It is fair to say that the recent election has created deep concerns in our community regarding issues of diversity and gender equity. This unease certainly extends far beyond the campuses. In writing about the uncertainty in America’s corporate workplaces a recent article in Bloomberg stated, “Diversity issues have come to the fore as the presidential campaign exposed and deepened bitter divisions on matters such as the treatment of women and minorities.” So, as we enter the potentially troubled waters of 2017, allow me to share some of my thoughts on the fundamental issue of diversity as it relates to our discipline and the AAG.

This past month the University of California reported on our 2017 applicant pool and it makes for enlightening reading in this regard. By the numbers — the UC applicants were 34 percent Chicano/Latino, 30 percent Asian American, 25 percent White, 6 percent African American and about 1 percent American Indian and Pacific Islander. In terms of socioeconomic diversity, 42.4 percent were from low income families and 46 percent would be the first in their families to obtain a degree. On my own campus about 21 percent of the current undergraduate population are Chicano/Latino, 32 percent Asian American, 26 percent white, 5 percent African American and 1 percent American Indian/Pacific Islander. Slightly over 50 percent of UC undergraduate students are women.

This increasing diversity and gender balance amongst university students is of course not just a feature of the University of California. It is part of a long-term national trend. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) the proportion of Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander students in higher education tripled and African American enrollment increased by about 40 percent between 1976 and 2008. Since about 1980 women have been the majority gender amongst undergraduates. The diversity amongst graduate students remains lower than amongst undergraduates, but the NCES data indicate progress towards developing a graduate student body, which more closely resembles the complexion of the nation. The percent of African American graduate students has increased from 6 percent to 12 percent, Hispanics increased from 2 percent to 6 percent and Asians/Pacific Islanders increased from 2 percent to 7 percent. Women now account for a bit more than half of all graduate students. Recent data by NCES also shed some light on the diversity of the faculty. Although the ranks of full professor are largely dominated by White males, there is increasing ethnic and gender diversity in the more junior ranks. One would suspect that this increased diversity in the ranks of associate and assistant professors will propagate upwards into the professorial ranks over time.

There are obvious reasons why, in a healthy and equitable democracy, access to higher education must be open to all regardless of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion or socioeconomic status. There are also many reasons why diversity bestows benefits to students in the classroom and on the campus in general. The potential added value of greater diversity has been articulated many places including in U.S. News and World Report – 1. Diversity expands worldliness in regards to exposure to people beyond a single social set, 2. Diversity enhances social development, 3. Diversity prepares students for future career success in today’s diverse workplaces, 4. Diversity provides preparation for work in a global society, 5. Diversity drives increases in the student’s own knowledge base, 6. Diversity promotes creative thinking, 7. Diversity enhances self-awareness, 8. Diversity enriches the multiple perspectives developed by higher education. It is not surprising the U.S. News and World Report includes a Diversity Index in its campus rankings.

The value of diversity extends beyond the campus setting and into professional life. For example, a study authored by Vivian Hunt, Dennis Layton, and Sara Prince and released in 2015 by McKinsey and Company examined management data for 366 public companies across a range of industries in the Unites States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Latin America. They found that firms in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity were 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their national industry medians. They also found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15 percent more likely to have financial returns above their national industry medians. Interestingly, for the United States there was a linear relationship between racial and ethnic diversity and better financial performance. Every 10 percent increase in racial and ethnic diversity in senior management was correlated with an increase in earnings before interest and taxes of 0.8 percent.

Collaborator diversity has also been shown to be a positive driver of research performance. As Jean Vanski, Director of Management and Analysis, Division of Institution and Award Support at the National Science Foundation, has stated “Diversity is important to our mission because different perspectives bring to an enterprise different ways of solving problems.” Katherine Phillips argues in Scientific American that it is not just the diversity of views that is important, but the diversity of the voices expressing those views is also impactful. Differences in race and gender can actually increase the impact of novel or dissonant opinions in group research. There is also a potential payoff to diversity in the communication and impact of the resulting research. In a 2014 commentary published in Nature, Richard B. Freeman and Wei Huang of Harvard discuss an analysis of 2.5 million research papers in which they found greater ethnic homogeneity among authors was associated with publication in lower-impact journals. In contrast, papers by multi-ethnic teams of four or five authors experienced a 5-10 percent advantage in terms of citation numbers.

So, with all this in mind, we might ask how our discipline and our association are faring in terms of diversity? As it happens, there is a wonderful AAG Disciplinary Data Dashboard that allows members to explore this question in detail. If you have not visited the Dashboard I highly recommend you take a look. The data therein suggest a positive trajectory, but as of yet incomplete journey. Let’s assume that with almost 12,000 members, the association roughly represents the demography of the discipline as a whole in terms of gender balance and ethnic diversity. Since 1972 the proportion of female members has increased from less than 20 percent to about 40 percent. Close, but not quite parity when measured against the general population or university student proportions. In terms of ethnic diversity we clearly have work to do. Our numbers of African American, Hispanic, Native American/Alaskan and Pacific Islander remain markedly below the proportions of those groups in the general population.

Some of this may reflect the fact that about a third of our membership is international, but I do not think that wholly explains the disparity between the AAG and the U.S. population. We should also be cognizant that our survey numbers remain incomplete in terms of socioeconomic background, sexual orientation and other attributes that contribute to the full palette of diversity in any society.

As a discipline, and as an association, we are making progress, but work remains. That work must center on making sure that the discipline of geography and the AAG are seen as relevant and valuable to a wider cross-section of the population. Here I believe there are important positive feedbacks to be realized. As we add more geographers from currently under-represented groups we add to the perspectives that geography provides and the voices by which those perspectives are communicated. Our work expands in its relevance and the message of that growing relevance is shared more widely and effectively through having a diverse membership.

We would be remiss if we think of diversity simply in terms of numbers needed to fill-out comparative spread sheets. There has been much work done in business on the challenges of the effective development and capitalization of diversity. This is often referred to as “diversity management.” As Glenn Llopis points out in Forbes Magazine, “Diversity can no longer just be about making the numbers, but rather how an organization treats its people authentically.” To be effectively and authentically diverse an organization must allow its diverse membership to be both meaningfully engaged with the organization and empowered to change operating models and chart new courses. Engagement means more than just giving voice. It means identifying priorities and providing opportunities that are relevant to broader populations. Empowerment to change priorities and operations may mean surrendering of some power by established leaders. However, as Kathy Hannan, National Managing Partner, Diversity & Corporate Responsibility, KPMG LLP, argued in the Forbes piece, “Diversity must move from just a value, to being operational.” I believe that this is the same for our discipline and association.

This all sounds good, but how can it be effected? As diversity has increased in universities and other organizations there can develop a sense of alienation by both the previously dominant or empowered groups and newly arrived and developing groups. Communication and cooperation give way to dismissal and adversity. An article in the Harvard Business Review by Tessa L. Dover, Brenda Major and Cheryl R. Kaiser suggests that in many cases corporate diversity training does little to improve such cultures or alleviate increasing senses of alienation. To overcome these challenges takes more than exposure to training, it takes more than curriculum, it takes doing by each and every one of us. Simon Goring at the Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison, was part of a team that produced an article in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment on creating and maintaining diverse and high-performing collaborative research teams. I find the piece quite instructive on how we, as individuals, can promote a healthy diverse organization. The article highlights the importance of Social Sensitivity (empathy, honesty, clarity, integrity, accountability) coupled with Emotional Engagement (shared excitement about goals, personal commitment to the team, trust). Another important element they identify is Team Communication (evenness of talking and listening, lack of dominance, equality of interactions and tone). These values are important for any team or organization, and critical for those which are highly diverse and incorporate members with a variety of markedly different life experiences and perspectives. One might distill this all down to actively showing mutual respect.

Many of our members have long been working hard in their teaching, research and service to advance the cause of diversity and equity. So too has the Association. The commitment of AAG leadership and staff from past presidents on down has been continuous. I invite you to the read the 2006 Diversity Task Force Report on goals for enhancing diversity. My recent predecessor, Mona Domosh, has written in this column about the importance of diversifying our curriculum. Each year the AAG expressly honors a geographer for their efforts toward encouraging a more diverse discipline. Geography is innately a discipline about diversity and geographers should be better equipped than most to embrace and foster a culture of diversity. If we wish to see our discipline and organization grow and prosper in an increasingly diverse nation we must do so. In addition, we as geographers can and should provide an example of the strength of diversity and the route to overcoming any challenges along that path. Let’s all think about working to achieve this, particularly in our own personal interactions, as we move forward into the New Year.

Join the conversation on Twitter #PresidentAAG

—Glen M. MacDonald

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0001

This past month the Oxford Dictionary named “post-truth” as its 2016 Word-of-the-Year. The word was chosen because it has seen a “spike in frequency this year in the context of the European Union referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States” and “has gone from being a peripheral term to being a mainstay in political commentary.” For scholars and educators the idea that being truthful is now optional should be deeply troubling, as it undermines the ethical and operational foundations upon which we function. In this column I want to explore the turn towards a post-truth world.

Two other similar descriptors have become more widespread in recent years — post-factual and post-rational. I believe that these terms are all part of the same sociological and political trend, but have important differences. Post-factual does not necessarily mean being untruthful, it may represent situations in which pertinent factual information is either not sought, not considered, not valued, or is simply reviled. The term post-truth implies deliberate provision or knowing acceptance of information that is known to be untruthful. I would suggest the deliberate suppression of factual information would also fall under this rubric. Post-rational suggests situations in which facts, reasoning and logic are deemed unnecessary or even loathed when decisions are taken. The term post-truth is widely used in a sense that captures all three of these issues. In the context of western philosophy and history, an increasingly post-truth world can be seen as a rejection of 300 years of scientific, socioeconomic and political development that was initiated by the Age of Enlightenment in the 18^th century.

At the moment post-truth phenomenon is sending shockwaves through the body politic and causing concern about the future of democracy. As political economy professor William Davies pointed out this August in The New York Times, “Facts hold a sacred place in Western liberal democracies. Whenever democracy seems to be going awry, when voters are manipulated or politicians are ducking questions, we turn to facts for salvation. But they seem to be losing their ability to support consensus.” The Brexit referendum and U.S. Presidential election offered political pundits much evidence of a turn towards post-truth. For example, a centerpiece of the Brexit Leave campaign was the claim that the EU is taking £350 million a week from the U.K. and that this money could be spent on the National Health System. This figure was so misleading that it drew an official rebuke by the U.K. Statistics Office and yet the Leave campaign continued to cite it. After the election the figure and promise to give those funds to the National Health System was then disavowed by one of the leaders of the Leave campaign, Nigel Farage. Yet due to this post-truth campaigning, some 47 percent of British voters surveyed accepted the figure and an additional 14 percent were uncertain of its legitimacy. Immediately following the vote some 6 percent of the Leave supporters stated they wished they had voted to remain in the EU. Either they did not understand their “protest” vote would count in such a tight election or they did not fully reason the consequences of a vote to leave the EU. This seems to me an example of the post-factual, post-truth and post-rational.

Turning to the U.S. — according the Pulitzer-Prize-winning site Politifact, some 51 percent of the checked statements made by Donald Trump and 12 percent of those by Hillary Clinton were deemed false or worse. Although both candidates appear to have made false statements, the large difference in the proportion of such statements between the eventual President Elect and Hillary Clinton indicates that facts and demonstrable truthfulness were not deciding factors in the election. In some cases the dismissal of facts and truthfulness may be an informed and deliberate choice on the part of the voter. As Salena Zito famously wrote about Donald Trump in The Atlantic, “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

Donald Trump’s capacity to win voters’ trust in him as a leader despite a lack of veracity in many of his statements was no doubt honed by his experience in modern broadcast and digital media. It cannot be assumed though that the public recognize political statements as false in all cases. The recent U.S. election was marked by an incredible amount of “fake news” containing lies and outrageous speculations. The fake news problem has become viral due to the ability of its practitioners to use the web to reach huge and widely dispersed audiences. It would be wrong to think that the turn to a post-truth world, fueled in part by a changing media, is a new phenomenon created by these recent elections. Almost two decades ago, Carl Bybee wrote in Journalism & Communication Monographs, “we appear to have moved into a post-factual age where the border between fact and fiction, news and entertainment, information and advertisements has increasingly blurred.”

So, what does this evolving and potentially post-truth word mean for scholarship and geography? Let’s tackle the sciences, as that is the realm I know best. Scientists often decry the divergent views on what is factual or true between themselves and the public. According to a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, despite the scientific evidence to the contrary and large consensus amongst scientists, 32 percent of the adult U.S. public do not believe in the value of mandatory childhood vaccinations, 63 percent do not feel it is safe to eat genetically engineered foods, 50 percent do not believe in anthropogenic climate change and 35 percent do not believe humans evolved over time. Scientists often lament and ponder why the facts or consensus opinions from our hard work is so widely dismissed, even in instances when there are measurable and repeatable observations (“facts”) to back it up. In some cases, such as the anti-vaccine movement, the contra-factual trend is more or less grass-roots in nature, fueled by personal fears, religious beliefs, political ideologies or misinformation. In other cases, however, public skepticism and dismissal of scientific results arise from sophisticated and large-scale media campaigns and political lobbying by special interests, such as the tobacco or fossil fuel industries. As described in Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s book, Merchants of Doubt, such campaigns, often co-opting scientists, have suppressed facts or spread false information. Healthy skepticism and inquiry is good, deliberate sowing of misinformation is not. In either case, the powerful tool of the Internet now allows the unprecedented spread of both valid factual information and misinformation alike.

Perhaps more troubling in the context of creating a post-truth world are governmental attempts to suppress facts and research. This both denies factual information to the public and policy, but also reinforces messages that facts do not matter and those facts that you do not like can simply be suppressed. For example, as reported in Science, in 2012 the North Carolina legislature passed HB 819, a measure that initially banned the use of scientific sea-level rise projections in coastal planning. This was a response to a scientific study that outlined the dire impacts or projected sea-level rise on the state’s coastline. In Canada, the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper placed severe restrictions on the public communication of science by Federal scientists. As reported in Nature, The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada summed up the situation this way, “Here’s how we do things in the Harper government” — “We muzzle scientists, we cut research and we ignore anyone who doesn’t tell us what we want to hear.” Looking at the recent U.S. election, the The Guardian newspaper interviewed Trump science advisor, Bob Walker, and concluded, “Donald Trump is poised to eliminate all climate-change research conducted by NASA as part of a crackdown on “politicized science.” It remains to be seen if this is an overstatement by the Guardian or an accurate take on the situation ahead.

The issues and concerns outlined above extend beyond the natural sciences. In Canada, the former government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper did away with the mandatory long-form census, a tool vital to collecting social sciences data. A Conservative Party advisor summed up the reasoning succinctly in The National Post newspaper, “If it can’t be measured, future governments can’t pander. I imagine that [in] Stephen Harper’s view, Canada should be a country of individual initiative, not one of collective dependence ‘justified’ through the collection of data.” I am not sure I know of a clearer statement of the cynicism and unethical quest for political expediency that is fueling the march towards a post-truth world.

The healthy and vital debates which we have as scientists and scholars about our research and how we go about it have also been cited as helping drive the movement towards a post-truth world. Andrew Calcutt’s op-ed, entitled “Forget Brexit and Trump, “post-truth” was spawned by the liberal left long ago,” provides a particularly strong take on the role of academic concepts of social constructionism in the current turn towards a post-truth world. Geographer David Demeritt has long worked on social constructionism in the sciences, and in a 2001 paper in the Annals he points out that “This political strategy of social construction as refutation has been pursued by the so-called climate skeptics and other opponents of the Kyoto Protocol.”

So, where does this leave us as individual geographers and the AAG? Because our discipline deals with so many socially, economically, culturally and environmentally relevant issues, we have a particular need to be concerned about this turn towards the post-truth. For example, many of our members work with earth-surface data and support provided by NASA. Defunding those programs would disrupt our work, and also decrease our ability to help inform the public and policy makers about important issues. I can envision many other areas of physical and human geography where the embrace of post-truth policies and public perceptions will be deeply felt by geographers and limit our efforts to contribute geographical knowledge to the public and policy makers.

However, to address these challenges we must move beyond past standard responses. I believe that, as scholars, we must understand that for many people the facts do not “speak for themselves” and that lines on graphs and numbers in tables do not carry the persuasive weight we might think they do. Neither can we assume that somehow our presumed academic authority on a topic translates to public trust. As scholars we progress in part through our skepticism of orthodoxies — why should we expect others, including the public, not to do the same? In his Annals article David Demerritt urges the scientific community to recognize “Science does not offer the final word, and its public authority should not be based on the myth that it does, because such an understanding of science ignores the ongoing process of organized skepticism that is, in fact, the secret of its epistemic success. Instead scientific knowledge should be presented more conditionally as the best that we can do for the moment. Though perhaps less authoritative, such a reflexive understanding of science in the making provides an answer to the climate skeptics and their attempts to refute global warming as merely a social construction.” I quote this passage at length because I believe it pertains not just to scientists and the issue of climate change, but to every sphere in which we, as scholars and teachers of geography, operate and wish to effectively counter the post-truth world. It is important to understand that these efforts demand truthfulness, self-examination and full-disclosure on our part. If recent political events and the rise of the post-truth world tell us anything, it is that facts in-and-of-themselves are not enough, we must also engender trust if we want our messages heard and valued.

As an association the AAG will continue to do what it has long done to monitor and respond to efforts to stifle or censure geographic research, education or the dissemination of geographic knowledge. We will work to make sure that the public and public policy makers have access to, and are informed by, geographic knowledge. We will work to make sure that such efforts support geographers and their work regardless of race, national origin, religion, sexual orientation or disabilities. When appropriate we will join with other scholarly associations in these actions. In these efforts we need the aid of our members in bringing the problems engendered by the post-truth world to the attention of the association and in helping to tackle them. In pursuit of a world that is truthful and rational we have our work to do — both individually and collectively.

Join the conversation on Twitter #PresidentAAG

—Glen M. MacDonald

DOI: 10.14433/2016.0020