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Richard Morrill (geographer) Richard Leland Morrill (b. 15 February 1935) is an American geographer. He is professor emeritus at the University of Washington, where he spent most of his career. His research interests have been varied, but tended to focus on population, economic, urban, political, and health geography. He was part of an early influential group of geographers who transformed their discipline through the use of scientific method and quantitative spatial analysis in the mid 1950s, which was known as the Quantitative Revolution. Morrill’s work and professional career has also been noted for its commitment to social justice and equity, and much of his work addressed questions of social inequality.

Background and undergraduate career
Morrill was born and brought up in Los Angeles (except for an exciting year in Hawaii, where he watched the attack on Pearl Harbor from that location). His father was a civil engineer for the city and his mother a teacher and librarian. His father moved him to secular and radical thinking, from which he has never retreated. His mother took a job as a librarian in the Beverly Hills schools, so that he could attend their elite high school as an out of district student. Armed with their good genes as well, he got a scholarship to Dartmouth College (where his father went). From an early age the family loved camping, hiking and travel. At Dartmouth College, he discovered Geography and at 18 was already determined to become a professor (and save the world). He Besides lots of hiking, he became a camp counselor, and led the Dartmouth Christian Union’s Hoedowners, providing music at local grange halls, and learning the guitar and mandolin to add to his classical violin. As an undergraduate he his senior thesis on water-power development on the Columbia River. His interest in urban geography led him to go west to Seattle in 1955 for graduate school to study with Edward Ullman at the Washington Geography Department. Since Ullman was heading off to Italy for field work, Morrill became the eager student acolyte of William Garrison, who was a pioneer in bringing quantitative analysis into the discipline. He and fellow graduate students became known as the “space cadets”, due to their interest and commitment to transforming geography from an ideographic, descriptive regional tradition into a mature spatial science. Their efforts at Washington and allied geography departments (Chicago, Iowa, Michigan, and Northwestern) reoriented and energized the discipline. This was vital because through the early 20th Century American geography’s existence had been under threat. It was increasingly subordinated by historians in social-studies curriculum in school curricula. It had been increasingly dismissed as a remedial subject in college curriculum.

He completed his doctoral dissertation in 1959 on predicting the effect of the new American interstate highway on the use of medical services. Morrill took up his first academic position as an assistant professor of Geography at Northwestern University in Illinois. He loved the school, students and faculty, but upon finding that his UW advisor, Garrison, would be coming to Northwestern, he accepted a job back at Washington in 1961

LOYALTY OATH CONTROVERSY

In 1960 Morrill received the first National Science Foundation research grant in Geography to study with Torsten Hagerstrand in Lund, Sweden, who guided the NSF work on urbanization in Sweden over time (a classic spatial diffusion experiment). Morrill and his wife Margaret, were also able to travel extensively in Eastern Europe’s Soviet style regimes, which cured Morrill of any hope that their model of state socialism would work, opting instead for the Scandinavian model of social democracy.

Back in Seattle in 1961, he found the economic geography program fully staffed, so by default he moved into social geography, beginning with courses and research on population and migration, but quickly to then pioneering courses on social inequality, geographies of race, with associated courses and field work in the local area. The academic shift paralleled his and his wife’s social activism with CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), the Unitarians for Social Justice, and the Socialist Party. He began his studies on housing discrimination and ghettoes in 1962, leading to his pioneering 1965 study, The Negro ghetto: problems and alternatives”, followed by work on the historical geography of Black America , later studies on gentrification of Seattle and the displacement of Blacks to the suburbs , continuing on to his 2014 review of 50 years of the Seattle ghetto (“CD”). Related work with the National Academy of Sciences concerned the role of technology in Navajo development. More locally he was very involved in the desegregation of Seattle schools The study of poverty and economic inequality was a parallel track of research and writing including the 1970 book on the Geography of Poverty (with E Wohlenberg), the first such book in geography, and continuing with recent studies of inequality from the national to the local level. Because these efforts in the public arena were inescapably political, it is no surprise that Morrill also now shared courses in political geography, becoming perhaps too much the generalist, when a narrower specialization might be viewed as a wiser strategy. Yet it was perhaps that Morrill’s intense fascination with statistics, location models, and scientific explanation that united all these interests, as well as requiring courses and research on methods. In 1966 he was invited to spend a year in Chicago as Director of the Chicago Regional Hospital Study, an analysis of the differential access to Chicago area health service, leading to many papers and several dissertations, and Morrill’s involvement in Health Services after returning to Seattle. In subsequent years, work in this area was mainly in public service projects on persons with special needs. Other collaborative work measured access of remote rural population to medical services (over 30 years). Currently he serves on the Board of the Medical Legal partnership for Children in Seattle.

Work in political geography too began through actual local issues, notably studies for the US Courts and the AFSC on the traditional treaty fishing areas for the tribes (Boldt decision), and violations of fair representation in many governmental bodies. But the most critical was his appointment as special master to redistrict the congressional and legislative districts for the state of Washington in 1973 (MONMONIER XXXX). This led to participation in the major Supreme Court cases on political gerrymandering and to work with the Department of Justice on redistricting the state of Mississippi. Recent work has been devoted to analyses of voting, in the 2008 and 2012 elections, locally and nationally, and to local votes on gay rights and same sex marriage.

Besides research and writing on population distribution and change and migration, Morrill was, already since 1964, involved in helping plan the local census geography, for  the 1970 through 2010 censuses, and serving on advisory committees to the Census Bureau, especially  on issues of race, and on urban and metropolitan definition. A long (1988-1996) and important involvement was with the Hanford Dose Reconstruction study, to estimate the populations affected by nuclear testing at Hanford. At the University of Washington, Morrill served as Chairman of the Geography Department from 1973-1983, and also was a founder of the Institute for Environmental Studies, first director of the PhD program in Urban Planning and Design, and had appointments with Health Services, Demography and Ecology, and the Graduate School of Public Affairs. In the Association of American Geographers, he served on the Council, and as President in 1983, and co-founded the efforts to deal with the issues of the status of women and of racial minorities, in the profession. He had similar roles in the Western Regional Science Association, serving as President in 1994(?). He served on the initial Panel for Geography and Regional Science for the National Science Foundation. For the International Geographic Union, he served on Commissions for Public Administration, Population and Settlement and Political Geography.

Over the years from 1964 to 2009, he supervised 22 MA and 30 PhD students, and served on some 250 graduate committees in a dozen departments. Because he was so overcommitted, some students cleverly took him on long hikes, and forced the needed attention. Several books and dozens of articles were jointly written by these patient students.

Morrill’s social and political interests and study of the local region led to heavy involvement with local planning issues, including formal positions like 9 years on the King County Boundary Review Board, but also ongoing concerns and disagreements with many popular planning initiatives, including rail transit, growth management and smart growth, which he opposed from the left, as mainly benefiting the affluent. Fortunately, all this involvement, requiring too many trips to Washington, DC, and abroad, left space for family and friends. After Margaret died prematurely in 1964, Morrill was able to become the first “single male” able to adopt their just arrived son. Morrill married their long time friend, Joanne in 1965, strengthening ties to Montana. Joanne, an English teacher, help[ed improve Morrill’s writing. With the addition of two more children, the family continued the tradition of camping, hiking and climbing. (SOURCES REFS?)

Morrill has received many kinds of recognition, including certificates of service from local governments and societies. Formal awards include selection as a Fellow of the American Geographical Society (1972), Meritorious Achievement, AAG, 1971, election as a Fellow of Regional Science International, received a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1983-84, and in 2014, a University of Washington award for Distinguished Retiree Excellence in Community Service.

While fulfilled by a large body of recognized academic work, and hundreds of publications  in  these areas of geographic methods, economic, political, urban and especially social geography, Morrill believes his most important and satisfying role has from efforts on addressing economic, social and political inequality, in the classroom and professional publications, through  “liberalizing” students and placing social issues in the forefront, and in the streets and courtrooms. Morrill has not retreated from the goal of explaining the spatial structure of the human physical world, but has come to appreciate as fully the meaning of place.