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 committee has been charged by the Council with exploring possibilities for employment of political scientists outside of universities in the present and future. This assignment is prompted by some historic facts. We can expect to see a 25 percent decline in the number of undergraduate students in the next decade. This means fewer faculty members. If graduate programs continue at their present size during that period, one-half of the Ph.D.s in political science will be employed outside of academic life by the late 1980s.

The discipline could encourage these trends by closing down many graduate programs, keeping the field small and academic, and focusing increasingly on undergraduate teaching. This may happen anyway as prospective graduate students disappear.

As an alternative the discipline could develop new kinds of graduate education which would prepare M.A. and Ph.D. students for professional careers outside academic life.

It is three minutes of ten on a Monday morning. A long buzzer sounds. Quickly sweeping papers and books aside, climbing the 40 steps in a score of bounds, crossing the wooden barrier to enter by a side door, one slips into a chair in the extreme back and side of the courtroom, at the foot of one of the great columns of Italian marble, in time to hear Al Wong, the Marshal, intone “Oyez, oyez….”

The formal announcement of the Judicial Fellows program which appears annually in PS and other professional journals, and the posters which are seen outside placement offices, convey little of the essence of the experience. Since the Judicial Fellows Program is not only the younger sibling of the Congressional and the White House Fellows, but much, much smaller—with only two or three Fellows selected annually—relatively little is known about it.

The city, it seems, acted as inspiration for the meeting. 330 panels, meetings, and receptions, an increase of 17 over any previous year, mirrored the surrounding variety. And, regardless of the opinion of a rather prominent editorialist, some of the Big Apple's excitement and activism infiltrated the atmosphere of our Annual Business Meeting. I know a number of political scientists who felt that it was a pretty good way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Participants, at an all-time high of 1,457, represented almost 50 percent of those in attendance. Political Philosophy took its place again as first in attendance at the 74th Annual Meeting, with the second ranked section a good 14 points behind (see Table 1 for further details). Significantly, only three panels were reported to have over 100 persons in attendance (Table 2).

Editor's Note: The Department of Health, Education and Welfare has prepared amendments to regulations governing research on human subjects. The regulations were established in response to recommendations from the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedicai and Behavioral Research. These regulations are implemented by the institutional review boards established by colleges, universities and research institutes. The intent of the proposed amendments is admirable: to reduce the categories of research coming under federal control and review. But specific amendments could impose restrictions and difficulties upon political scientists conducting research projects or teaching their students to conduct research.

The Association's Council's concerns about the proposed regulations was expressed in this resolution passed on August 30:

Ithiel de Sola Pool has prepared the following analysis of the proposed regulations in order to inform colleagues of their possible impact. Political scientists who share his concerns are invited to write to the Executive Director of the APSA and join in forming a Committee of Concern about Institutional Review Board Practices by writing to: Ithiel de Sola Pool, 105 Irving Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.

The “Proposed Regulations Amending Basic HEW Policy for Protection of Human Research Subjects” which were published in the Federal Register of Tuesday, August 14, 1979, represent a substantial improvement over previous rules and draft rules, but are still grossly improper and unconstitutional.

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.

Although the Mershon Center was formally established by The Ohio State University Trustees in 1967, it is necessary and accurate to add that its origins can be traced back to 1954 when the will of Colonel Ralph D. Mershon, an alumnus, was probated. That document provided that not less than 50 percent of the income from the bequest be spent for the promotion of activities that can be said to fall within the area of national security.

Following a period of years during which a university-wide faculty committee administered the funds made available from the restricted endowment income, the Trustees approved what amounted in essence to a social science program of national security studies to be administered by a director. The late Edgar S. Furniss, Jr., came from Princeton in 1963 to conceive and implement the new program. Until his untimely death in 1966, Furniss' extremely effective leadership made possible a series of faculty appointments, doctoral fellowships, widely heralded international conferences, and high quality, scholarly publications whose enduring relevance and impact are plainly visible years later.

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.

The National Science Foundation provides support for basic social science research on law and legal institutions through the Law and Social Sciences Program. The primary emphasis of the program is on research that will enhance understanding of the nature and sources of variation in legal rules and institutions and their consequences. Proposals directed to developing methodologies for the social scientific study of law are also considered. Proposals concerning criminal aspects of the law will be considered if they relate primarily to theoretical questions in the social scientific study of the law. However, the central focus of the Law and Social Sciences Program is on noncriminal aspects of the legal system.

Those who anticipate submitting proposals might keep in mind the broad concerns that are central to the program:

1. The capacity of law, through statutes, administrative regulations, and court decisions, to affect individual and organizational behavior, its limitations in regulating action, conditions which enhance or diminish the impact of law, and the processes by which that impact is achieved or diminished.

2. The use of alternative methods, both formal (legal) and informal (extra-legal), for dealing with disputes, and factors that contribute to the selection of the alternatives used.

3. Change in the legal system, its causes and the processes by which it occurs, with particular emphasis on factors affecting the use of law as an instrument of social control.

In 1969 PS published the findings of APSA's first survey on the status of women in the discipline. The author concluded: “Tokenism is the prevailing pattern.” More than half of the departments had no female faculty members. Among 18 of the “distinguished” departments women comprised only 4.3 percent of the aggregate faculty. Female faculty were concentrated in undergraduate departments, in small departments with 15 or less faculty members and in part-time jobs. Has the status of women in the profession improved since 1969? To the extent that numbers can tell, this report examines the effects of a decade of affirmative action.

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.