at AAG.

AMY: Actually, that was great. As you were relaying your story, I kept thinking about how your path seemed to be laid out for you. And, I feel like I just fell into geography. I spent my early life walking around in circles trying to figure out what I was going to do until I found this magic thing called geography. It just basically landed in my lap in college. And, then it transformed me.

At this point, our conversation transitioned to AAG, Geography, and higher education. I’ll continue the interview in a later column in which Gary will highlight his vision and goals for AAG.

—Amy Lobben
AAG President and Professor at University of Oregon
lobben [at] uoregon [dot] edu

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0078

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President's Column

The Invisible and The Silent

I am the parent of an adult child with intellectual and developmental disabilities and have spent the past two decades watching how society (dis)engages with him. People avert their eyes. People pretend not to see him.  People give him a wide berth in store aisles.

Some adults demonstrate shockingly bad behavior when he makes his noises or rocks back-and-forth. They display disapproval of his imperfect body and social conduct with facial expressions, comments, or gestures—such as picking up their groceries and moving to another checkout line. My reaction is a swift but reasonably (I think) calm tongue-lashing. Then, I always tell myself I won’t make a public display again. But I do.

Believe it or not, I’m happy when kids stare. At least they’re acknowledging his presence. And Jeffrey loves social interaction, if given the chance.

Amy Lobben’s son, Jeffrey, is wearing one of his favorite shirts.

That Jeffrey is singled out like this reflects how our society is obsessed with physical perfection. Examples are too numerous to list. Vanity sizing is just one example. Is that international? If not, I’ll explain. In America, as bodies get larger, sizing gets smaller. A women’s size 6 today was a size 12 fifty years ago. Because…we cannot have socially defined “imperfections” in our bodies. So, the fashion industry wisely adjusts their sizing over the years. It is remarkable how I have been a size 6 my entire adult life (I hope you hear the sarcasm regarding myself).

Society trains us to have low tolerance of imperfections in our own and others’ bodies. It’s no wonder that in the race to perfection, those with physical imperfections are ultra marginalized by society. And if we are intolerant of weight gain or imperfect eyebrows, imagine how intolerant we are with non-functioning eyes or legs. We have been taught to actively ignore those imperfections and the bodies they’re attached to. Even being near such a person in a grocery line is unendurable. The only distance at which this imperfection can be tolerated is so far away as to be indiscernible. It is the spatial scale of exclusion.

And that’s when it happens. People with disabilities become invisible. Through able-ism, they are silenced, left alone past the detectable edges of the universe that able-bodies and able-minded individuals inhabit.

Fortunately, an increasing number of countries have laws that protect the invisible and silent. In the United States, for example, organizations are required by law to make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities.

Of course, “reasonable” is vague and open to opinion. For example, under the cover of “reasonable,” the state of Alabama developed their ventilator rationing policy, which said: “Persons with severe or profound mental retardation, moderate to severe dementia, or catastrophic neurological complications such as persistent vegetative state are unlikely candidates for ventilator support.”

Horrible, right? Let us not cast our righteous stones. Alabama was not alone in developing policies for ventilator support that excluded people with imperfections. Fortunately, disability advocacy groups and the U.S. Health and Human Services Department have now ensured that ventilator policies don’t discriminate based on imperfection.

The American Association of Geographers is not immune; historically, it has not been welcoming of people with disabilities. At the same time, we have mostly not been overtly discriminatory. There is no need for intervention by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But we have created a culture and a structure that presents barriers to inclusion and participation of people with disabilities. For example:

  1. Cost of our annual meeting remains a persistent (and often vocal) concern for many AAG members. AAG responds to this concern and attempts to defray costs when possible. Some strategies include:  booking venues off-season, booking older venues, and including multiple locations in a single meeting. All of these strategies address membership demands to keep costs down. But, the result is an increase in barriers to participation for people with disabilities.  Remember Denver 2005? Or Las Vegas 2009? Even without disabilities, it’s pretty hard to get around in a blizzard or between venues that are over 1km apart. How many times have you experienced overcrowded stairwells between sessions because the elevators were unable to support capacity? These are trade-offs that most membership welcomes in AAG’s responsive efforts to defray conference fees.
  2. The AAG website is a disaster and does not come close to providing Universal Access. It’s not even screen-reader compliant. We are unique in our antiquatedness relative to most other large, professional organizations. This is ethically unacceptable and, for an organization that is always worried about recruiting more people to Geography, it’s not even good business.
  3. The physical headquarters of AAG is Meridian Place. It’s far from being ADA compliant. People who use manual or motorized wheelchairs cannot enter the front door.

Why is this the current state of AAG?  Historically, our collective membership has relegated issues of accessibility to the margins in favor of other priorities, such as saving money.

Fortunately, many accessibility issues are now being addressed by our new Executive Director, Gary Langham, and the AAG staff. For example, for the first time in my over 25 years in attending AAG meetings, child care for older children with disabilities was offered for the Denver 2020 meeting. Unfortunately, because of Covid, no one attended that meeting in person. But, the precedent was set. Don’t underestimate how big of a game-changer this support is for parents of older children with disabilities. For me, traveling as a parent of an older child with intellectual and developmental disabilities frequently represents an impossible obstacle. I’ve missed AAG meetings over the years because I couldn’t find support at home and because my son was too old for the child care provided by AAG.

As for examples two and three, though no concrete designs are yet in place, both website and Meridian Place renovations are actively being planned. ADA compliance and Universal Access are major parts of the discussion.

I am also delighted to announce that the AAG Council has unanimously supported the formation of a new AAG Accessibility Task Force. The members will identify the most pressing barriers to access within the AAG and develop strategies and guidelines to inform website design, building renovation, conference venue choices, and practices at conferences that enhance access.

I will always argue that supporting access for even one person with disability justifies great effort. However, if numbers are important to justifying the effort, we should consider why persons with disability are such a small proportion of AAG membership and conference attendance. For example, each year prior to the annual conference, AAG asks members for accommodation requests. Few requests are made. But, according to the Institute on Disability, the overall rate of people with disabilities (in the U.S.) is almost 13%. Disaggregated, disability increases dramatically by age. The most common disability reported is ambulatory.

But, AAG does not receive accommodation requests from 13 percent of the attendees (i.e. equivalent to disability prevalence in the overall population). Perhaps the disability rate for geographers is shockingly low? I doubt it.

July 26 was Disability Independence Day, commemorating the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act that was signed on the same day in 1990. Yet, this day seemed to come and go with little notice. How many people did you hear talking about it, marching about it, let alone celebrating it? As we experience the wave of social justice demanding amplification of marginalized voices, an important perspective is missing.

For too long AAG members with disabilities have been kept invisible and silent. Based on my brief tenure as Vice President and President, I have learned that many such individuals left the organization or stopped coming to conferences when barriers become too overwhelming. The Accessibility Task Force will advocate for AAG members with former and current disabilities, as well as that large portion of us who will, based purely on statistics, develop future disabilities. If we wish to have true lifetime members, we need to get ready now.

The task force’s charge over the next two years is to identify barriers and develop remediation recommendations, to move beyond the ADA and what is required by law to create true opportunities for access and inclusion for people with disabilities. We’re at the start of new AAG leadership and experiencing a nationwide awakening to the damages of exclusion and social injustice. Yes, there is much work to be done. But as we enter the dawn of the new decade, I am profoundly optimistic that this dawn will cast a bright light that makes us see those with disability and the barriers that prevent them from being in the AAG, the discipline of geography, and our society at large.

This is when the invisible become visible.

And that is when we as individuals and the AAG become true facilitators to access.

— Amy Lobben
AAG President

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0077

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