Leadership in American Academic Geography: The Twentieth Century by Michael S. DeVivo (review)

The past few years have seen significant advances in the exploration of the history of American geography. Not as frequent as one would wish, however, are those works that provide us with new methods of advancing the subject.

Such a work is Michael DeVivo’s Leadership in American Academic Geography. In this tightly written volume, DeVivo brings to it his life experience, first as a Marine just out of high school, then service in the Navy, and finally as a U.S. Merchant Marine officer in command of various vessels, before entering academic life as a geographer. Not only has he seen varieties of leadership in these posts, but he has also mastered the literature on leadership and has frequently lectured on the subject. Combining these varied roles has given him the background he brings to this unusual approach to the discipline’s history.

DeVivo considers the leadership played by members, largely chairmen, of some sixteen graduate geography departments and programs, beginning with the heirs of Rollin Salisbury at the University of Chicago. His fundamental question is an important one: How is it that, in some institutions, geography flourished and later declined (and, in few cases, was later resuscitated), while in others it never developed significantly? He finds his answers primarily in the leadership provided by heads of departments and programs at critical points in their histories.

DeVivo leads us on a thoughtful tour from Chicago to the newest major graduate department, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He defines leadership (or its absence) in four categories. DeVivo sees “enigmatic leadership” (his coinage) as characterizing one “not known for his/her leadership attributes.” DeVivo believes the rise of the rotating chairmanship has resulted in the dominance of this style of leadership behavior today. He sees “transactional leaders” as dominant in geography largely before the 1970s. These leaders had some of the leadership abilities of his third category, “transformational leadership,” and perhaps exhibited strong scholarship, but fell short in other major areas of leadership.

“Transformational leaders” have a combination of talents, which DeVivo categorizes as “inspiration, integrity, selflessness, scholarship, and proaction.” Such leaders have a vision that is transmitted to and carried along by their colleagues, and also impresses the university hierarchy. “Laissez-faire leaders” are passive. They do their required administrative tasks, but lack other important attributes of leadership. DeVivo suggests (and provides several examples) that such leaders are the kinds of chairs who preside over the demise of their departments. Among the department chairs and program leaders he considers, DeVivo finds twenty-two transformational leaders, nine transactional leaders, six enigmatic leaders, and five laissez-faire leaders.

Probably most of us, on opening DeVivo’s book, will look first at his discussion of the graduate departments at which we studied and/or taught. For an example, I will discuss Clark, where I either studied or served with three of the four leaders DeVivo discusses. His appraisal of Wallace Atwood, one of the transactional leaders, is sharp but I think well justified. Atwood brought in some admirable departmental faculty to Clark in the 1920s, but his manner of handling the Clark presidency alienated his colleagues in other departments and largely discredited his pretentiously named “Graduate School of Geography” internally. His pronouncements concerning the superiority of his department, which the evidence seldom sustained, discredited the School within the profession. Toward the latter part of his tenure (after having appointed one of his sons to the faculty), Atwood lost the support of two key geography faculty members, Samuel Van Valkenburg and Clarence Jones.

DeVivo believes that Atwood’s successor as department chair, Van Valkenburg, possessed some transformational traits, and mended relations within the university, but was not a transformational leader (he was also hindered by Clark’s financial position in relation to other departments, though he did bring in two excellent scholars, Raymond Murphy and Richard Lougee.) Murphy, his successor and the most professionally visible member of the department, was not temperamentally equipped for the...