The Association of American Geographers' Role in Educational Leadership: an interview with Sam Natoli.

This article presents an interview with Salvatore Natoli, Educational Affairs Director of the Association of American Geographers. According to Natoli, the association is concerned with the health of geography in higher education. Beginning in 1961 the association appointed a committee to investigate how geography could be introduced into the curricular structure of undergraduate liberal education. The Committee secured funding from the National Science Foundation of the U.S. government and in 1965 issued a report, Geography in Undergraduate Liberal Education that laid the broad conceptual background for the subsequent work of the Commission on College Geography. It focused on a variety of ways to present the way to present the introductory course. First titled resource papers aimed to bring the latest developments in geographic research into small, inexpensive publications before this information reached textbooks. They were really summaries of the state of the art in various subfields or on various topics.