Where Are They Now?

A Letter From James Landing (Ph.D. 1967):

August 6, 2003

To my former colleagues at Penn State, although I suspect nobody alive knows me since I graduated with a Ph.D. in l967.

I have been at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 1968, where my principal interests were minority issue studies and local environmental problems, especially in the Lake Calumet area of the southeast side of Chicago. I am presently involved in a number of projects involving wildlife and the Chicago lakefront of Lake Michigan with the Chicago Park District. For years I have been an up-front advocate on behalf of many of the environmental organizations in the Chicago area. I served 18 years as Chairperson of the Faculty Advisory Committee, the chief faculty complaint body at the University.

I officially retired in 1996 as Professor Emeritus of Geography, but the Department has hired me each year on an annual contract. In a few weeks I will begin my 51st year of teaching. In April of 2002 the Department held a dinner to honor my 50 years of teaching as well as to honor my latest book: BLACK JUDAISM: STORY OF AN AMERICAN MOVEMENT, Carolina Academic Press, 2002.

Last spring the Calumet Ecological Park Association, which I helped cofound, honored me with the "Defenders of the Lake Calumet Wetlands" award for my work in the area, and I have also received a special environmental commendation award from the Chicago Audubon Society. As you can see, the work patterns I developed at Penn State remain intact.

Now for the bad news. Under the guise of a budgetary retrenchment plan approved by the Board of Trustees, it was decided to phase out the Department of Geography. On September 1, 1996, the Department of Geography was subsumed as a Program in Geography in the Department of Anthropology. Since no new geography faculty members were hired, and retirements accumulated, there is now not a single full time geography faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I, like others, arrived in 1968 full of hope for the future of an expanding institution, but we were never able to convince the administration of the potential of geographic work.

Whether this was a problem with the Geography faculty, or just bad management, is still being debated.

My best to all Penn Staters, faculty, students, past and present.

Sincerely,

James E. Landing