Morrill, Richard (1939-)

Richard Leland Morrill is best known as one of the quantitative revolutionaries who impelled geography toward more scientific epistemologies, theoretical sophistication, and quantitative modes of analysis during the mid 20th century.

He was born in Los Angeles in 1939. He received a BA in geography at Dartmouth College in 1955 and then pursued graduate work at the University of Washington, where he earned his doctorate in 1959. As a graduate student at Washington, he was one of a small but influential group of students (including William Bunge, Brian Berry, Art Getis, and Duane Marble) under the tutelage of William Garrison, a doyen of the quantitative revolution in geography, who introduced his students to quantitative analysis. Walter Tobler was also a guiding figure for these “Space Cadets” at this time. Morrill taught briefly at Northwestern University in 1959–1960, undertook a postdoctoral research position at the University of Lund in Sweden in 1960–1961, and then returned to the University of Washington in 1961 to take up an assistant professorship. He remained at Washington for the rest of his career. Morrill officially retired in 1997, and he is currently Professor Emeritus.

Morrill's interests have always been wide ranging and difficult to chart linearly, but his work exemplified two principles: (1) that geography should be a science, as science is the most valid and reliable means of getting at the truth (this stood in contrast with the largely descriptive and parochial aims of geography in the early part of the 20th century), and (2) that geographers should work toward social and spatial justice. (Morrill was a member of CORE [the Congress of Racial Equality] in the 1960s, was involved in the civil rights and other progressive causes, and in 1969 was one of the founding members of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography.) Systematically, his work has been categorized in terms of political, economic, health, urban, population, and transportation geographies. His research specialties have included social and economic inequality, political representation, redistricting and voting behavior, and modeling spatial behavior. His career has included longtime public service at various scales of government. For example, he has served on the U.S. Census advisory committee, the King County Boundary Review Board, and the Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project, as well as serving as an expert in various redistricting court cases in Washington, Mississippi, Indiana, and California. He served as president of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) and the Western Regional Science Association. His books include Migration and the Growth of Urban Settlement (1965), Spatial Organization of Society (1970), Geography of Poverty in the United States (1971), Political[Page 1946]Redistricting and Geographic Theory (1981), and Spatial Diffusion (1988), and he has written more than 200 journal articles. Morrill was also a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. To this day, he remains an avid hiker, especially in his beloved Cascade Mountains, east of Seattle.