On the Map

America's leading geographer in the first half of the twentieth century was a Harvard man, but the University will not graduate any leading geographer of the future unless the Administration reverses its de-emphasis and spends more money on this increasingly-important field.

Isaiah Bowman, late president of Johns Hopkins, studied geography here as an undergraduate fifty years ago when many schools were neglecting it. Today's College student finds only a handful of courses on the subject. Undergraduate concentration is impossible, and no graduate students want to come here for their Ph.D.'s since Harvard has only one specialist in the field.

Geography has become more significant since Bowman's day, when it was under the Geology Department, but it has never won independent status. Instead, the Administration sharply cut geography in 1948, explaining that the University could not excel in every field.

A faculty committee headed by Professor Donald C. McKay has now called for a revival of geography with emphasis on graduate work. The Faculty Committee on Educational Policy agrees that geography deserves attention but it is not willing to increase the amount of unrestricted money spent on it.

Although a university cannot invest heavily in every field of learning and still meet its budget, a school with a large graduate program must cover certain fields adequately. Harvard continues to de-emphasize at a time when political geographers are needed by the government and when other schools, such as Yale, are building up their geography studies. The void in geography also hurts departments like Economics and History whose students cannot get expert help in problems tied up with geography.

The McKay report emphasizes the value of "human geography" as an independent subject co-ordinating work in many fields. It calls for three professors to teach geography, since one man cannot be well versed in the three vital areas today--the Far East, Russia, and North America.

Harvard already has the resources on which to rebuild a department that could be one of the best in the country. A modern building and a large collection of maps and books on geography are now unexploited. Yale is spending large sums trying to equal what Harvard has and won't use.

The members of McKay's group were skeptical of the value of geography when their work began. But after a year's research, they satisfied themselves of the importance of the field, and their word should have convinced the educational policy committee.

Harvard has always supported research in obscure fields. Geography, though obscure, is now vital to any large university. The savings accomplished in the 1948 cutback were small, for geography was not an expensive field to maintain after the initial investment, which Harvard had already made. Somewhere in the University's $30,000,000 budget, the Administration should find the additional $20,000 or $25,000 annually to re-establish Harvard as leader in geography.