Many of the leading contributors to the judicial process and behavior field are persons who completed an LL.B., and then moved on to a doctorate and to teaching in political science; very few persons have gone the opposite route since the end of World War II. One of that tiny minority is the author of a recent PS article, “Who is Listening?” in which he observed that “it may be significant that some of the older generation [of traditional public law scholars] wound up teaching in law schools jointly or exclusively.” It may also be significant that it did not occur to him how well the shoe fits.

Robert Dixon inappropriately subtitled his essay “Political Science Research in Public Law” — inappropriately because what he thereby denotes is virtually a null category. Even so, his may well prove to have been the last gasp of reactionary legalism, at least in the professional literature of political science.

Three decades ago in his analysis of the academic profession, Logan Wilson found that the faculty in lesser institutions as well as the junior faculty in the major universities held teaching to have primacy over research. At the same time, however, “everywhere there (was) an attitude among the academic elite that dismisses meticulous attention to instruction as a deflection from the ‘higher’ purposes of scholarship and science.” Research, not teaching, was found necessary for professional prestige and institutional recognition. Theodore Caplow and Reece J. McGee identified the conflict between teaching and research as “the leading problem for the individual faculty member.” A faculty member is hired to teach but expected to do research and publish — at the expense of the former; and in fact, “academic success is likely to come to the man who has learned to neglect his assigned duties in order to have more time and energy to pursue his private professional interests.”

Other authors argue from a different perspective. Frank Pinner did not see teaching and research as alternatives but as “part of the same process of education, complementary activities in the academic community.” Pinner went on to explain it was not possible to allocate time to each function due to differing teaching and research demands in different fields and due to individual work habits.

In a self-consciously forward looking survey recently published in PS, Glendon Schubert continues to employ the phrase “public law” as roughly synonymous with the legal concerns of political science. The recent publication of Murphy and Tanenhaus' The Study of Public Law also reaffirms that, in spite of the movement toward “judicial behavior,” which it might have been anticipated would change the boundaries of the field, the “public” in public law is still very much with those political scientists particularly concerned with things legal. There does not seem to me to be any valid reason why political scientists should maintain the public law—private law distinction and then proceed to exclude themselves from the “private” law sphere.

In 1969 David Easton argued that a new revolution was “underway in American political science.” This revolution, which he labelled the post-behavioral revolution, is motivated by a “deep dissatisfaction with political research and teaching, especially of the kind that is striving to convert the study of politics into a more rigorously scientific discipline modelled on the methodology of the natural sciences.” Specifically, post-behavioralists, according to Easton, attack the abstractness, irrelevance, “methodological purity” and conservatism of the existing literature, and argue that political scientists as well as the associations of which they are a part, must take a more active role in the solution of contemporary social problems. In short, post-behavioralists seek to “help create a ‘new political science’ that will not be trivial or misleading.” But, what is the nature of the support within the profession for this goal? In other words, what kinds of attitudes do American political scientists hold about this new revolution? In addition, what are their views on the behavioral revolution, the other major event in the recent history of the discipline?

To answer these questions we recently conducted a mail survey of 176 political scientists in the Mountain West (i.e. Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.) Our questionnaire included twenty three items dealing with professional and related issues.

Political science, if you haven't noticed, is a highly disjointed discipline. The staggering outpouring of articles and books produced each year testify to the prodigious energy of political scientists, but as we have been reminded over and over again in protest manifestos and addresses by presidents of the APSA, the discipline suffers from a chronic case of theoretical underdevelopment. Research methods have improved, to be sure, or at least more of us are “into” statistics these days, but despite the heroic efforts of functionalists, systems theorists, formal modelers, Marxists, and other more or less global thinkers, most empirical work in political science is either highly descriptive and exploratory, or is based on propositions drawn primarily from common sense speculation.

If political science lacks the kind of intellectual guidance that allegedly would stem from consensus on a macro-political theory a la Keynes, this does not mean that researchers in the discipline are left completely adrift. There may not be any ruling paradigm to shape their efforts, but political scientists still have firm ideas about what ought to be studied and what should be ignored. An inspection of political science journals during the past decade indicates that substantial agreement exists among political scientists about the subjects that demand their attention.

There are many indications of growing interest in Canada on American campuses: new interdisciplinary programs, increasing enrollment in courses on Canada, more research projects on Canadian topics, and now, ACSUS, the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States. Why this new development? Are American scholars becoming more aware of the differences between the two countries, and consequently of Canada as a bona fide “area” of study? Has Trudeau-mania overflowed across the 5524 mile common frontier, and made Canada seem a less dull neighbor than heretofore? Has the separatist movement in Quebec, and particularly the terrorist activities there, titillated scholars disabused with the study of independence movements in farther reaches of the globe? Has the fact that Canada and the United States have entered a period of friction, if not of confrontation, with their respective national interests in conflict in many respects, offered scholars a new and significant area of study? The causes themselves warrant scientific analysis: the effects in terms of academic interest are already clearly visible.

The study of Canada in the United States can be traced well back into the nineteenth century, but was included for many years within the context of British imperial history or North American geography.

The regular lists of completed doctoral dissertations that appear in PS can be given use beyond that of keeping readers informed about the subjects of doctoral research. Converted into tables, they yield data which show the amount of work being done in the sub-fields of political science and the number of degrees being awarded at various universities. From this, other data are easily derived.

Unfortunately, a careful look at the lists reveals that they are not complete. Some political science departments that actually granted degrees have no entries at all in one or more years. These omissions, which have been confirmed by correspondence with several schools, are the inevitable result of the difficulties attendant upon the collection of information from so many offices. While they diminish in some measure the utility of the lists themselves and of the tables that appear below, the data still give a fairly accurate, though conservative, index of the number of Ph.D. degrees being awarded in political science. Certainly, it is the best readily available index we have.

Now that American political science is safely launched into its post-behavioral era, the study of community power has at long last been pried loose from the suffocating embrace of a mode of thought sometimes referred to as “pluralist.” This is liberating for pluralist and antipluralist alike; the former can no longer be sneered at for embodying or expressing or fomenting “conventional wisdom.” Indeed, on some campuses, it takes quite a lot of courage, not to say eccentricity, to harbor, let alone utter, a vagrant pluralist thought. Anti-pluralists are faced with the golden opportunity of themselves offering explanations of social and political behavior. Already, in fact, little tendrils of creativity are sprouting up, like the spring's first dandelions through the cracks of a disused sidewalk. It is, I think, too much to think of these as more than preliminary attempts at establishing a fresh new Consciousness of things political. And so it is not my thought to subject any of the major propositions that have so recently emerged to the increasingly irrelevant tests of outmoded paradigms, such as obedience to rules of logic, agreement with the preponderance of evidence, accuracy and contextual aptness of citation to earlier work, and so forth.

One component of a survey of Western European studies in the United States being conducted by the Council of European Studies in cooperation with the Institute of International Studies of the U.S. Office of Education is a study of dissertations completed in the social sciences in recent years with special emphasis on those in the area of Western European Studies. The full study, to be published early next year, seeks to identify the actual and potential resources in the American academic community with a goal to increasing our understanding of contemporary European society and politics and securing better insights into the ways in which these resources might be more effectively mobilized to support training and research programs.

The data on dissertations completed with special emphasis on those in the fields of foreign and comparative government by world area is presented here because of its general interest and as a complimntary piece to the data presented in this issue by Walfred Peterson.

For the third consecutive year there was a contest for offices of the American Political Science Association. The 1971 APSA election saw two groups fielding complete slates: the APSA nominating committee, and the Caucus for a New Political Science (overlapping in one Council nominee, Christian Bay) and two groups nominating or endorsing candidates, the Ad Hoc Committee and the Women's Caucus. The Ad Hoc Committee endorsements coincided with the nominations of the APSA nominating committee, while the ten Women's Caucus endorsements went to seven nominees endorsed by the New Caucus (three of whom were women) and four nominees of the APSA Nominating Committee (two of whom were women), the overlap being Christian Bay. (See Table 1).

The 1971 Election had much in common with its predecessors. The principal differences shown in Table 2 are a continuing decline in voter turnout, a slow but continuing increase in the number of women candidates, and the entry of the Women's Caucus into the electoral lists.

As any recent Ph.D. recipient can attest, the writing of a doctoral dissertation is at times a process fraught with uncertainty and anxiety over the “meaning” of one's work and its implications for the growth of knowledge in the discipline. The dissertation usually marks the first opportunity for a graduate student to exercise a great deal of independence and autonomy on a research project of one's own choosing; and the successful defense of the completed dissertation represents the final phase in a socialization process designed to initiate the newcomer into the sacred “holies” of academic folkways and mores.

From its inception in 1861, when Yale became the first American university to grant the Ph.D. degree, the doctoral degree was viewed as a “research degree” and the writing of a dissertation was justified in terms of making an “original contribution” to the scholar's own discipline. A casual glance through several recent graduate school catalogues indicates that the official rhetoric concerning the dissertation continues to stress the notion of an “original contribution.”