GEO-EDUCATION IN OUR UNIVERSITIES: A GLOBAL COMPARISON AND SOME LOOKING PROBLEMS

The principal function of a university is scholarship, to provide a superb education, at the cutting edge, for the best young minds by the best older minds. Research is a natural consequence of this process; research and teaching are inextricable, one feeds upon the other. Modern universities world-wide with a few notable exceptions, are losing sight of this fundamental mission. Funding agencies compound the problem by their increasingly pro-active role in research design favoring big programs rather than the support of a clever individual.

These factors are a serious problem for “small subjects” like geology. Much field-based geology can be done individually and very cheaply but the all-important overhead may be negligible. Tenure and promotion depend upon grants and publications. Most serious field-based research takes tough physical and intellectual effort over many years. Hence, there is an understandable move to the laboratory and numerical modeling, for which the rewards are more immediate. Classic geology departments are regarded as non-viable by university administrators. Consequently, there has been a rash of excisions, fusions, and name changes (Earth Science sounds so much more scholarly than geology!), especially in the UK, where the rot was started, in the late 1980’s by a disastrous top-down review of geology departments. This has led to a situation in which few geology/earth sciences departments in the UK teach a thorough course in basic geology that prepares the student for a geological career in academe or industry. Petroleum and mining companies complain that their new intake has a poor knowledge of basic geology and have to be retrained. Geology has been hijacked, deformed, and incorporated as a minor, lip-service, component into Earth Science. We need new classic yet modern geology departments in which students are taught to map and to know their rocks, minerals, and fossils.

The position in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, and continental Europe is substantially better, where both classic geology and modern earth sciences are taught in harmony. In North America, the situation is much more complex because of its great size and diversity. In the great 4-year colleges undergraduate geological education is superb and their graduates are greatly sought after by the top graduate schools.