In the late sixties, women in the United States became sensitized to their second-class status and organized to raise their consciousness and change their conditions. At the same time women in academia began to organize within their disciplines to address the problems they faced there. Political science was no exception; in 1969, when women constituted 5 percent of the membership of the APSA and 8 percent of all political science faculty teaching in colleges and universities, the APSA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession and the Women's Caucus for Political Science formed. Numerous reports have revealed a moderate increase in the presence of women in the profession in recent years. As Table 1 shows, the percentage of degrees in political science awarded to women has increased since 1970. By the academic year 1976–77 women constituted 11 percent of full-time faculty and 18 percent of part-time faculty. Twenty-three percent of the students entering Ph.D. programs in 1977 were women, a downturn of 3 percent from the previous year, although an overall rise from the previous decade.

The Political Science Program at the National Science Foundation provides support for basic empirical and theoretical research on political institutions and processes. The goal of the program is to facilitate the development of scientific theory and knowledge on political behavior, the operation of political systems, and the actions of governments. The program seeks to meet this goal by supporting research on a very wide range of substantive topics falling under the rubric of politics. As part of its long-range planning, the program attempts to identify areas of intellectual growth for program emphases. In making funding decisions, however, the determining factor is the scientific merit of the proposed work rather than topical or methodological closeness to the major emphases in program plans.

Support for basic political science research has been growing at a faster rate than overall NSF support for the social sciences. From fiscal 1977 to 1979 the Political Science Program allocation grew 35 percent compared to a 17 percent increase in the overall funding for the Division of Social and Economic Science.

The 22nd annual meeting of the Advisory Committee on Historical Documentation met in Washington on November 3, 1978, with the officers and staff of the Historical Office of the U.S. Department of State, and with other officials in the Bureau of Public Affairs, the Department and the government who are concerned with the release and publication of historical documentation on American foreign relations. The Committee, formerly called the Advisory Committee on Foreign Relations of the United States, continues to be concerned chiefly with the Foreign Relations series as the major form of the Department's historical documentation.

The leitmotiv of the meeting—continuing from last year—was the problem of the appropriate adaptation of the series to fiscal constraint. The problem is the more acute because the Foreign Relations series is now dealing with the 1950s, where it confronts a veritable explosion of documentation involving other agencies of government as well as the Department of State. This expansion of the relevant historical record comes at a time when increases in the budget have barely been able to keep up with the pace of inflation, thus holding practically constant the real resources available for publication.

This document provides estimates of the number and characteristics of political science faculty and students. The data utilized in this report are drawn from a number of sources: National Center for Education Statistics, National Research Council's Survey of Earned Doctorates; National Science Foundation; and two data collection devices of the American Political Science Association: The Guide to Graduate Study in Political Science and The Survey of Departments.

In many cases the statistics presented are estimates of the relevant population based on information available on a sample of cases. We shall attempt to be explicit about our definitions and estimation procedures, so that the reader can draw his own conclusions on the usefulness of individual components of this report.

Among the legendary thin volumes such as Ethics for Used-Car Dealers or Love Sonnets for Bureaucrats, one would invariably find a copy of The Wit and Humor of Political Science. There is an irony here and it is this: the very subject matter which is studied by political scientists—government and politics—has produced an enormous amount of humor, but those who study it rarely allow themselves the luxury of approaching the topic with levity or a sense of the absurd. How can it be that what is humorous in practice is so serious in theory? There are jokes about sports, jokes about ethnic groups, jokes about sex, and even jokes about religion but can anyone recall the last time he was elbowed in the ribs and had someone snicker to him, “Say, did you hear the latest joke about content analysis?” What would a joke about political scientists sound like? Would it go something like this? Question: How many political scientists does it take to experience love-making? The answer is three—two to ask each other how it felt and the third to determine the degree of inter-coder reliability. Pretty slim pickings on the whole until the book that is the subject of this piece of arrant puffery.