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 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.

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.

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.