The Omega Affair: Discontinuing the University of Michigan Department of Geography (1975–1982)

The University of Michigan Department of Geography was discontinued in 1982, after a grueling review process that saw the discipline’s necessity very publicly called into question. Despite the fact that Michigan’s department was central to most of twentieth-century academic geography’s major intellectual movements, it was also the first in a series of major department closures in the early to mid-1980s. With the exception of the well-known case at Harvard, these events have gone largely unexamined. When austerity arrived following a decade of disinvestment, administrators raised this question: Which disciplines were least essential to the university? We find that many at Michigan had been prepared to answer “geography” since at least the mid-1970s. This answer was at the ready for reasons that had a great deal to do with the department’s self-defense (and its misalignment with its actual practices). We draw on oral histories and archival research at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library to trace the events surrounding the closure. We see this study as the first in a series of necessary histories that begin from the discipline’s deinstitutionalization rather than its growth and development, what we call breakdown historiography.