Remaining relevant, visible and vibrant: Embracing experience

Abstract

As an educator and administrator in the recreation, parks, and tourism discipline for nearly 30 years, I have had the good fortune of observing first-hand many of the trends, triumphs, and struggles that we as a collective community have confronted. In the late 1970s, I chose recreation administration with a specialization in parks and natural resources as my undergraduate major literally a few months before the passage of Proposition 13 in California that ended two decades of what many considered to be the heyday of public parks and recreation (Talmage et al., 2017). Suddenly, the job prospects plummeted for those of us pursuing a recreation-related degree. Nevertheless, many recreation educators around the country adjusted and re-envisioned their academic programs to prosper for the coming decades. During the ensuing decade of the 1980s, commercial recreation burst upon the scene largely spurred by the seminal work of Bullaro and Edgington’s (1986) Commercial Leisure Services: Managing for Profit, Service, and Personal Satisfaction. Shortly thereafter, others followed, filling the void in this emerging area of our discipline as evidenced by the first edition of Introduction to Commercial and Entrepreneurial Recreation (Crossley & Jamieson, 1988). As we entered the 1990s, the study of tourism expanded significantly, and many tourism scholars found a home in recreation-related academic departments. To coincide with this shift, Crossley and his colleagues revised the title and focus of the fourth through seventh editions (Crossley et al., 2018) of their book Introduction to Commercial Recreation and Tourism: An Entrepreneurial Approach. The 1990s also saw a shift away from leisure as a descriptor of academic department names including some of the leading doctoral degree granting programs in the United States such as Texas A&M University, the University of Utah, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Fast forward to the 21st century and event planning, hospitality, and sport management have been added to the mix for many recreation-related academic programs in North America and beyond. Again, revitalization, renewal, and embracing change propelled many academic programs to growth, innovation, and a new wave of opportunity. How is this evolution over the past 1=2 century relevant to Duerden’s (2022) thesis that it is time to contemplate a change from a leisure context to experience focus? Change in our discipline has perhaps been the only constant. Time and time again, we have observed some traditional recreation-related academic programs decline in