A History of the Department of Global Studies and Geography at Hofstra University 2010-2023
By Nicholas Lucchetto1
Submitted as an Independent Research project in Global Studies (GS 151), Fall 2023 (revised Jan-Feb 2024)
Advisor, Dr. Grant Saff, Department of Global Studies and Geography
1 Nicholas Lucchetto is a senior earning BAs in Geography (Concentration in GIS) and Global Studies at Hofstra University. E-mail: nlucchetto1@pride.hofstra.edu
Graduates at the end of Semester Party, Spring 2015 Geography Awareness Week: Alumni Day, Fall 2023Fourteen years since the conclusion of Grant Saff and Adrienne Gillespie’s collaboration to record the 1935-2010 history of Geography at Hofstra University, few aspects of its existence, internal environment, or parent institution have remained static.
In 2010, the fledgling home of the Geography program set out to “recapture its history” (Saff & Gillespie, 2010, p. 1)2 from its prior days of being nested in Hofstra’s Economics and Geography Department, in which the Geography courses remained under-enrolled for several decades. Now, the independent Department of Global Studies and Geography resides in the Peter S. Kalikow School of Government, Public Policy and International Affairs, established within the Hofstra College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (HCLAS). This arrangement provides more of the faculty and planning resources needed to support a well-rounded Geography curriculum because splitting from Economics and Geography in 2008 gave the new Department a dedicated faculty and chairperson, increased autonomy, and a distinct identity at Hofstra.3
However, while Geography is the historical backbone to this Department’s existence, it is not the sole pillar of study that has seen major change since 2010. The birth of the Global Studies program, born out of a rise in interest in the study of globalization at Hofstra and around the world, created a new interdisciplinary Bachelor of Arts that has graduated 305 majors from Fall 2008 to Spring 2023, which are impressive numbers for a relatively young undergraduate program. The Department has also expanded its Geographic Information Systems (GIS) program with the hiring of one full-time GIS professor in 2015 and the introduction of a series of brand-new courses (see Figure 1).
A new student organization and opportunities for student involvement, alongside faculty members joining and retiring, have changed the Department. To remain strong through the strains on academia brought by COVID-19, the strategies of the chairperson and faculty continue to adjust and have affected everything from the courses it offers to the
2 https://issuu.com/hofstra/docs/geog_final
3 Dedicated resources, autonomy, and identity were frequently cited and major advantages of the newly independent Department of Global Studies and Geography within Saff & Gillespie (2010, see p. 40-42) and interviews conducted for this new report.
target audience of students it aims to cater to. However, amidst the strategic and operational shifts outlined in this paper, a strong focus has remained on retaining a core of deeply involved students who actively collaborate with the faculty and contribute to the Department’s student-centric environment.
Figure 1. Graduates of the Department of Global Studies and Geography between 2010-2023, divided by graduates with a B.A. in Geography, B.A. in Global Studies, and B.S. in GIS.
Graduate sums include students with multiple majors. For example, a student with a B.A. in Global Studies and B.A. in Geography (any concentration) would be counted as 1 in each category. Graphic: Nicholas Lucchetto. Source: https://www.hofstra.edu/global-studies-geography/alumni.html
Alongside my existing interests in transportation and urban architecture, it was partially this environment that led to my entrance into the Department in Fall 2021 (with a B.A. double major in Geography w/ Concentration in GIS, and Global Studies). At the end of the Spring 2023 semester, Dr. Saff mentioned the opportunity to create a follow-up analysis to his report with Gillespie: a retrospective and analysis of the history of the Department, post-2010. After thoroughly reading the 1935-2010 report alongside related
literature about university Geography programs, I agreed to author a new report in the Fall of 2023. My connections to the Department are strong and current; because this paper describes my opinion on the state of the Department at several points, it is important to describe my positionality as a current major, Student Aide, and recipient of a Masaharu G. Inaba Endowed Memorial Scholarship from the Department. My connections to Department happenings and figures, built over the last 3 years, partially made the findings in this report, which are those of the author, possible. For this paper, I focused on developing an understanding of departmental history before collecting outside sources for contextual review, and later conducting six semi-structured interviews with faculty and students (including a new interview with Dr. James Wiley, following up his interview in the prior paper4).
This report reviews my empirical findings and personal accounts from the interviewees to comprehensively review how the Department of Global Studies and Geography has changed in scale and scope. Dr. Saff also provided several informational and advising meetings together, reviewing the various drafts to add and clarify contextual history.
4 See Saff & Gillespie, 2010, p. 25-27.
2010-2019: Local Changes, and Finding a Departmental Identity
Wiley, Saff, Rodrigue, Jensen, and Longmire—the five full-time professors of the newly formed Global Studies and Geography—got to work brainstorming strategies for how to build this fledgling Department. Beyond establishing the core Global Studies courses, Saff & Gillespie cited the Department’s most significant achievements at this time being those that induced “a very positive synergy between the two programs and their students,” (Saff & Gillespie, 2010, p. 39). This included the introduction of many new Geography courses, including Cultural Geography (GEOG 004) and Geography of South Asia (GEOG 114) in 2008; and Population and Migration Geography (GEOG 005) and Resources and Energy (GEOG 006) in 2009. Courses in the new Global Studies discipline were now offered as well, including the preliminary course Cultural Globalization (GS 002) in the 2007-2008 academic year, and The Globalization of Food Cultures (GS 105) in 2009. Revisions to the requirements for a Global Studies major and Geography major requirements also increased the number of courses that apply across degrees. Concurrently, an increased number of teaching sections allowed more students to take Global Studies and Geography courses, meet members of the Department, and engage in its events.
One key trait of Global Studies and Geography in its first years after splitting from the Economics Department was a collective entrepreneurial spirit, as the Department’s autonomy grew (Saff, personal communication, 9/27/2023) and the faculty were empowered to act on new ideas for the Department. Dr. Wiley recalled that the faculty dynamic helped with this at the time, led by “an excellent coordinator of what others are doing to help move things [in the Department] along” in the chairperson, Dr. Saff (Wiley, 11/12/2023).
A spirit of faculty proactivity combined with a rapidly globalizing world created justification at Hofstra for the Department to exist. This contributed to the launch of two now-staple courses in the Global Studies program, Globalization and Human Trafficking (GS 108), and Globalization and Human Rights (GS 109) in 2011. Three new regional Geography
courses later launched in 2012, covering Western Europe, Mexico and Central America, and the Caribbean. While launching new courses was an exciting prospect, Dr. Saff made it a point each semester to offer the two required Global Studies courses and two senior seminars (GEOG 191 and GS 180), in order to support majors who were soon-to-begraduates regardless of their final semester at Hofstra (Saff, personal communication, 9/27/2023)—a philosophy that remains embedded in the semester course schedules to this day.
This era
Department created Mu Kappa, the Hofstra chapter of the Gamma Theta Upsilon (GTU) honor society for Geography scholars, under the sponsorship of Dr. Jensen. Students in the Department are invited into the society based on achieving a minimum 3.3 GPA, and completing at least 3 Geography courses plus 3 semesters overall at Hofstra. Mu Kappa inducted 6 students 3 in its first year, and as of 2023, 190 members have been inducted in total (GSG, “Honor Society”)5 .
5 https://www.hofstra.edu/global-studies-geography/honor-society.html
One year later, the Department was given the opportunity to administer a new scholarship program for its majors. It sparked from an event in 2011, when the family of Dr. Masaharu George Inaba shared news with the Department that Dr. Inaba had passed away in July of that year. Dr. Saff and Dr. Rodrigue, neither of whom had met Dr. Inaba during his time at Hofstra from 1959-1991 (Saff & Gillespie, 2010), chose to attend his funeral and commemorate the former Advisor of Geography, who was credited for “keeping the flame of Geography alive at Hofstra during the difficult times during the 1970s and 1980s” (Department of Global Studies and Geography, 2011)6 . At the service, Saff and Rodrigue
6 https://www.hofstra.edu/academics/colleges/hclas/geog/geog_news_inaba.html
met the family, who expressed their interest in starting a scholarship dedicated to Dr. Inaba. Dr. Saff worked closely with Gail Inaba, the daughter of Dr. Inaba, to create the new scholarship program. This was an advantageous move for the Department: creating attractive courses and spaces for students was relatively straightforward, but meaningfully incentivizing exceptional students to put their time, energy, and creativity back into the Department was deemed a greater challenge. However, if students are rewarded for their dedication with something that can be proudly displayed—a scholarship—then a material goal is created, encouraging students to aim for attaining it. Thus, the Dr. Masaharu G. Inaba Endowed Memorial Scholarship was created, and awarded to its first recipient, Catherine Misczuk (2014, B.A. Global Studies), in May 2013 (Department of Global Studies and Geography, 2013)7 . The Inaba award has awarded at least $5,000 to each recipient every year—intentionally negotiated by the Department as an addition to the recipient’s existing financial aid package at Hofstra. This enables recipients of the Inaba scholarship to use their funds toward opportunities they would not have been able to access otherwise—for example, paying off their student loans earlier, or pursuing research projects that require funding. As of 2023, the Inaba Scholarship has been awarded to a total of 12 students majoring in Geography and/or Global Studies (see Figure 3).
Several strong cohorts of students formed and contributed to the new Department in its early years, motivated to demonstrate comradery and involvement by the opportunities it created. Many of these students in this period pursued their passions for geography while bringing distinction to the Department. The official Global Studies and Geography Club at Hofstra was launched around 2010, later renamed to “Get Global”. Students Adrienne Gillespie and Allison Redman filed the initial paperwork to create a club that would hold future events for discussing global issues. Later, Get Global would organize a series of “Diversity Dinners”: meals where students and professors would gather to eat and learn about food from other cultures. Several groups of students have attended and presented at regional and national Geography conferences (including 7 https://www.hofstra.edu/academics/colleges/hclas/geog/geog_inaba_misczuk.html
NACIS, National AAG, and AAG Middle States, among others), most recently in October 2023. These conferences provide valuable exposure to new geographic findings, chances to meet with professionals outside of Hofstra, and presentation practice.
Several fascinating opportunities arose to expand the Department during its first decade. Three years after the founding of Global Studies, Hofstra was seeking to start a multifaceted program and degree in Sustainability Studies, covering the theory and implementation of sustainability in the social sciences and natural sciences. Initially, Hofstra wanted to place this program in Biology, but after an unsuccessful job search for the director where most of the final candidates were geographers or urban planners, Hofstra identified Global Studies and Geography as a more fitting home for the new program (Saff, personal communication, 1/24/2024).
In September 2011, Dr. Robert Brinkmann was hired as a faculty member in the Department to make this happen. According to a Hofstra press release titled “Hofstra Appoints Director of Sustainability Studies, Plans Multi-disciplinary Degree Program” (2011)8 , Dr. Brinkmann (formerly the Chair of Geography at University of South Florida in Tampa) identified a need amid growing movements in corporate sustainability “not just to produce students who can work for companies and institutions dealing with sustainability issues, but to produce students who would be entrepreneurs and transform our culture through their own innovations”. Sustainability Studies was set to launch its undergraduate majors and minors in Fall 2012. However, during the first year of Brinkmann’s stay in the
8https://web.archive.org/web/20150907062331/http:/www.hofstra.edu/Home/News/pressreleases/Archive/ 04122011_SUSTAIN.html
Department, it became mutually agreed that the Sustainability Studies program would function better in the Geology Department, later renamed “Geology, Environment, and Sustainability” (GES). The first Sustainability Studies class at Hofstra, Our Sustainable World (SBLY 001) would formally begin as planned in Fall 2012 within its new Department (Ellucian & Hofstra University, 2024). Despite the spinning-off of sustainability, many Geography, GIS, and Global Studies majors continue to graduate double- or triplemajoring in Sustainability Studies, now under the direction of Dr. Jase Bernhardt. Considering the adjacency between the Sustainability and Geography disciplines, it is unsurprising that a connection was initially made between the programs, and continues to exist, albeit indirectly.
While the first 6 years of Departmental life proved significant for student opportunities, 2014 marked the start of a sea change among the faculty cohort. First, in 2014, Geography Professor Dr. Kari Jensen became the first Global Studies and Geography faculty member to win Hofstra’s Mentor of the Year title, an annual student-nominated award that began in 2012. Then, in 2015, Dr. Wiley announced his retirement after 24 years of teaching at Hofstra. Following his departure in Spring 2015, the Department retained a significant number of regional Geography courses he designed, a roster of distribution courses that revived the program in the 1990s, and hundreds of memories made—from his travels around the globe with other faculty members, to the courses he taught across several generations of students. Just before the end of his last semester, Dr. Wiley was awarded the Mentor of the Year title at the Spring commencement. He also embarked on one last study abroad in Cuba under the Hofstra banner in 2015 (Wiley, 11/12/2023). Dr. Wiley, reflecting on his tenure in the Department, stated he “could not have found a better job that was more suited to what I bring to the table, and what they needed at Hofstra at that particular juncture” (Wiley, 11/12/2023). In honor of his longterm contributions, the University granted him Professor Emeritus status. When interviewed for this project on November 12, 2023, Dr. Wiley remarked that he has kept his profound interest for Geography and travels internationally as much as he can.
Dr. Wiley and Dr. Jensen with their respective 2015 and 2014 Mentor of the Year Awards.
Following Dr. Wiley’s departure, Geography education at Hofstra placed a greater emphasis on technical education in the field with the hiring of Dr. Craig M. Dalton in 2015: an expert in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a technology that has grown rapidly in its practical use and popularity. As stated previously, the Department had been running a GIS program under the leadership of Dr. Rodrigue since 1999. Yet with changes in the industry and budding enrollment figures in the existing introductory and intermediate GIS courses (GEOG 060 and GEOG 160), hiring a new GIS specialist appeared strategically advantageous. Dr. Dalton held several years of teaching experience in cartography courses he designed at Bloomsburg University, enabling him to carry over years of material to the Department of Global Studies and Geography (Dalton, 12/12/2023).
Upon Dr. Dalton’s arrival, one of the immediate conflicts to growing the GIS program was the low number of students enrolled in its courses. Introduction to GIS (GEOG 060) enrolled roughly 15 students per semester, often in Geography, Geology, Sustainability, and Urban Ecology, as a tool that directly applied to their majors (Dalton, 12/12/2023). Outside of this group, little justification on paper existed for students in other fields of study to enroll–limiting the pool of potential GIS students and the number of courses that could be run.
Dr. Dalton, recognizing that advertising to students is key to building up a program, embarked on a strategic choice with support from the Department that paralleled Dr. Wiley’s impact on enrollment success: pursuing a Natural Science (NS) distribution status for GEOG 060, starting in the 2021-202 academic year.
The distribution system at Hofstra University is a series of requirements of all undergraduate students to take a variety of courses in specific, defined categories prior to graduating—for example, one Computer Science (CS) and one Cross-Cultural (CC) course alongside the student’s major coursework. Rather than being analogous to a checklist of courses, students are free to choose from a selection of courses in each category to their liking (as long as the courses have sufficient capacity and the student fulfills all their distribution requirements). Every distribution category has requirements defined by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (HCLAS); according to HCLAS, the NS distribution status has historically applied to courses that “engage students in a rigorous study in the natural sciences,” (Hofstra University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, “Distribution Courses”)9. marketing the Natural Sciences (NS) credit that applies to GEOG 060 to Hofstra students across schools and majors, starting in the 20212022 academic year. The NS distribution is advantageous due to:
a) The requirement for all undergraduate students at Hofstra to take one or two NS courses, and;
b) The relatively small pool, in relation to demand, of courses approved in this distribution category.
Past efforts had been made by Global Studies and Geography to establish GIS in the NS category. Dr. Saff stated on the matter:
For many years I had sought NS distribution status for GIS courses, but this was always refused by the Dean as the NS category was supposedly not allowed for Departments outside of the hard sciences. It was only when Acting Dean [Daniel] Seabold was in office that my request for the NS status for GEOG 060 was positively received and then supported by a vote of the College faculty. This highlights the problems facing Geography as a discipline in that in straddles the hard sciences and the social sciences and the former role is often not supported by administrators. (Saff, personal communication, 1/24/2024)
9 https://www.hofstra.edu/liberal-arts-sciences/distribution-courses.html
NS courses regularly approach or reach capacity regardless of their home departments. Additionally, most NS courses consist of one lecture and one lab, making them highly time-consuming for most students. GEOG 060, however, defied this trait, as lectures and labs shared one timeslot, and natural science concepts such as physical Geography, navigation, and environmental pollution could be taught in the curriculum. GIS is recognized as a science by many states including New York State (Dalton, 12/12/2023).
Factual support qualifying GIS as a natural science existed, but to earn a formal NS distribution, it would be a “competitive” process (Dalton, 12/12/2023). “Natural sciences are pretty rarified,” Dr. Dalton stated, as few courses are given NS status: in the 20202021 academic year, only 23 courses at Hofstra were offered that held NS status10 (Ellucian & Hofstra University, 2024). There was bountiful evidence and appeal to petitioning for GEOG 060’s NS attribute:
Grant [Saff] gave his blessing: for anything that will bring in more students, go…It comes with its challenges, but it also comes with what is achievable at that moment, because…you’ve got to get it through the Dean, then the Committee, then the college-wide vote–the HCLAS vote–because they are HCLAS distribution credits and the other schools at Hofstra respect them, but it is HCLAS that sets the rules. (Dalton, 12/12/2023)
This process successfully resulted in the granting of a NS distribution credit to GEOG 060, first applying at the start of Fall 2021 (Ellucian & Hofstra University, 2024), and as a result, a new incentive for students across all programs to enroll in an introductory GIS section.
The change in GIS enrollment between Fall 2015 and Fall 2023 was dramatic. To understand progression in the discipline’s enrollment, records were retrieved from Hofstra’s internal course catalog system, Banner Student Registration Self Service” (Version 9.26.1; Ellucian & Hofstra University, 2024), which archives current and past years’ course listings from the Hofstra Bulletin and each course section’s enrollment numbers. In Fall 2015, one section of introductory GIS was taught, and had 19 students
10 This sum includes courses where one lecture and one lab were linked, which must be enrolled in simultaneously and thus were combined into one course for simplicity.
enrolled (Ellucian & Hofstra University, 2024). Yet in Fall 2023, 7 sections ran, with 2 reaching their cap of 35 students, 4 that reached within 1-2 students of capacity, and 1 course with 22 students–filling 62.8% of the maximum capacity for GIS courses (Ellucian & Hofstra University, 2024) (See figure 4).
Y-axis (left) depicts the number of undergraduate enrollments in GIS courses. Graphic: Nicholas Lucchetto Data source: Ellucian and Hofstra University. (2024). Banner Student Registration Self Service [Web app]. Retrieved from https://my.hofstra.edu
Amid this spike in enrollment, the greatest change beside the number of total students in the GIS program was the growing population of non-major and non-HCLAS students taking its courses. Appealing to more students has grown the pool of students at Hofstra who learn about GIS and Geography for the first time, choose to join the Department’s other courses, or even major in Geography or Global Studies. The total undergraduate enrollment across all GIS courses and sections totaled 1,531 students between Fall 2015 and Fall 2023, an increase of 1,335 from the sum of 196 students enrolled between Spring 2007 and Spring 2015 (HU, 2024).
To offer a focused learning experience around specialties in GIS, and appeal to the growing group of GIS majors, new courses in Cartographic Design (GEOG 159) and Geospatial Remote Sensing (GEOG 162) were established in the 2016-2017 academic year (Ellucian & Hofstra University, 2024). In 2017, this expansion of the program saw the creation of a new Bachelor of Science in GIS, and minor in Computer Science and GIS, aimed at students who aspire to engage in the fields of GIS, data science, and computer science.
Conversely, with new students from so many disciplines taking GEOG 060 for a necessary credit, the odds that any individual student taking the course is invested in the material itself are not guaranteed. While multiple full sections of GEOG 060 are offered every semester, Intermediate and Advanced GIS are currently only scheduled for one section each with fewer than 10 students per section (Ellucian & Hofstra University, 2024). This lends to the observation that attracting more new students to a program’s introductory course does not necessarily guarantee an increased interest among those students in joining the major, or taking higher-level courses. Speaking on the challenge of retaining students from those enrolled in GEOG 060, Dr. Dalton states:
And that makes classes like Intro GIS vital to making or breaking the Department, because we have to recruit once students are already here, and we can show them what they can do if they take the time to work in Geography. So, the challenge I'm working on right now and have been for the last year, and probably will continue to work on, is how to get people excited enough about Geography that they are able to take advantage of the tools that we are offering…It's a challenge now, with the population we've got: it’s just the [class] size of and the number of people who can do the NS [Natural Science credit] late in the late in their time at Hofstra. (Dalton, 12/12/2023)
This presents a challenge that the Department is currently trying to address by making the technical elements of GIS more accessible early on through revising the curriculum and overall recruitment strategy, with the goal of easing more students into the higherlevel courses. This is starting to pay off with a healthy enrollment for the Intermediate GIS class in Spring 2024. Additionally, as GIS can be applied as an elective for graduate students in Sustainability and Urban Ecology, since the introduction of Geographic Information Systems for Graduate Students (GEOG 260/2160), recruiting graduate
students from these programs may help provide the important enrollment figures and student involvement that the Department requires going forward.
Through current majors concentrating in GIS, including departmental peer teachers (who work directly with students requesting tutor and review sessions on GIS material), the Department aims toward personally encouraging more students to take up GIS as part of their academic careers by advertising it as an applied technology, useful for a variety of fields and marketable in today’s competitive job market. This is evident in the Department’s (2021b) GIS interest pamphlet:11
Graduates have found employment in a wide variety of occupations…Many of our graduates have pursued further education at prestigious graduate schools12 while others have been accepted into programs such as the Peace Corps and Teach for America. (p. 1)
2020-2023: Global Change, a Stay-at-Home Department, and Regaining Strength
Universities are not immune to the circumstances of public health and economics around them. Beginning in March 2020, academia faced one of the greatest challenges to student engagement, retention, and enrollment it had encountered in the 21st Century. The COVID-19 pandemic shut down in-person classes and, in many cases, entire campuses across the United States, to protect student and faculty health from the spread of the virus. The consequences of lockdowns on academic work varied by institution but spread to every corner of Hofstra University’s operations. Compounding the previous effects of the 2008 financial crisis, the pandemic reduced the number of students who could pay tuition without loans, and shrunk enrollment figures for some higher education institutions between March 2020 and Fall 2021 by 6.5% (Saff & Casellas, 2023, p. 136)13 . These changes effectively reduced the potential pool of students and tuition revenues that universities could draw from14 , and thus reduced the
11 https://www.hofstra.edu/sites/default/files/2021-02/gis-brochure.pdf
12 Said graduate schools include Columbia University, New York University, University of Cambridge, and University of Oxford, among others.
13 https://revistes.iec.cat/index.php/TSCG/article/view/150821
14 Saff & Casellas (2023) notes that this disproportionately caused changes among the strategies of “community colleges and second tier and below private schools” (p. 136), a category that includes Hofstra University.
pool of incoming students who could support departments through their academic involvement, and later as alumni. On the surface, this situation created deep uncertainty as to whether many academic institutions would emerge from the pandemic with the students and support, they need to sustain long-term success.
Hofstra was one of the few universities in the country to reopen its residential and dining facilities shortly after the strictest of lockdown rules were lifted. Students could continue to live in on-campus dormitories, but since academic buildings were closed, the remainder of the Spring 2020 class time was conducted remotely via video conferencing and virtual classroom software. Therefore, within the Global Studies and Geography Department, the critical student-faculty connection became more difficult to sustain. Dr. Saff remarked that the act of establishing and maintaining contact with individual students was often strained by technology and the lack of a common space to work and talk together (Saff, personal communication, 9/27/2023). Student-faculty interaction was isolated to scheduled Zoom courses and office hours, meaning the presence of students was now contingent on their possession of functional devices, internet connections, and suitable spaces to learn and work in. The closing of academic buildings also left the departmental office and common spaces in Roosevelt Hall closed, which later raised concerns regarding whether students would return to casually gathering in the departmental common space in Roosevelt Hall following the lockdown, restart the Department’s Get Global club (which had gone inactive due to the pandemic) or even use Department facilities. Recalling the transition to hybrid courses and student life, one Global Studies and Geography major remarked that, “Especially coming out of Covid, there wasn't really an established community of students at all” (Rocha, 11/17/2023).
Additionally, the Department did not have a full-time secretary on staff. In previous years, as Dr. Saff noted, a secretary was imperative to the event planning and administrative efforts that kept a departmental community (Saff, personal communication, 11/12/2023). The longest-serving full-time secretary for the Department, Christine Kempski, started in 2010, and after surviving a layoff in 2013, maintained her role until 2016. She was credited with having “created a welcoming and loving atmosphere…[and having] taken the lead in
organizing graduation and other events for students” (LoCurto, 2013)15 including new student recruitment. Her eventual departure from the Department led to a series of secretaries working for the faculty and students–including the current part-time secretary Nicole Dillon, who started in 2022–who have performed essential work required to maintain a departmental community. However, 2016 to 2022 was a period of high secretary turnover as full-time secretaries sought higher paying jobs and part-time secretaries sought full-time positions. Although many secretaries of part-time and full-time nature lent their effort to the job, with this rapid turnover it became more difficult to keep these community-cultivating tasks fulfilled without a dedicated, full-time administrative assistant.
During the COVID lockdown, the Department was stripped of its dedicated secretary and the Secretary of the Mathematics Department (also housed in Roosevelt Hall), Christine Jutt, was tasked to help out with the Department’s administrative needs. Saff notes that 15 https://www.change.org/p/president-rabinowitz-provost-berliner-evelyn-miller-suber-reverse-thetermination-of-ms-christine-kempski-in-the-global-studies
she provided vital assistance for the Department without any extra remuneration from the University (GSG, 2021a;16 Saff, personal communication, 1/24/2024).
Nonetheless, the Department worked to maintain strength wherever possible. In 2020, Global Health Geography was established as a cross-listed Geography (GEOG 115) and Global Studies (GS 115) course. This was a collaboration pre-dating the pandemic with Hofstra’s growing Public Health It was hoped that this new program would send students to the course and into the GIS program (Saff, personal communication, 12/4/2023). The course’s focus on the “spatial distribution and diffusion of diseases” on a global scale (Ellucian & Hofstra University, 2024) aimed to bolster the Department’s coverage of spatial analysis and applied Geography in its overarching curriculum and was also exceptionally timely given the global pandemic.
Global Health Geography was piloted for two semesters but did not reach the enrollment figures that were hoped for by the Department. Saff (personal correspondence, 1/242023) notes that the reason for this was that the Public Health program did not require any of the Department’s courses for their students, and the hoped-for collaboration between the programs did not occur. However, the course remains approved, and can be revived if demand for the class were to return.
The Department survived hybrid schooling with all its professors and programs intact, graduating 81 majors between 2020 and 2021 (see Figure 5). The following years would entail the difficult process of rebuilding community in-person, requiring additional effort from professors and students alike. However, since 2021, the departmental community has rebounded in its engagement of students for several reasons.
Compiled from data found at: https://www.hofstra.edu/global-studies-geography/alumni.html
Quintessentially, this would not have occurred without the existing avenues for student connection that the Department provided. Courses across the Global Studies and Geography programs already shared many of the same students from one cohort; when these courses returned in person, students were not only able to congregate and communicate at a deeper level once again, but often saw each other multiple times throughout their schedules, forming friendships based on their shared experiences—not only within the Department, but also across adjacent programs at Hofstra.
The case of one of these students is emblematic of this process. Julian Rocha (2024, B.A. Geography w/ Concentration in GIS, B.A. Global Studies) entered Hofstra University as an undecided major looking at various departments but declared a major in Geography
shortly after taking Urbanization in the Developing World (GEOG 106) with Dr. Lippencott, which the student called “one of the best classes I’ve taken in college” (Rocha, 11/17/2023).
Rocha was advised further by the faculty to join more classes in the disciplines of Global Studies and Geography, which further invested him into the program’s curriculum, connected him with more students, and got him involved with peer teaching and working as a student aide in the Department. Through his involvement, he found several friends who had also joined the Department (including the author, whose experiences are not directly cited in this report but are noted for transparency) through positive encounters with students and faculty. In an example of student involvement, they shared academic as well as personal interests and initiated several departmental projects together including a revival of the Get Global club in 2023 (which was particularly encouraged by Dr. Jensen), and various academic trips. For example, Global Studies and Geography Adjunct Professor Tiffany Cousins and four majors represented Hofstra most recently at the 2023 AAG Middle States conference in Philadelphia; and prior to that, Dr. Saff, Dr. Rodrigue, Dr. Dalton, and Geography major Natalie Correa attended the 2022 national AAG conference in Denver, Colorado. Additionally, several groups of majors have studied abroad on one of Dr. Longmire’s programs17—most recently, the 2023 “Paths to Peace” excursion in Northern Ireland, which was held from May 19 to June 10. This exemplifies how important supportive faculty are to retaining students and building a base of students who positively represent their Department. With said students engaging their peers from other programs and referring them to speak to faculty members, a cycle of new recruitment slowly grew. As a result, Global Studies and Geography has been known among its members across many years as an enclave of intellectual stimulation at Hofstra. Dr. Wiley noticed that when he encountered double-majors and minors in the Department who split their time with other programs, they “would come and say, this is
17 Dr. Longmire ran several other study abroad programs at Hofstra including the Mexican Odyssey, American Odyssey, and the 26-year European Odyssey series (Knock, 2011, https://www.newsday.com/news/hofstra-s-european-odyssey-turns-20-j82593) which was moved under the Global Studies and Geography umbrella.
like a breath of fresh air” (Wiley, 11/12/2023). In the current departmental atmosphere, it appears that this notion still rings true.
Students of the Paths to Peace in Northern Ireland study abroad program, including several Department majors/minors, May 2023.
Source: Julian Rocha
Conclusion: Trends, Concerns, Hopes and the Future
Fourteen years after the first edition of this paper’s publication, there are many additional lessons to be learned from the history, actions, and current condition of the Department. Consequently, in a time of deep change at Hofstra University and universities in general, we can reflect upon the past to infer where the Department might stand in the future.
Trends
The prior edition of this report (Saff & Gillespie, 2010, p. 40-42) made several conclusions about which trends this Department has experienced, both in terms of advantages and challenges. These included:
a) The necessity of hiring enough committed faculty members and fulfilling enough teaching sections
b) A shared focus and identity across a newly independent Department
c) The collective investment in, constant promotion of, and consistent advocating for a program, shared by a dedicated chairperson and faculty members
d) The forming of a sense of departmental pride among alumni of the new, independent Department
Gaining the status of an independent Department helped resolve many challenges of its prior nesting within Economics and Geography. With a dedicated budget, chairperson, part-time secretary, and collection of professors all committed to core departmental programs, an advantageous position had been created in which taking coordinated action to make a successful program was far more likely.
As previously described, this tight-knit group has helped create a shared identity among the students, motivating them to contribute to the Department by holding events and starting academic projects together. This brings more students into Department spaces and attracts new students to its programs. As Dr. Dalton notes, “What makes the Department special is having a combination…of programs that allows students to take the lead,” leading to more mentorship and research based around the concepts pertinent to their interests (Hof Pop, 2017)18 .
At the end of every Department graduate’s last semester, they are gifted a copy of the children’s book Oh, The Places You’ll Go! by Dr. Seuss, in a gesture of well wishes for their future careers. This tradition provides a keepsake that encourages students to remember their time spent with the Department, similar to how a yearbook can have an extrinsic sentimental connection to the personal memories one makes while attending school. Encouraging sustained Department-alumni connections is crucial; staying connected with students following graduation, however, has evolved significantly with
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6YSqKIIBbU
time and the progression of technology. Whereas alumni information was difficult to access while conducting the prior report, today the chairperson makes a constant effort to keep in touch with alumni online (primarily through LinkedIn and Facebook). Dr. Saff and the Department Secretary regularly write posts about departmental events, awards, and ceremonies, while encouraging current students to also publicize the Department. This has strengthened alumni engagement, since posts from the Department are integrated into their existing social media and allow for comments, creating outreach and interaction without the significant cost of more traditional strategies (e.g. alumni mailing lists).
New trends have also become clear from these reflections on post-2010 history. First, there seems to be a significant transfer of students into the Department who did not originally intend to study either Geography or Global Studies while attending Hofstra. This was apparent in how most students that were interviewed for this report (or provided feedback on its contents) claimed that they either transferred into the Department from another field of study, or applied for a major from an Undecided status, due to encouragement from Department faculty and students. This is not an easy trend to sustain: Dr. Saff notes that “while this has always been the case, it is becoming increasingly difficult as fewer students take non-STEM classes thus offering fewer recruitment opportunities” (personal communication, 1/24/2024). Discovering students
who are interested in geographic teachings but do not know about the Geography or Global Studies programs is an incredibly pressing challenge.
This highlights the importance of reaching out to prospective students through existing means wherever possible (regardless of whether they have shown prior interest in these programs). Making more courses available to students of other disciplines through the distribution system has boosted the number of unplanned majors and minors who can be recruited through GIS courses into the program itself. When students who had not heard of Global Studies and Geography at Hofstra are recruited, they are welcomed in with existing systems of mentorship, career opportunities, academic opportunities (peer teaching, scholarships, student aide work), and community. This once again evokes the concept of the Department as an enclave for academically driven, like-minded students at Hofstra University.
Concerns
While growth in a Department is desirable, its leaders must take note that actual progress is sustained by being able to change course when the tides appear out of their favor. Most universities operate like ships: they take an enormous amount of time to shift—and a shift too late could become a gash in the success of an entire institution. The Department has
observed growth and the obstacles that come with it, as well as microcosms of the sea change away from an emphasis on Liberal Arts.
With a growing Department that has added 15 new courses, a new Bachelor of Science degree, and a new minor in Computer Science and GIS since 2010, hiring faculty fit to teach the discipline remains a challenge. The rapid growth of the GIS program, for example, has been overseen since 2015 by only 2 full-time professors (now reduced to 1, following Dr. Rodrigue’s resignation and move to Texas A&M University as of January 2024) and 1-2 adjuncts at a time (who are limited by the Collective Bargaining Agreement to teaching no more than 8 credit hours per semester). With 7 GIS sections taught in Fall 2023 and potential demand from students for more, maintaining a stable number of GIS sections will be limited foremost by the number of professors and amount of lab space available to the Department.
However, even with the hypothetical foresight to hire professors in preparation for future growth, gaining new tenure-track faculty is difficult. When a full-time professor resigns from their position at Hofstra, their line of tenure is closed, meaning no replacement professor can be hired without requesting a new line (Wiley, 11/12/2023). As tenured faculty are relatively expensive, petitioning for a line can involve making exceptional justification—and may or may not lead to a new open position (while a line of tenure opened for hiring a GIS professor in 2015, leading to Dr. Dalton’s hiring, Dr. Wiley’s former line of tenure has remained dormant since his retirement). However, if a new tenure-track position is approved, the hiring process must accommodate a competitive national search for job candidates. Fortunately, the University Administration recognizing the importance of GIS and the huge gap in the program left by the departure of Dr Rodrigue has authorized an expedited search for a FT tenure track Assistant Professor beginning in Spring 2024 (with an anticipated start date of Fall 2024) (Grant Saff, personal communication, 1/24/2024). Although a search is lengthy and multi-step, there is a strategy for resolving faculty absences far faster. The Department has employed 14 different adjuncts from 2010 to 2024, and the number of adjuncts actively teaching in the Department between 2010 and 2023 has varied between 4 and 7 per semester (HU,
2024). Adjuncts play an important part in filling courses in need of professors, and even enabling the Department to open new sections—which has been highly beneficial to the Geography and GIS programs in recent years.
The requirements for hiring adjuncts are easier to satisfy than those of full professors, which can become quite useful for the Department when absences arise on short notice. Following notice of Dr. Rodrigue’s departure, for example, other professors in the Department immediately started sending out more invitations for qualified geographers and GIS professionals to apply to open adjunct positions, making for a short-term solution before requesting to open a new tenure line (Saff, personal communication, 9/27/2023). Adjuncts are not always short-term hires, as they can also be hired as tenure-track professors in the future if their expertise and qualifications match that of an open position in the Department. The part-time status of adjuncts should not be confused with a lack of investment in the Department; there have been several adjuncts who dedicated significant time and energy to the departmental culture, from teaching courses for many years to organizing events with students. However, as adjunct professorship by its very nature is part-time work (and many Global Studies and Geography adjuncts have simultaneously taught at other institutions or worked on their PhD dissertations), it would be assumedly unfair to expect adjuncts to devote the remainder of their time to the Department amid all the other responsibilities they must maintain. Therefore, tenured and tenure-track professors are still highly important to building departmental success over an extended timeframe, even with the extra administrative energy and resources they require to be hired and retained. More broadly, the Department is affected by a shift in strategy, at Hofstra and other universities, towards heavier investment of resources and promotion of its STEM, business, and medicine programs. As more incoming students are majoring in these fields across academia domestically–undergraduate enrollments in STEM majors19 at American four-year institutions rose by 1.76% from 2022-2023 (Berg,
19 “STEM majors” refers to a collection of the CIP titles recognized by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (Berg, et al., 2023, https://nscresearchcenter.org/wpcontent/uploads/CTEE_Report_Spring_2023.pdf) which include at least one term from the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) acronym. This collection includes majors in Computer and Information Sciences and Support Services, Biological and Biomedical Sciences,
et al., 2023, p. 14)—more American universities are shifting in the same direction. Due to this and generally declining enrollments in liberal arts and sciences majors20 , by -2.4% at American four-year institutions from 2022-2023 (Berg, et al., 2023, p. 14), Liberal Arts departments feel more pressured to change and adapt, rather than maintain continuity with how they operated previously. This has been shown in the Department’s efforts to attract students from the growing fields into its programs, most recently using the NS distribution status of GEOG 060.
Engineering, Physical Sciences, Mathematics and Statistics, Engineering Technologies, Communications Technologies, Military Technologies, and Mechanic and Repair Technologies.
20 “Liberal arts and sciences majors” refers to the CIP title “Liberal Arts and Sciences, General Studies and Humanities” recognized by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (Berg, et al., 2023).
