Thumbnail History of Geography and Environmental Studies at SRU

When Slippery Rock University opens as Slippery Rock Normal School in 1889, all students are required to take at least one of the three geography courses offered by Maude Bingham – Geography of the U.S. and Europe, Physical Geography, and Political Geography. The name of the institution changes over the years, first to Slippery Rock State Teachers College in 1927, then to Slippery Rock State College in 1960, and finally to Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania in 1983, but geography’s presence in the curriculum remains constant throughout.
 

Warren Thoburn Strain, with a Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin, joins the faculty for the 1936-37 academic year to chair the newly created Department of Geography. The geography curriculum includes twelve courses, eight regional and four systematic ones, which are offered on a multi-year schedule. Professor Strain, who chairs the geography department through the 1950s, is honored by the university in its naming of the Strain Behavioral Science Building.

The early 1970s see the arrival of an interdisciplinary environmental program with three tracks involving nine departments. The ecological planning and social and economic planning tracks develop into environmental studies, and the water and air pollution track develops into environmental science.
 

By the mid-1970s, Slippery Rock State College’s geography faculty of nine offer both an independent geography major with concentrations in rural and urban planning, human ecology, and liberal arts geography, and a program for education majors. Paul Rizza joins the geography faculty in the early 1970s and chairs the department for most of the next 25 years. Following his retirement in 1998, he becomes the second geographer to be honored by the university when West Hall, built in 1900, is renovated and renamed the Paul and Carolyn Carruth Rizza Hall for Paul and his wife Carolyn.
 

During the 1990s the department’s program evolves to offer a B.A. in geography with concentrations in environmental planning and liberal arts geography, and a B.S. with concentrations in applied geography and environmental planning. An administrative reorganization in 2001 results in the current Department of Geography, Geology, and the Environment, with programs leading to the B.S. degree in Applied Geographic Technology and Environmental Studies and to the B.A. degree in Liberal Arts/Geography.

History of geography and environmental studies at SRU--longer version.