Michael Goodchild on Maintaining Intellectual Depth

Disciplines inevitably tend to look inward, to drag their practitioners into a narrower and narrower focus, often at the expense of connection with the outside world. This is a fundamental problem with academe: How do we avoid our work becoming more and more abstract, more and more esoteric and yet, at the same time, not sacrifice quality and intellectual depth?

Michael Goodchild (with Nadine Shuurman). 1999. An interview with Michael Goodchild, by Nadine Shuurman. January 6, 1998, Santa Barbara, California. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17:3-15.