GEOGRAPHY AT GUELPH
Although it has a mature campus on the edge of the city, the University of Guelph was
one of the last Ontario universities to be created in the 1960s. The founding colleges:
Ontario Agricultural College (1874), the Macdonald Institute (1903) and the Ontario
Veterinary College (1922) were cautious in making any moves towards unification and the
quest for a university charter. In 1962 the three colleges were integrated as the
Federated Colleges of the Ontario Department of Agriculture and two years later the
University of Guelph Act established an autonomous instutition with a broader mandate.
Wellington College was formed in August 1964 as a framework for the new B.Sc. and B.A.
programs. As one of the new innovations a semester system was introduced, allowing
students to enter at three points during the year. Although the Guelph colleges were
affifliated with the University of Toronto for the granting of degrees, faculty from the
University of Western Ontario had a major influence in the shaping of the early academic
structure of Wellington College. An interdisiplinary Department of Social Science was
created in 1965 and in July 1966 a department of Geography was established.
Frederick Hung (1906-1988) first served as a consultant and was later appointed the
first chair of the new department. In common with all departments at the time there was a
phase of very rapid growth. The number of faculty was expanded from 4 in 1966 to 17 in
1970 while annual course enrolments grew from 206 to 2,924 over the same period.
The geography curriculum was developed in a context of rapid student growth and changes
in the discipline. An early emphasis on regional courses was quickly superceded by a range
of deeper specialization in human and physical geography. A B.Sc. degree in physical
geography (later earth sciences) was introduced in 1975. The evolution of the graduate
program illustrates the changing emphasis within the department. By the mid 1970s there
was an M.A. stream with a focus on rural geography while the parallel M.Sc. stream
concentrated on geomorphology. A decade later the academic focus had broadened to
biophysical analysis and resource assessment as well as rural studies. In 1988 a Ph.D. in
resource evaluation and environmental analysis was introduced.
The early development of the physical branches of geography in the new university faced
challenges from some existing departments. Soil Science (later Land Resource Science) with
its interests in meterology, soils and geology was somewhat resistant to the introduction
of courses in geomorphology and climatology. Agricultural Engineering, which had courses
in hydrology and air photo interpretation, needed careful persuasion that geography had
complementary interests in these fields. The acceptance of geography’s academic
contribution to the Guelph campus evolved through the efforts of faculty members and
graduate students in the work of the Centre for Resources Development, the Kellogg
Foundation Outreach Program in Rural Development, the School of Rural Planning (created in
1980), the Centre for International Development Study and the Faculty of Environmental
Sciences.
In its first year, the department’s accommodation was limited. Faculty offices
were located above a downtown restaurant, while teaching space was provided in an old
building vacated by Crop Science. In the fall of 1967 all the arts and social sciences
departments moved into a new multistorey office and teaching building. While the facility
was a major improvement, it had been designed without any input from geography faculty.
All the specialized laboratory space required by the growing and increasingly complex
department had to be converted from rooms in distance parts of the building or elsewhere
in old facilities. Constructing a wind tunnel in the later 1970s, for example, required a
great deal of ingenuity to fit all the equipment into the basement of the old Physics
Building. When the machine was turned up to full power occupants of the upper floors began
to complain! In August 1991 geography moved into the old Horticultural Building where, for
the first time, there was adequate floor space for all the undergraduate and graduate
laboratories. The steel-framed construction of the building also provided a secure home
for the enlarged wind tunnel and other heavy equipment.
The evolving role of geography at Guelph and its broader relationship to Canadian
geography is partly shown in papers which have appeared in "The Canadian
Geographer" and in the annual record published in the "CAG Directory".
Graduates from the Guelph department are now faculty members across the country and in
other parts of the world. |
