Friday, September 21, 2007
Lawrence is the center of the world, according to Google Earth. Perhaps that is because the co-founder of engineering for the satellite mapping company is a KU alumnus. Brian McClendon returned to the Earth’s center last night to join two professors in making a case for what they called a largely forgotten field: geography.
Brian McClendon, center, engineering director at Google, goes over the panel discussion with, from left, Jerome Dobson, KU professor of geography, Greg Hurd, host of TV show "River City Weekly," and Alexander Murphy, professor of geography at the University of Oregon Thursday night in the Director Room in the Dole Institute of Politics. McClendon grew up in Lawrence. He was the co-founder of Google Earth.
McClendon joined Jerry Dobson, professor of geography at the University of Kansas, and Alexander Murphy, professor of geography at the University of Oregon, in presenting “World Hot Spots: What Google Earth and Geography Tell Us About War, Peace and Politics” at the Dole Institute on Thursday.
The presentation started off with jokes surrounding Miss Teen South Carolina’s response to a question concerning the inability of many U.S. children to locate the United States on a map. The three speakers said that her now-infamous reply, in which she said many people in the United States could not afford maps, cited a cause for alarm.
“It is not just our beauty contestants that have these problems,” Dobson said. “We face a society in which national leaders don’t understand fundamental geography.”
Dobson said that of the top-20 private universities in the United States, only two have geography departments.
“There is an old joke,” said Dobson. “What is the most common first name for a high school geography teacher? The answer is coach.”
Many universities stopped making geography a priority after World War II. He said that the lack of geographical knowledge led to misconceptions of the world and misguided foreign policy decisions.
“For the past 60 years, we’ve had more quagmires than victories,” Dobson said. “This coincides with the American purge of geography. We’re playing a game of blind man’s bluff.”
Alexander Murphy said part of the problem was the way people viewed the field of geography. He said most people thought of it only as a way to locate states and capitals.
“When you say the word ‘geography,’ it connotes lists of memorization facts,” he said. “There are a lot of other things that have come to the fore such as locations of oil resources and infrastructure.”
Brian McClendon said he hoped the availability of Google Earth software would help people embrace and fully understand geography.
“The problem with geography is communication,” McClendon said. “The President of the United States is not a technical person, most people aren’t. If you show him a presentation that goes over his head, it’s gone. If you can keep it simple, he has a chance to understand.”
The speakers said that current U.S. foreign policy complications in the Middle East had to do with geographical ignorance in national leaders. All three agreed that universities needed to better promote geography so that future generations could avoid blunders when examining borders and demographics. They stressed the need for everyone to understand not only locations of physical borders but religious and cultural borders as well.
“Geography is to space what history is to time,” said Dobson. “War is God’s way of teaching geography.”
— Edited by Amelia Freidline
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