Erwin Raisz, one of the nation's foremost cartographers and until Monday Curator of Maps at the Institute of Geographic Exploration, is a remarkably cheerful man for one whose life work has just been voted out from under him by the President and Fellows of Harvard University. He is also a remarkably philosophical man who finds no cause for bitterness in the fact that the cartography division chairman of the American Association of Geographers is very abruptly and very obviously jobless.

For Raisz has been treading a narrow academic wire ever since he came to Cambridge in 1931. From that time until Monday he had a University appointment and gave University courses, but, as a member of the Geographic Institute, was paid by Dr. A. Hamilton Rice '98, its founder. Now the University has taken over the Institute, closed it, and asked Raisz to leave the rooms he has worked in for the last 20 years.

Raisz, a small, wistful-looking man, can find no fault with the University's closing the Institute for "If they are going to de-emphasize geography they might as well do a good job of it," but he adds. "Of course Harvard is going completely against the trend in modern University education."

Since the time he was born in Hungary 58 years ago Raisz has been a crusader for geography as a method of bringing true understanding among nations. When he talks of the University's emasculation of geography in the last three years, his slightly foreign-accented voice raises and he lets his heavy spectacles drop from his eyes. "It is tragic, tragic," he says, "that in a period like this the University choose to practically abandon the one subject which teaches the differences and similarities between nations. For both an Army officer or a United Nations official, geography is the vital subject."

Always interested in the Earth as a physical body, Raisz first came to this country in 1920 to take his doctorate in geology at Columbia. At Columbia he became intrigued by the science of map-making, and in 1931 came to the Institute here as an expert in geomorphology, that branch of geography which deals with the configuration of the earth's surface. From that time until the present he has drawn thousands of maps, developed an entirely new form of map, built up the University's collection by trading some of his own choice specimens, and earned a reputation as one of the college's best teachers.

"I have done road maps and charts for history books and every other sort of map you can think of," he says, "but my whole aim in life has been to close the gap between map and land." To do this Raisz has developed a unique process of making landform maps, which show the exact physical nature of the land, from aerial photographs taken by specially-equipped Army planes. To date he has completed aerial landform maps of Canada and Arabia, and is at work on one of North Africa. Each one of these maps, which he does on contract for the Army, takes about a year to complete, and requires aerial photographs of every square foot of the nation to be charted.

Lately Raisz has been working on a new development of his which is the closest he has yet come to closing the gap between map and land. Done in colors corresponding to the land, this "land-type" map also shows its configuration and what it is used for. "The Institute's closing down will mean that I won't be able to get much new work on this started," Raisz says. "It's sort of late to get any university teaching job, but I would like to do some teaching soon. I do very much like to teach."

So until the University asks him to leave the building, Raisz will live on in Cambridge, take occasional mountain-climbing trips, and sometimes go over to Memorial Hall for a Saturday night square dance. Music too is one of his great interests, and next to his desk at the Institute is a small phonograph with a stack of records nearby. At the end of my interview with him, he put a Mexican folk-dance on the record-player and said, "Don't go just now. Wait, this is very good." And then as the sound of music filled the room, he added under his breath, "If one must go to hell, one might just as well go to music."