For decades, the Northwestern geography program has been the subject of mythic curiosity. Why is it inside of the anthropology department? How has one professor managed to propagate the entire program? Who are these “chosen few” geography majors? But the discourse will finally end this summer when the geography department closes its doors for good.
Professor John Hudson, chair of the geography department, has finally decided to retire.
[Prof. John Hudson]: It’s better to go while it’s your decision, not when you’re forced to, and I’d been thinking about it and this last year I thought “this should be it,” you know, 82. I’ve had the idea of retiring before, but I always put it off—it’s something you can’t put off forever.
Now in his eighties, Professor Hudson is looking forward to using his retirement to immerse himself in his interests and catch up on projects that have been sitting on the back burner.
[Hudson]: I have a book that I have not been able to get published, but haven’t given up on it. -There would be a college level book on the geography of Illinois. It’s a very old fashioned kind of subject, but the book is there and probably needs more work. So that’s one project that I have. I have a couple of short pieces that I promised people that I would write. I have no trouble staying busy with stuff.
[Music: “Pillars”]
Professor Hudson first came to Northwestern in 1971, back when geography had its own separate department. By 1986, he was one of two tenured geography professors left. It was no surprise to Hudson when Northwestern President Arnold Weber made the call to shut down the department. Since they were both tenured, Professor Michael Dacey and Professor Hudson were absorbed into the larger anthropology department. Not long after, Dacey founded the Mathematical Models in Social Science, or MMSS, department, leaving his days as geography professor behind.
[Hudson]: So that really just left me teaching geography and I asked the dean of Weinberg and said, well, we’re not going to have a department but can we have a program? He said yes, but it has to depend only on Hudson and Dacey, nothing else.
With no funding coming from the university, Hudson was forced to make a choice: lead the program by himself or say goodbye to Northwestern geography.
[music: “The Predator”]
[Hudson] And for 37 years, I have been the program in geography.
Despite being a one-man run program, classes are usually pretty lively. Madeleine Williams, a junior majoring in Economics and Geography, often found it hard to gauge the size of the program because so many students would take geography classes to fulfill distribution requirements, or simply for fun.
Madeleine Williams: Although the department is really small because it’s just one professor and everything, Hudson, in itself, because all the classes are always pretty full because you can, like—two of them are natural science credits, so a lot of people take them for natural science, the econ counts for econ, and there’s, a lot of them can double count for electives and other things, so it’s honestly not that different.
To keep the geography program running solo, Professor Hudson took on a higher workload.
[Hudson]: So I’ve always taught more. I’ve always taught five lecture courses a year, which is more than most professors teach.
By taking on an extra class each quarter, Hudson made sure that there were enough course offerings for both a major and a minor in geography.
[Hudson]: A geography major was created, an adjunct major. You have to major in something else and over the years, there have been dozens of people who got a geography degree. Now this year, we finally got down to the last two majors and one minor are finishing up, and that will be it.
As one of the last two geography majors at Northwestern, Williams feels that the small size of the program has in some ways been a benefit, allowing her to create a deeper relationship with Professor Hudson than she might otherwise have.
[Williams]: You get to know him after he’s like, oh hi Madeline. He knows I’m from Switzerland, so it’s, like, kind of like stay after class and talk a bit. So I would say, like, definitely I mean it’s when you have a professor so many quarters, right?
I asked Williams if there were any moments or classes that stuck out to her in her time with the geography department.
[Williams]: I really liked, uh, I can’t remember the exact name. I think it’s Chicago and its Greater Region or something, like, super similar to that. I thought it was cool-because it’s nice to get to know, like, where you are. I think, like, especially being at Northwestern, I kind of feel separated from Evanston a lot of the time, so it’s nice just to get to learn more about, like, what, like, industries were originally here. How it, Chicago, like, uh, founded, how it was created? Why do people move here and, like, things kind of like that. It was nice to, like, feel more connected.
Chicago and its Greater Region, or Geography 312, has been taught by Professor Hudson for years—in fact, it is the only class he is teaching this quarter. The class begins with the changes in physical geography in the Midwestern region and discusses the Indigenous populations that originally lived in the area, along with the conditions of their displacement. After that, it moves into the more modern geography of Chicago—changes in layout, population growth, and industry.
The course offerings in the geography department didn’t always look like they do now.
[Hudson]: When I came, we taught mathematical models of this and that and everything that we could think of. It was theoretical, very mathematical and it was not, it was not successful.
As time went on, Hudson made the decision to shift the program away from the mathematical geography of the seventies and eighties to a more regional, historical look at the subject.
[Hudson]: There’s quite a big shift, I might say about a 99 percent shift in the courses that we offered from the, from 1971 when I arrived until today.
With all of the change in the geography department—and now the end of it—I was left wondering what place geography has at Northwestern, and in higher education in general. I asked two of Northwestern’s three last geographers what they thought the discipline had to offer.
[Williams]: I definitely think, like, a lot of what we learn, like, is pretty valuable. I wouldn’t want to, like, lose it as a whole. It’s, like, a really expansive topic and I would have liked to have seen it grow. I feel like there could have been an opportunity to bring in, like, outside professors to grow the program.
[Hudson]: Well I think the main thing geography has to offer is totally obvious. It’s just like history. Why not become familiar with who you are? Why it rains? Just becoming better acquainted with the world you live in and a lot of geography teaching, it really addresses that more than anything else. Its basic information is learning how to understand the environment, how to understand the economy, try to understand why this happens and that happens on a worldwide basis.
For WNUR News, I’m Gabby Shell.
Music from Soundstripe.com
Shimmer – Pillar (Copyright Free Music)
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Phillip Mount – The Predator (Copyright Free Music)
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