Each year the members of the faculty of Gustavus Adolphus College publish dozens of scholarly articles and books and deliver scores of learned papers at professional meetings. But what feeds our research and what we care most about is our teaching. Cinema has its Oscar and television its Emmy. At Gustavus, the pinnacle is winning the Edgar. Since 1971, the Edgar M. Carlson Award for Distinguished Teaching has been awarded in honor of Edgar Carlson’s influence on this college for almost half a century, twenty-five years as its president. The recipient of the 1987 Edgar M. Carlson Award for Distinguished Teaching is Professor Robert Timothy Moline.
Having earned a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, Professor Moline has taught geography at Gustavus for twenty-six years. A common characteristic of Carlson Award winners, beginning with those four immortals, Fuller, Owen, Kendall, and Clark, has been a passion for crossing intellectual boundaries. Bob Moline continues that tradition. For him, the discipline of geography is not merely the charting of the earth. Bob is a humanistic geographer. One of the students who nominated him this year said that as Bob’s student, “you are not just learning geography but learning of the world and the people in it.” Bob sees the earth not as a place to be measured, but as a sacred space with which we humans have an organic relationship. For him, the earth is not our house, it is more like our skin. It is not so much our kingdom as it is our host organism. His research and teaching center on the mutual effects of people and place on one another.
In addition to being humanistic, Bob’s geography is global. Travel is an important part of his approach to the earth. For many years he has taken students to the San Francisco area and the Santa Clara valley to share his research on urbanization and on agricultural landscape mutation. His travels in Europe and the Mediterranean have fed his vision of a global community. For the past three years Bob has worked tirelessly to share that vision with this academic community as the college’s Coordinator of Internationalizing the Curriculum.
But it is particularly for the quality of his teaching that Robert Moline is admired. In his own words, he attempts to help students “see geography as something of an intellectual, spatial adventure.” One of his students wrote, “I would have to say that he specialized in enthusiasm.” And a member of the faculty summed Bob up with three phrases: “enthusiasm from the heart, commitment to the land, and deep care for students.” That care makes him both gentle and rigorous. He lovingly demands work of high quality from his students, just as he does of himself. But the excellence of his own work never affects his instinctive humility. In an age when self-assertiveness is deemed a virtue, it is a wonderful relief to deal with a man who is described by an early Carlson Award winner as “indefatigably self-effacing.”
Anyone who has ever had one knows that a great teacher is one who first of all loves his discipline. Of this incomparable vice, I will convict Bob out of his own mouth. A few years ago, when the college was deliberating where it might have to retrench in its program, Bob said, “Gol! If they cut out geography, I’ll go teach it on the street corners.” That is love of the intellectual life for the good of humanity.
Bob, it is an honor for me to congratulate you as a truly distinguished teacher and as a human being who embodies the best of the spirit of Gustavus Adolphus College.
Presented by William K. Freiert
Associate Professor of Classics
1986 Recipient of the Edgar M. Carlson Award