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.

密歇根大学地理系在经过艰苦的审查过程后于1982年停办，该过程公开地质疑了该学科的必要性。尽管事实上密歇根州的部门是20世纪大多数学术地理主要运动的中心，但它还是1980年代初至中期一系列重大部门关闭中的第一个。除了哈佛的一个著名案例外，这些事件基本上没有经过审查。十年的紧缩投资导致紧缩政策到来时，管理人员提出了一个问题：哪些学科对大学最不重要？我们发现，至少从1970年代中期开始，密歇根州的许多人就准备回答“地理”问题。出于与国防部的自卫（以及国防部与实际做法的失调）有很大关系的原因，这个答案已经准备就绪。我们利用密歇根大学本特利历史图书馆的口述历史和档案研究来追踪关闭事件。我们认为这项研究是一系列必要历史中的第一项，这些历史始于该学科的去机构化，而不是其发展和发展，即所谓的崩溃史学。