I’ve only spent a few years with geographers but I agree. First of all, let me say the fact that a lot of physical geographers probably don’t care about this kind of conversation may indicate something about its usefulness.

That said, a few of your points, such as the lack of education about spatial statistics and cartography, suggest that the pace of technology shouldn’t matter in the long run. Aren’t these fields somewhat robust in the face of changing technology?

This article by Middlebury econ professor David Colander suggests that economics is booming as a major because it gives students the mix of practical tools and theory that makes their investment of time and money in school possible:

http://www.viet-studies.info/kinhte/Economic_Major_CHE.pdf

Geography has the same capacity for a solid combination of practical tools and theory. A lot of Geography department’s don’t capitalize on it. As Sean points out, some do. Still, the variation in any geography departments’ interests is exciting because it allows for this continual debate.

@Brian Timoney agree that most graduates are trained button pushers unfortunately. A few exceptions like Wisco where the cartographers learn to program so they can do custom cartography outside of a GIS system. More out of necessity though and few teach the back end. I’d guess as geo becomes more mainstream it will be picked up by CS departments.

What’s striking about your slide deck is that your examples covered the most recent 3-4 years. The pace of change is jaw-dropping and most of academia simply isn’t equipped to keep up.

What’s especially rich is to ponder all the ways in which academic geography departments are utterly failing their undergraduates–

1. No experience with spatial databases and SQL
2. The foggiest grasp of spatial statistics
3. ESRI dialog-button pushing in lieu of understanding spatial analysis (see: “buffer”)
4. Paper-centric cartography vs. screen-centric cartography.

Sure, some of the above doesn’t lend itself journal articles for junior tenure, but there are way too many 2009 graduating seniors who’ve spent way too much money to exit their institutions of higher learning with a 1999 skill-set.

Brian

Nah, layer packages are nothing special. Change the extension to *.zip and open that puppy up. All it does is allow ESRI to read the contents into ArcMap/ArcGIS Explorer without all those wacky files such as *.prj, *.lyr, *.readme getting in the way.

We tend to forget that techies have their own language that we are constantly imposing on others. It’s kind of ironic that we dismiss ideas because we can’t get through another language – like that of Critical Theory.

I’ve heard the academic position of “they should come to us” repeated numerous times. After the dot-com bomb left me in a position to return to school, I took a job at a small university in the Southeast as the sole GIS support person. I started calling myself the “GIS Evangelist” because, even though we had a full site license for the ESRI software and a dedicated teaching lab complete with large format plotters and digitizing tablets, most of the faculty didn’t even know how to spell GIS. The faculty member who started the GIS lab, a parasitologist but training, had the stated attitude of “I’ve been running this lab for a decade. If they want to use it, they can come to me.” Before I started working there, he actually required faculty to take his GIS course before he’d let them even install ArcView on their machines!

Academia has a lot to learn about marketing…