Today has been a day full of meetings (with another to come tonight!) and now I’m tired. One of the meetings gave me mixed feelings: a division meeting of all the science faculty to give our final approval of a decision to get rid of our geology discipline.
OK, that’s overly dramatic. We’re not actually getting rid of any of the geology classes, or any of the geology faculty, we just won’t be giving out geology degrees, and the existing structure of the discipline is getting folded into our Environmental Science program. Nothing will be lost, it’s more of an administrative shift, and apparently this is a common kind of change at many universities, but I still feel like it’s a historical break. Before there was a biology, there was geology, and geology was one of the core research fields in natural history. It’s being absorbed into a broader academic discipline, which is OK, I guess, but as an old guy I feel like something is being lost.
I wonder what will happen to biology in a few decades…what grander concept will expand to encompass my little domain?
Don’t tell me physics.
With Trump’s monstrous “drill, baby drill” sloganeering and its practical economic benefits, I’m surprised they’re stopping geology – would’ve thought that subject would be something in high demand with people being pushed towards it.
Thought it was the “soft” sciences not one as realtively hard as geology that would be under most attack…
Then again, there is the whole Christianist rejection of the reality of the age of earth – actual versus counting the biblical begats so there’s that.
But this isn’t political or cultural just administrative so, huh. Still surprises me.
Geomorphology with its focus on risks and impact of earthquakes, floods, volcanoes etc.. still being taught?
dianetics
engineering
or finance
I can’t help but think that this is a very bad idea. Geology is really about the history of the earth written in rock, and it has little intersection with other parts of the environmental sciences.
This is a grave mistake. It will lead to there being less geology experts who are really specialists on rocks.
We have provisions for students who want to specialize in pure geology.
Biology won’t be absorbed wholesale, it would be split. I am a postdoc at a big university (Canadian equivalent of an R1) which has a straight “Biology” department. Many of our peer universities already split it, usually along the lines of EEB and Molecular+Cellular. Even within our department, there are “research groups” that correspond to those divisions. But an EEB dept could theoretically be subsumed into Environmental Science, and an M+C into Biochem over in Faculty of Medicine.
But… There are enough PIs that span the gaps to avoid it for now. The “omics” people of various sorts that do evolution in wild systems stuff, the behavioural ecology people (big on molecular work), the development people who also do fossils, or the imaging people who work on cells one day but 3D geomorph of feeding morphology the next. I like it, we are all biologists in the end.
I think I hear a little peep out of Kentucky – “Floodology!”
Kind of weird when you think about it – whycome all the hyperchristians have started crawling out from under their rocks, except creationists?
“Geology is really about the history of the earth written in rock, and it has little intersection with other parts of the environmental sciences.”
I am not a geologist. Trust the opinions of a real geologist over anything that comes out of my head. That said: I think I disagree. I think there is a lot of geology in some of the other environmental sciences, just maybe not so much flow the other way. I took a hydrology of rivers course at university that was intimately intertwined with geology, for instance, though the geologists seemed to mostly care about our rivers as a way of looking at all the geology without having to dig a hole first.
@7 DaveH : “Biology won’t be absorbed wholesale, it would be split. … (snip).. usually along the lines of EEB and Molecular+Cellular.”
EEB = ???
Huh. I’d have thought biology would split along its field lines of botany, zoology, mycology then further into things like genetics, ecology, taxonomy, vetinary science, biochemistry, entomology, myriapodology, dendrology, mammology, arachnology (is that the word?), Paleobotany*, herpetology, ecology, bryology & lichenology, et cetera..
.* Come to think of it is Palaeontology itself biology or geology or a fusion of both?