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Higher ground: geography faculty honored, elected to AAAS17 June 2006
As with much these days, news travels faster by email than by post. It was by congratulatory emails from colleagues that both Bill Cronon and Bob Sack first heard news of their election to the 2006 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). Sack said, "On a Monday, I received a FedEx envelope from the Academy saying that I had been elected, and then almost at the same minute I was opening emails from colleagues offering me congratulations." Cronon likewise received congratulatory email from colleagues over the weekend before his letter arrived in the mail. (Apparently, the AAAS informs current members as soon as elections are completed.) The official announcements Their letters confirmed that Dr. William J. Cronon, Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies, had been elected to the AAAS Humanities and Arts class of 2006. Dr. Robert D. Sack, Clarence J. Glacken and John Bascom Professor of Geography and Professor of Integrated Liberal Studies, had been elected to the AAAS Social Sciences class of 2006.
Upon the announcement, Department of Geography Chair Karl Zimmerer said: "On behalf of the department I would like to offer hearty congratulations to them both. It is an extraordinary achievement and much-deserved recognition, for them and for the Department." Election to the Academy represents one of the most prestigious distinctions available to a geographer. The award is in recognition of a career of sustained groundbreaking accomplishments in their fields and election is an honor bestowed upon members by their peers. The Academy has over 4,000 Fellows and 600 Foreign Honorary Members, and publishes the quarterly journal, Dædalus, a leading intellectual journal. AAAS and the role of "scholar-patriots" The Academy was founded during the American Revolution by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and other leaders who wanted to provide a forum for a select group of "scholar-patriots"—academic scholars, members of the learned professions, and government and business leaders who would work together on behalf of the democratic interests of the republic. When asked how his work fit the role of "scholar-patriot," Cronon said:
Sack remarked that issues of a free and democratic society with freedom of the press will always be extraordinarily important. "The idea of patriotism," he said, "is also about defending an intellectually-free society which is still foundational to any academic--and to the nation." Geography's place in the changing academic landscape A current project of the Academy is to develop a set of Humanities Indicators that model the state of the humanities—history, philosophy, literature, and visual and performing arts—and to baseline the trends for the Humanities labor market, graduate study, policy, and public awareness. This is a long-awaited companion to the biennially published Science and Engineering Indicators (SEI) by the AAAS. Like many traditional fields, such as philosophy, Sack finds that geography is experiencing the same disequilibrium that accompanies changes in approach and purpose:
Cronon similarly finds it almost impossible to place geography squarely within one discipline or another. "If you had to position us, I think Bob Sack and I are both working at the humanities end of geography discipline," said Cronon, concluding that geography is perhaps the best field for integrated and dynamic approaches:
Other Fellows elected in 2006 Geographers Michael Goodchild and Peter Haggett were also elected to the Academy this year. And while both Cronon and Sack had interest in their work, Sack said he had known Peter Haggett for quite some time. "At a talk he gave in Science Hall one time," said Sack, laughing, "I introduced Peter Haggett with a one sentence introduction. It was: 'Peter Haggett: the gentle revolutionary.' I don't know what he thought about that, but I do know he is a remarkable person and a preeminent human geographer." Also, Sack and Cronon both acknowledged the contributions of the other, both in geography and to the intellectual life of the University. Along with Cronon and Sack, in other fields UW-Madison colleagues James Lauriston Skinner was elected in the 2006 Chemistry division, as well as Susan Coopersmith for Physics and Stephen R. Carpenter for Evolutionary and Population Biology and Ecology. Work in progress Although at this point, it's unclear exactly what scholarly demands the AAAS might make on Bill Cronon and Bob Sack, it is clear that both have plenty of work already in progress. Cronon is finishing his book, Saving Nature in Time: The Past and the Future of Environmentalism, which should be out in 2007. "This book has relevance to our current political situation and to the 2008 political campaigns,"said Cronon. "It's about how American environmentalism and environmental policy would be different if we thought more dynamically and historically about nature than we typically do." Cronon also said completion of his book on Portage, Wisconsin, "a sort of Michener-scale book on the making of the American landscape—in a very small frame," was several years off but that he's "never enjoyed a project more." Sack, who recently announced his upcoming retirement from the Department of Geography, is nearing completion of the first draft of a first volume on geographic theory provisionally called Facing the Gap: What Geography Says About Self, Society, and Nature. Sack remarked that "the book is going well. I think of it as a 3-volume work. The great opportunity of retirement is to have the time to work on such a large project."
### Article by Melanie McCalmont, © 2006 Department of Geography, UW-Madison mccalmont@wisc.edu Additional sites of reader interest Read the press release announcing all new members >> Read "Making the Humanities Count: the Importance of Data" >> Contacts:
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