He worked as an assistant professor at Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan from 1962 to 1969 but became disillusioned with conservative US politics, racism, and the Vietnam War and its supporters.
Almost at the same time, he became an urban radical, supporting applied geography of social change and justice in inner city America and Canada.
All of these projects turned geography "in" to the immediate surroundings and issues of the inner city, rather than "out" to exciting new discoveries in foreign climes (Bunge 1971).
He did not work in an academic environment after 1973, when he was employed at York, colleagues finding him too threatening and confrontational (Wisner nd; Goodchild 2008).
Goodchild reports "The graduate seminar he gave at the University of Western Ontario was well received by many of the students, but his openly expressed disgust with the political positions of some of his colleagues made it impossible to renew his contract.
His legacy has been discussed in several articles and his work on "geographical expeditions" to the uncharted areas of the inner city, rather than to distant shores, was path breaking (Warren et al. 2019; Katz 1996; Merrifield 1995).
Barnes (1996) suggests he remained wedded to 'scientific' socialism, setting him apart from colleagues like David Harvey who soon rejected their roots in quantitative geography and scientific method when they took on Marxist forms of analysis.