Imagine being the parent of a high school senior who proudly announces that they are going to spend the next four years getting a degree in Microsoft Excel. Chances are you won’t be too keen on dropping several hundred thousand dollars of your hard-earned savings to finance said degree on specific software, or to watch your kid go heavily into the vortex of student debt to do it.
And yet that is exactly what many university geography departments now offer – a degree in using GIS software.
I have had far too many conversations with people who obtained a geography degree on the “GIS track” and have then dutifully paid fees and been tested to get a GISP designation. At thirty, and often to their surprise they find themselves stuck in a career path that seems to be going nowhere. They spend their days making pretty maps or producing reports within a corporate or government organization, but they are rarely invited into the group which sets policy or makes decisions. Nobody seeks their advice on interpreting the subject matter of the maps, they are simply relegated into a service bureau role in order to graphically justify the decisions which have already been made.
Geography has always had a bit of an inferiority complex about where it stands.
Like history, it is not a subject matter per se but rather a synthesizing mode of thought about many traditional disciplines. If time is the central organizing principle of history, then space is that for geography.
Even in the late 1970’s, when I was an undergraduate at York University, the department always wondered why it couldn’t attract more majors. While the range of courses and the faculty were unified in many regards through the 1960’s quantitative revolution in geography, they covered a broad range of topical areas and often prefaced their study area with a more traditional topical discipline, such as ‘economic geography’. The use of the hybrid title says much about geography itself – it is more of a worldview than a discipline.
In the social sciences, the economics department viewed us as a curiosity. Sociology was already heavily influenced by Marxist thinking and therefore not particularly interested in evidence and data, let alone spatial data. Historians were kindred spirits, as we both recognized that things happen in both time and space. On the science side, there were some niche study areas – ecology, climatology, and maybe the agricultural sciences people – where there was common interest in things geographic.
When I arrived at the University of Toronto to do graduate work, the geography department was officially named “Geography and Urban Planning”. The urban planners were physically segregated and generally looked down upon by the geography people – and this included both faculty and students. They were the department’s second-class citizens, but the department enrollment numbers looked better.
Today, many of the geography departments now offer two tracks – one a traditional geography degree, the other a GIS specialist degree. Again, geography departments have found something to latch onto to get their major counts up.
But the reality here? The GIS track students are viewed as second class citizens, especially by the students. And we fear that the faculty considers them as cash cows only.
The distinction here is between creating analysts and technicians. Should the analyst know how to pick up a GIS tool and use it? Of course. But a good GIS technician will find it very difficult to become a good analyst because they lack the training in spatial thinking, and they are so busy producing maps for the analysts that they don’t progress. At the end of the day, we can teach a spatial analyst to run ArcGIS or QGIS in short order.
Our plea to geography departments? Please go back to teaching geography and training students to think spatially rather than just training technicians. In a business environment now talking about all things geospatial, geography does finally have the chance to take its position at the head table rather than as the wait staff.