We’ve all gotten accustomed to the rhetoric; the constant drone of praise for students going on study abroad, the international diversity that all ISU students are forced to appreciate in their classwork, the multi-cultural opportunities available on campus ad nauseum. I’m still not sold. I’ve seen plenty of people getting ready to study abroad and not know the major cities or products from their destination. “I’ve heard it’s a cool place,” they say. I’ve shot the breeze with aspiring diplomats who have no idea about current events that are shaping the lives of people in Sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia. One international studies major told me of her recently assigned paper on Nepal. “That’s in Africa, right?” I took a class entitled World Food Issues, which was confusing to some of the other students in the class, because they had homogenized the poverty of the Peruvian highlands and the people living on a river delta in Bangladesh. I find it hard to believe that we are receiving a world-class education when the majority of ISU students believe that the capital city of Canada, our neighbor and primary trade partner, is Montreal or Toronto, depending on who you talk to. My roommates in Washington, D.C. asked me to tell them which states bordered Iowa. Fortunately, they weren’t ag types so I didn’t have to field the potato thing. We’ve been lulled into thinking that we are ready to tango with the global village, and we can’t even find the dance floor. When I was a freshman, I could have taken a class in world geography. It was administered through the anthropology department, since the ISU geography department was never on the map. Unfortunately, our local geography scholar left, and in the ever fore-sighted nature of a fundraising school, no one was hired to fill the void. This means I can brag about going to a school with students from eighty bazillion countries, but I don’t have the means to learn about the features, products, peoples, or governments of those countries. I can learn Latin dancing, but if I wanted somebody to teach me about why Brazilians speak Portuguese and what that has to do with Mozambique, I’m up a creek. I could take a class in feminist villains in French literature, but if I needed to know why Francophone nations continue to vote in blocs or how they interact, I’m on my own. I spent a semester in Kenya (equatorial east Africa, former British colony, the size of Texas, no, it wasn’t unbearably hot) and unless I had done extensive reading on my own, I may have thought the Great Rift Valley was some big weird ditch. I’m challenging all departments that touch a facet of geography, from economics to geology, anthropology to political science, history to business: please do not continue to do your students the disservice of not providing them with basic geographic education. The essence of the global education you are working so hard to implement in the curriculum will be lost on students who can’t conceptualize your ideas for lack of a solid foundation. We are continually told that our jobs will involve international work, interaction, and travel, but if we cannot anticipate the language, culture, climate and government of the place we’re sent, we’re not going to do our jobs well, even if we have the technical skills. In a world of instant communication, shrinking resources, burgeoning populations and increasingly complex commerce, the way humans use space will be a vital factor in reinventing technology and services. A study of geography can be personally rewarding as well. Upon my departure from Kenya, a friend wrote: “I was so glad to discover that someone out there would work so hard to find out about us.”