Once a year, or at least that’s the idea, the Institute of Geography packs up and heads out to a remote place, this time Burg Rothenfels, an old castle not far from Würzburg, to spend a weekend doing something that almost never happens in the day to day grind: actually stepping back and talking about how the institute works. Not a single research project, not one grant deadline, not one committee meeting. The whole thing. How we’re set up, what’s not working, and where we want to go.
And that’s harder than it sounds. Most of the year everyone is heads down. Teaching, supervising, writing papers, chasing funding. The castle setting helps, honestly. There’s something about getting people out of their offices and into a room with thick stone walls.
This year the big open question hanging over the weekend was staffing. Old and new positions, professorships, who is needed, where and for what. It’s the kind of topic that sounds administrative until you realize it shapes literally everything else the institute can or can’t do for the next decade. Some discussions aren’t just a line item, they are a research direction, a set of courses, a pull for the kind of students and postdocs who’ll want to come work here. So there was real time spent on where the institute needs to grow, which areas are thin, and which hires would actually move the needle rather than just filling a gap.
Tied right into that was the question of students. Not just how many, but how to attract the right ones in the first place. Geography as a field is competing for attention against a lot of other programs, and the institute knows it can’t just assume students will show up because the subject is interesting. So there was a good chunk of discussion on visibility, on what actually draws someone toward geomorphology, climate analysis, human geography, urban research, applied earth observation or georisk over something else, and on where the institute is underselling itself.
From there the conversation moved naturally into the study programs themselves. How well are the current ones actually working. Everyone has a sense of this from teaching, but a retreat is one of the few times people from different programs sit in the same room and compare notes properly. What’s the status, what interests students, which courses are pulling their weight and which ones are coasting on inertia. Evaluating a study program honestly is uncomfortable work because it means admitting some things aren’t landing the way they were designed to. But that’s exactly the kind of conversation that doesn’t happen over email.
And then the bigger question underneath all of that: should there be new study programs at all. Not as a knee jerk expansion instinct, but as a real look at whether the current lineup covers what the field needs now, or whether there are gaps that a new program could fill better than trying to bolt more content onto an existing one. No firm answer on that yet, but the fact that it’s now a live question rather than something nobody wanted to bring up is progress in itself.
None of this got fully resolved over a weekend, and it wasn’t supposed to. Positions take months to advertise and fill. Study program reform takes even longer, there are committees and accreditation processes and a dozen stakeholders who all need to sign off. But that’s kind of the point of an institute retreat. It’s not where decisions get finalized, it’s where the institute figures out which questions are actually the right ones to be asking, and gets everyone rowing in roughly the same direction before the next semester swallows everyone whole again.
