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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

In my last report I described some attempts at innovation in the management and format of the Review; this year I can report that we have settled into our routines. The increased readability and literacy which some readers have noticed in the Review I attribute primarily to the alert and sensitive manuscript editing of Dr. Ellen Siegelman, a remarkable person who combines wide learning in the social sciences with an unusual feel for language. Jeanne Dritz, our hawkeyed proofreader, is responsible for a Review increasingly free from typographical error. The energy and imagination of Professor Philip Siegelman, our book editor, has in my opinion brought the book review section to a new level of usefulness to the profession. The work of these gifted professionals has not only lifted the quality of the Review but also the spirits of the managing editor. Barbara Hight, Norma Jean Minor, Lenny Cooper and, for a time, Margaret Carlson, performed the mundane tasks that kept the machinery going: placing the calls and opening the mail, unwrapping the books and sending out reminders, snipping authors' names off manuscripts and balancing our bank account, collating galleys and bringing back coffee.

The sum total of these routine tasks is, I suppose, what producing a scholarly journal is all about. An editorial office cannot write a scholarly journal — scholars do that. It is our job to see that what scholars do write and send to us is evaluated fairly — and so far as we can extort cooperation from our referees, promptly — presented attractively and with fidelity and delivered seasonably into the hands of readers.