The primary mission of the Geography Department is to introduce the substance and methods of modern academic geography to Middlebury students. We provide our majors with the foundation necessary to succeed in related careers and competitive graduate programs, but we are even more committed to offering a curriculum that contributes meaningfully to our students' appreciation of an increasingly complex, shrinking world and to prepare them in ways that are immediately stimulating and challenging but that have lasting value and significance.
The Middlebury geography faculty is recognized for its interest in theoretical issues, both in the curriculum and in its collective research contribution. At the same time, from our entry-level course to the senior seminars, our program emphasizes normative issues and encourages hands-on experience.
Geography shares with other social sciences an interest in and concern for the human condition. What distinguishes geography from other disciplines is not so much the problems it explores but rather the way in which it examines them. Geography seeks to understand spatial patterns, how those patterns change through time, and the underlying processes responsible for those patterns. Accordingly, geography is unusually sensitive to issues such as scale, area, and distance, whether measured in miles, minutes, or the mental metric of a particular individual. A major objective of the Geography Department is to share and to teach the value of these concepts, while recognizing that the spatial perspective neither precludes nor devalues the importance of diverse contexts and ideas.
Geography has a legacy of studying the distribution of both human and physical phenomena. While undoubtedly easier to treat these as wholly separate sub disciplines, we believe that such separation is somewhat artificial in fact and sacrifices the understanding that comes through an integrated knowledge of physical and human systems. Accordingly, one of our major goals is to provide a general framework for understanding the physical world through physical geography, while exploring the relations among people and their natural environment in an interdependent context.
 Robert R. Churchill,
1946-2004
The Geography Department, along with the rest of the Middlebury College community, continues to mourn the loss in November 2004 of Bob Churchill, a longtime member of the Geography Department faculty.
Hundreds of students, faculty, staff, and alumni attended an early December memorial service for Professor Churchill, held in Mead Chapel.
A note from President Ronald D. Liebowitz. |