For two years, 1971 and 1972, I was on leave from Dartmouth College to serve as Director of the Department of Social Sciences of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). What I am about to say, therefore, comes from that experience, as well as a continuing concern over a longer number of years with the problems of international cooperation among social scientists. My principal aim is to explain how the UNESCO social science program seeks to respond to these problems in the period of social science development through which we are passing.

In December of 1949, a student of public service internships wrote: “All of the professions have sought reality and human understanding, at least in some degree, through the use of internships.” At that time, however, according to a survey conducted by Thomas and Doris Reed, only one American college offered what we would now regard as a political internship program.

Today this situation has changed dramatically, and the place of political internships in undergraduate (as well as some graduate) curricula is established in scores of colleges. The pressure for so-called “life experience” courses, the move toward independent study and off-campus programs, and the renewed interest of political and administrative leaders have all contributed to the burgeoning of intern programs. In fact, a recent meeting at Lexington, Kentucky saw internship directors from across the country gathering to confer on such matters as the philosophy of internship, financing, organization, relationships among politicians, academics and students, and related matters.

Despite widespread and growing interest among students and faculty in using practical political involvement as an adjunct to formal classroom teaching, professional academic literature offers little guidance regarding such programs. As Professors Hirschfield and Adler point out, political science literature has largely ignored questions regarding the scope, structure and strategies of internship programs. Anyone concerned with how students respond in these settings or with what can be done to maximize student learning during internships would find little assistance in the journals, books and monographs of political science. Indeed, no central source even has access to the number of national, state and local political internship programs sponsored by institutions of higher education, public or private agencies, and professional organizations. Consequently, communication regarding internships is fragmented and haphazard. Interested persons must rely on informal channels of communication (e.g., correspondence, mimeographed evaluations and reports circulated among program directors), infrequent conferences (e.g., the 1971 Kentucky Conference on Students in Government and the 1972 APSA Conference on Political Science and State and Local Government), and prior experience with other internship programs (45 per cent of the past academic participants in the APSA Congressional Fellowship Program reported some type of subsequent involvement in other internships, with 91 per cent of these indicating that this later involvement was administrative or advisory). Such a communications network is hardly an adequate substitute for systematic exchange and rigorous analysis. The anomaly in this state of affairs is that any exchange of information and sharing of experiences has taken place. Hopefully, these two reports in PS, the scheduled publication of a book, Government Management Internships and Executive Development, and a new journal, Teaching Political Science, plus the formation of a center for disseminating internship information, the National Center for Public Service Internship Programs with their “Public Service Internship Newsletter,” Indicate a new stage in the evolution of political science concern with internships.

In the fall '72 issue of PS, Walfred H. Peterson, Stephen Blank, and William C. Yoels have drawn some interesting data and interpretations from APSA's annual listing of completed political science dissertations. Their focus on data related to Ph.D. output, interest distribution within sub-fields, and “the fate of the Ph.D.” clearly reflect the concern of the advanced scholar who is interested in the general development of the discipline.

However, it may not be astonishing that one type of data, that may be of particular interest to the beginning student of political science or the Ph.D. candidate has been neglected. This is the question of how long it actually takes to earn the desired degree.

Departmental Ph.D. programs indicate generally that an approximate term of four years is suggested as being necessary but also sufficient for the successful completion of the entire Ph.D. program. A tabulation of data derived from our annual listings, however, easily reveal that — at least in practice — such an approximation is far from reality. As indicated in table I, more than twice that time lies actually on an average between graduation and the successful completion of the dissertation.

In a 1972 “Communications” to PS I noted that according to the annual listing of “Doctoral Dissertations in Political Science, 1971,” women had not come close to achieving parity in numbers with the male members of the profession.

Curious to see if the 1972 listing would show any sizable change, I once again divided the names by sex. The results were almost exactly the same.

Even if the list is viewed by selected subject areas, the percentage of females never goes above 13%, although it does drop as low as 7%.

According to these figures, the field in which women are most frequent has changed from U.S. Government and Politics to U.S., State and Local Government and Politics. Public Administration shows the sharpest decrease in percentage of women, while U.S. Constitutional and Administrative Law and Foreign and Comparative Politics show increases. To guess that half of the unknown names are females is risky and adds little to the total impact.