Section 202(a) of Public Law 253 of the 80th Congress, 1st Session, approved July 26, 1947, provides that “there shall be a Secretary of Defense, who shall be appointed from civilian life by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.” Section 311 of the same act amends the Presidential Succession Act, approved July 18, by striking out “Secretary of War” and inserting in lieu thereof “Secretary of Defense,” and striking out “Secretary of the Navy.”

The effect of these changes is to elevate the Secretary of Defense to a position in the President's cabinet and to provide for his possible succession to the presidency. The law gives authority for his appointment, but says nothing about his term of office. This raises a question concerning which there is considerable confusion and lack of information. Specifically, what is the term of office of heads of the executive departments, i.e., those who compose the President's cabinet?

If one turns to the more recently established executive departments—those of Commerce and Labor—he reads that in each case the Secretary's “term and tenure of office shall be like that of the heads of the other executive departments.” Further research discloses the interesting fact that only one of the other executive heads has a legal term. This is the Postmaster General. In his case, the law provides that “the term of the Postmaster General shall be for and during the term of the President by whom he is appointed, and for one month thereafter, unless sooner removed.”

A comparison of the postwar worlds of 1919 and 1948 indicates that the process of nation-building has moved from Europe to Asia. In the peace settlement after the First World War, the new states of the world appeared for the most part in Europe, but in the aftermath of the Second World War the new members of the family of nations come almost entirely from Asia.

In Europe, three of the states that emerged from the First World War—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—have lost their national existence and are now numbered among the sixteen republics of the Soviet Union. The only new state from a practical viewpoint to appear in the European firmament is Iceland, which dissolved the personal union of a common king with Denmark dating from November 30, 1918, and became a sovereign republic on June 17, 1944. An even exchange may be noted in the incorporation by Poland of the Free City of Danzig, once under the protection of the League of Nations and in the creation of the Free Territory of Trieste under the protection of the Security Council of the United Nations.

Although classification is difficult, the new states or near states of Asia fall roughly into a fourfold pattern: independence with partition, independence without partition, de facto or promised independence, and emergence from isolation into the family of nations.

The departments of political science in America's colleges and universities are now numbered in the hundreds, their students in the tens of thousands. The variety of these departments is bewildering, differing as they do in size, curriculum, teaching methods, political complexion, aspirations, and even in name. It is no easy matter to discover what the fifty-man faculty in political science at Columbia and the one-man department of government at a California junior college have in common; yet one thing in common they certainly do have: the introductory course, and the complex problem which it presents.

That the introductory course does present a major problem to departments of political science everywhere was clearly acknowledged by the program committee of the 1947 meeting of the American Political Science Association, when it scheduled a panel entitled “The Beginning Course in Political Science.” The problem was further acknowledged by the panel itself; hardly a person of the many who took part in its proceedings, whether seated at the round-table or holding forth extemporaneously from the audience, failed to show some degree of candid dissatisfaction with the introductory course as presently conducted at his institution. Rare indeed is the department of political science which is willing to let its introductory course ride along through 1948 in the exact shape it assumed through 1947. The urge for improvement is nation-wide, and several prominent departments have gone so far as to relieve instructors of part of their normal teaching burden and commission them to work out definite programs of radical revision.