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.

On November 21, 1972 Samuel Lewis Popkin, an assistant professor of government at Harvard University, was imprisoned in the federal section of the Norfolk County jail in Dedham, Massachusetts, under a contempt order of the United States District Court, District of Massachusetts. He was imprisoned for contempt of court for refusal to answer several questions before a federal grand jury investigating the publication of the Pentagon Papers. In the course of the grand jury proceedings Popkin asserted a right under the First Amendment to refuse to answer questions concerning the identity of confidential sources and the content of his opinions and data developed in the course of research on and in Vietnam. He refused to answer the questions on the grounds that they violated his rights to freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly under the First Amendment in the absence of a showing by the government that the information sought was relevant and necessary to the government's investigation.

On November 28, 1972, the grand jury was discharged at the government's request and Popkin was released from jail.

In early January, 1973, Popkin filed a petition for a writ of certiorari asking the Supreme Court to review the case. The petition was denied by the Court in April, 1973.

The Popkin case is the first on record in American law in which the question of a scholar's right to the confidentiality of his sources and data has been raised and decided, at least in part, on the merits.

It may be an unfortunate commentary on our achievements as “scientists”, but an American government textbook tends to be a rather topical document, and the ones that are good enough to justify the effort must be updated every several years, in order to maintain their competitive position. One of the best, I think, and surely one of the ones most highly recommended to me by other political scientists, was Marian Irish and James Prothro's The Politics of American Democracy (Prentice-Hall: 4th edn., 1968; 5th edn., 1971). I used the 1968 edition in classes several times, with such satisfaction that I ordered the new fifth edition in the summer of 1971, sight unseen. As the following comments indicate, I had reason to regret the decision. Since textbooks are rarely reviewed, and since Prentice-Hall reports that this edition will be current through 1975, I have reluctantly chosen this medium to bring some rather strange attributes of this book to the attention of the political science community.

In common with many of the texts that have appeared in the last one or two years, the authors have gone to considerable effort to make their new edition more relevant to the great political disturbances we have just experienced and — to a lesser extent — are still experiencing: ghetto riots, the Vietnam peace movement, and women's liberation.

Academicians are properly suspicious of efforts to characterize all the intellectual currents of a decade by a single phrase. But perhaps our less cautious friends in journalism are not so far wrong in suggesting that we are returning in the 1970s to the conservatism of the 1950s. The first edition of The Politics of American Democracy (1959) was denounced by a John Birch group in California for its left-wing orientation. The only previous broadside attack on the book to appear in print was directed at the third and fourth editions (1965, 1968); this attack, which appeared in a 1970 issue of the Newsletter of the Caucus for a New Political Science, denounced the book for its right-wing, pro-system biases. Now we have come full circle and find the fifth (1971) edition denounced because “spokesmen of the left seem to have been given more than equal time.” In some respects we are gratified to think Mr. Stevens' critique must prove we have not grown more conservative with each edition, and we shall certainly display his comments to our children, nieces, nephews, junior colleagues, and students.

More seriously, however, we cannot be gratified to have our scholarship and our integrity impugned. We do not wish to overreact, but the charge that we are guilty of “bizarre statements of ‘fact’ and misrepresentations of the academic literature” and the suggestion that we “can no longer claim to be speaking as … political scientists[s]” can hardly be interpreted to mean that we have merely slipped into occasional error.

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.

Huey Long once described himself as sui generis. In the galaxy of American cities: New Orleans fits the same description. There is no other place like it — from the mania and madness of Bourbon Street on Mardi Gras, to the unbelievably hot, humid afternoons of late summer dozing on a bene in Jackson Square or watching the sails move in and out of the Lake Ponchartrain haze.

New Orleans is a city for the senses. The sight of a worn-out streetcar still clanking along under the oak trees of St. Charles Avenue. The smell of beer and whiskey and urine being washed down in the French Quarter by the 5 a.m. street cleaner. The moaning sound of a clarinet as it reaches out for “Just a Closer Walk With Thee.” And the taste of some of the best restaurant cooking in the country.

New Orleans also is a city par excellence of politics and politicians. Its political intrigues and range of personalities challenge the imagination. Louisiana has been described as the “westernmost of Arab States,” with New Orleans as its capitol. The zest and intensity with which the game of politics is played even overwhelms the natives from time to time.

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.

For the past few years, women political scientists have been working for measures to improve their professional status and increase opportunities available to them in the discipline. The national and regional political science associations have demonstrated their willingness to explore existing situations disadvantageous to women by the appointment of Committees on the Status of Women (CsSW). The regional committees have recently collected a variety of information on the employment status of political scientists in each of three regions. The availability of their reports prompted the Editor of PS to ask me to prepare a summary statement on the current status of women in the profession. In order to provide a more comprehensive discussion I have also assembled some additional data and indicators and the APSA national office kindly provided some data from the 1972–73 Department Chairmen's questionnaire.

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.