The Politics of American Political Scientists

The Politics of American Political ScientistsAuthor(s): Everett Carll Ladd, Jr. and Seymour Martin LipsetSource: PS, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring, 1971), pp. 135-144Published by: American Political Science AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/418058 .

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The Politics of American Political Scientists

At the heart of the debates which have resounded around political science these past few years are charges and counter- charges as to the "politics" of the contenders. Terms like conservative, liberal and radical are no longer reserved for analysis of positions in the larger society; they have become part of the regular vocabulary with which political scientists evaluate their colleagues. This increase in visible and self-conscious political dissensus extends, of course, throughout the university, but it has left a special mark on political science and the other social sciences where the issues and objects of political disagreement are so enmeshed with the regular subject matter of the discipline.

In spite of all of the discussion, and the now seemingly general recognition that the politics of members of the profession has a lot to do with its development and contributions, we still don't have very much firm information on the distribution of political views among the approximately 6,000 faculty members regularly engaged in the teaching of political science in the United States. There have been a number of studies, of course, of party identification and voting behavior, showing political science to be one of the most Democratic fields in academe. Spaulding and Turner have reported on surveys which found 74 percent of the political scientists to be Democratic identifiers, about the same as sociologists (78 percent), historians (72 percent), and psychologists (70 percent); but more Democratic than the physical and biological sciences (for example, botanists 50 percent), and much more than the applied fields (engineers 27 percent).' This high Democratic support is reflective of generally liberal

1 Charles B. Spaulding and Henry A. Turner, "Political Orientation and Field of Specialization Among College Professors," Sociology of Education, 47 (Summer 1968), p. 253. Other studies showing essentially the same distribution, include Robert Yee, "Faculty Participation in the 1960 Presidential Election," Western Political Quarterly, 16 (March 1963), pp. 213-220; and D. Stanley Eitzen and Gary M. Maranell, "The Political Affiliations of College Professors, Social Forces, 47 (December 1968), pp. 145-153.

Everett Carll Ladd, Jr. University of Connecticut

Seymour Martin Lipset Harvard University

politics. Spaulding and Turner, working with a 14 item index designed to measure the liberal-conservative dimension, classified just 10 percent of the political scientists in their sample as conservatives compared to 51 percent of the botanists, 61 percent of the geologists and 66 percent of the engineers.2

Such data bear on only the most general sorts of national political commitments. There has been very little survey work reported on the opinions of political scientists on major social and political issues before the nation, such as the war and civil rights.3 Nor is there any more information on the responses of political scientists to the many issues associated with the growth of campus political activism in the last half decade.4 There has been a lot of speculation on this latter subject, with the point often made that political science is for some reason a "conservative" discipline.5

Now, however, a major survey of college and university professors gives us the opportunity to measure the opinions of political scientists on a broad range of social and political issues. This article is a report to the profession on the survey and its findings.

2 Spaulding and Turner, loc. cit.

3 One useful, although limited, investigation of the opinions of political scientists on the war was reported by Gabriel Almond, et al., in the Communications section of the American Political Science Review, 64 (June 1970), pp. 589-590.

4 One modest body of data is provided by Ladd, "American University Teachers and Opposition to the Vietnam War," Minerva, 8 (October 1970), pp. 553-555.

5 For example, Alan Wolfe has written that "political science is one of those professions in which radical organizing does not make sense. Something seems to happen to people when they become political scientists, or maybe people who become political scientists were strange to begin with. But whatever the causal relationship, this profession is one of the least movable there is. (Economics may be worse.) Allied disciplines such as sociology and history have recognizable subgroups of scholars whose dissents from the prevailing orthodoxies were well-known to incipent radicals. . . . Radicals, in a few words, do not really exist in the discipline of political science." "The Professional Mystique," in Alan Wolfe and Marvin Surkin (eds.), An End to Political Science (New York: Basic Books, 1970), pp. 304-305.

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I. The Carnegie Survey of the American Professoriate In 1969, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education initiated several large scale national surveys of students, faculty and administrators. These studies were administered by the Survey Research Center of the University of California, Berkeley, with advice and technical assistance from the Office of Research of the American Council on Education.6 We are now engaged in analyzing data from the faculty survey.

The questionnaire requested about 300 items of information from each respondent, including in detail the faculty member's social background, his professional activities and achievements, and his opinions on a wide range of issues and controversies- from those exclusively within the domain of the academy to matters of national and international affairs. The unusual size of the sample, slightly over 60,000, lets us attend to subgroups too small for any detailed analysis in national surveys of a conventional size. Just 2.1 percent of the respondents are political scientists, but this is 1,267 faculty members, about 20 percent of those employed in full-time teaching positions in political science in American colleges and universities. This is by far the largest number ever included in a survey which measures a rich array of biographic and demographic characteristics, and social and political opinions. Sampling and weighting procedures allow us to generalize from the survey's respondents

6 These surveys were conducted with the financial support of the Carnegie Commission and the United States Office of Education, Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The interpretations expressed in this publication are, of course, solely the responsibility of the authors.

to the entire body of full-time faculty in the United States.7

We will be interested in two general sorts of comparisons as we examine the politics of political scientists in this piece. One is "external," comparing political scientists to their colleagues in other fields. The subject matter of an academic discipline involves its practitioners in a bundle of distinctive problems and concerns, and carries with it a conceptual frame developed in response to the tasks at hand but obviously applied outside the boundaries of the discipline. Subject matter also importantly influences the sorts of associations and identifications a faculty member is likely to have outside academe. A professor of engineering typically has much more contact with executives of business enterprises than a professor of English literature, and can be expected to feel closer to business interests. These features of subject matter-the area of activity it encompasses, the problems it involves one with, and the interests outside the university which it defines- together influence the type of person recruited into the field. That is to say, disciplines selectively recruit persons with consistent interests and values.8 From the companion processes of recruitment and socialization, the various discipline subcultures have emerged. We lack the

7 A disproportionate random sampling procedure was used to select colleges and universities, in order to obtain adequate numbers of institutions of various types and characteristics. The 303 schools thus chosen include 57

junior colleges, 168 four-year colleges and 78 universities. Next, a six in seven random sample of faculty was drawn from the rosters of the included institutions, yielding a sample of 100,315. A very high return of 60,028 completed questionnaires (60%) was achieved as a result of the standing of the sponsors (The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education and the American Council on Education), the careful administration of the survey, and the systematic follow-up with faculty not initially responding. The returned questionnaires, finally, were differentially weighted, adjusting the data for the disproportionate sampling of institutions and for the unequal rates of response. Tabulations from the weighted data of this survey, then, may be taken as reasonably representative of the entire population of teaching faculty at colleges and universities in the United States.

8 See Morris Rosenberg, Occupations and Values (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1957); and James A. Davis, Undergraduate Career Decisions (Chicago, Illinois: Aldine, 1965).

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space in this article to explore seriously so large a subject, but can at least note some of the distinctive orientations of political science.

The other set of comparisons are internal, of different groups within the profession. How influential, for example, is age in differentiating the opinions of political scientists? Social background? Academic prominence or the lack of thereof? The type of school at which the faculty member teaches? The questionnaire did not, unfortunately, ask the respondents to identify their subfields within political science, but the other variables potentially influential can be systematically explored.

The Carnegie survey included a wide variety of questions on political matters, from national and international affairs to such campus controversies as those over black studies programs and the appropriate role of students in university decision making. Judgments about the politics of professors are no longer based exclusively upon their views on national questions; campus issues have become important referents. Given the climate of the academic community at the time of the survey, it is very difficult to specify, on an a priori basis, which are properly considered "political" issues. Even the most commonplace judgments, such as the basis for faculty promotion, became in the 1960s sources of conflict and dissension. We chose to work with all questions of how decisions should be made in the university, what goals and purposes the academy should serve, the distribution of institutional resources, and the relationship of the university to components of the society outside which have in fact become major points of contention in schools around the country.

It was difficult to reduce the complex interrelations among faculty opinions on such a range of political matters (that is, their correlations) to a small number of neat and distinct categories. Factor analysis, however,

did reveal the mass of opinions coalescing around four primary dimensions, three involving campus politics and one containing issues in the national arena.9 Scales

measuring each of these dimensions were subsequently constructed: a five item liberalism-conservatism scale for national issues, comprising positions on the Vietnam war, the legalization of marijuana, the causes of Negro riots, and on busing to achieve school integration, and as well the faculty member's self-characterization of his political views; a four item campus activism scale, including questions calling for both a general evaluation of "the emergence of radical student activism" and for prescribing the appropriate university response to protests and demonstrations; a student role scale composed of five questions each beginning, "What role do you believe undergraduates should play in . . .?", and covering faculty appointment and promotion, undergraduate admission policy, the provision and content of courses, and student discipline-with the alternatives ranging from "control" to "little or no role"; and finally a five item scale measuring faculty judgments as to university policy toward blacks, whether "normal academic standards" should be relaxed in recruiting black undergraduates and faculty, whether black studies programs should be established upon the demand of black students and controlled by blacks, and whether the overall response of American colleges and universities should be considered "racist." 10

We should note that opinions on questions as diverse as Vietnam, race, and the legalization of marijuana almost certainly could not be organized into a single liberal- conservative dimension for the general population. That these opinions did

9 A factor analysis and orthogonal rotation was performed on the data.

10 Space does not permit us to provide the text of all of the questions in the four scales or to describe precisely the construction of each scale. This information is available upon request.

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consistently represent a single dimension in the factor analysis of the faculty survey data can be attributed to the fact that we are dealing here with a community of professional intellectuals whose very "business" requires them to maintain a basic consistency of ideas. It is to be expected that professors' opinions are more highly structured and interrelated than those of most groups in the society.

We computed the raw scores for all 60,000 faculty members in the Carnegie sample on each of the scales-from most liberal to most conservative or from the most supportive of student activism and variously (a broadened student role, the demands of blacks) to the most opposed -and then collapsed the raw scores into five approximately equal categories: that 20 percent of the faculty with the most liberal (supportive) responses, on down to the 20 percent most conservative (opposed). If the percentage in a field classified as very liberal exceeds 20 percent, then, a larger proportion of this field is very liberal than of the whole professoriate.

II. The Politics of Political Scientists: Comparisons to Other Disciplines The Carnegie data clearly show the existence of immense differences in the politics of the faculties of the various academic fields, and reveal as well a persistent pattern in relative field positions across the several dimensions of political orientation encompassed by our scales. Social scientists, Table 1 shows, are the most liberal-left in national politics, and are the most critical and change-oriented in the university context-the most supportive of the student protests, the most receptive to a broadened student role in university governance, and the most willing to change university procedures to benefit disadvantaged groups. Next in degree of general liberalism and receptivity to the

several dimensions of protest and change in the university are the faculties of the humanities and the fine arts, and of the most social-problems-oriented professional schools, law and education. Clustered together at a nitch substantially less "liberal" are the natural scientists-physical and biological, and the latter's related professional field, medicine. Finally, the most "conservative" in academe, are the applied fields with a close link to business and agriculture.

The notion of political science as a "conservative" field is emphatically not sustained. In both national and campus politics, political scientists are more liberal and change-oriented than the faculty in any of the other principal field groups, and within the social sciences yield only to their colleagues in sociology. Perhaps it is because the comparison is often made to sociology that political science is depicted as a conservative discipline. A full examination of the survey data shows that political scientists display a higher measure of system affect than sociologists, feel a stronger attachment to the regular processes of decision making, and are somewhat less supportive of change. This may well be because political science has long emphasized a "hard-headed," "realistic" approach to power and its uses, in contrast to an old tradition in sociology, now resurgent, oriented to social reform and social action. Political science lacks a tradition of social criticism comparable to that from Marx to Mills and other contemporary sociologists.

The persistence of a pattern involving the relative positions of political science and the other fields is especially striking because substantively the four scales cover an immense amount of ground, from Vietnam to the hiring of black faculty, from busing on behalf of integration to the proper student role in setting course content. The extent of the interrelatedness of opinion on this diverse array of political issues reveals, of course, the intensely ideological

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Table 1

Faculty Positions on the Campus Activism, Black Support, Student Role and Liberalism-Conservatism Scales, by Field

(as percentages of n)

Campus Activism Scale Percentage

Strongly Supportive and Moderately Field Supportive*

Sociology (n = 1,033) POLITICAL SCIENCE (n=1,267)

All Social Sciences (n=7,122) Psychology (n =2,103) Anthropology (n=421) Economics (n = 1,490) Humanities (n=9,546) Law (n=611) Fine Arts (n=3,475)

All Fields** (n=52,364) Education (n-3,277) Physical Sciences (n=7,599) Medicine (n=2,384) Biological Sciences (n=4,403) Business (n=2,080) Engineering (n==4,165) Agriculture (n= 1,348)

72 63 61 59 55 52 52 46 43 40 39 35 34 34 25 24 16

Black Support Scale Percentage

Strongly Supportive and Moderately

Supportive

58 49 48 48 41 40 42 38 41 34 37 28 31 28 21 21 19

Student Role Scale Percentage


Supportive

64 59 59 60 50 53 51 50 47 46 52 41 41 40 35 30 31

Liberalism- Conservatism Scale

Percentage Very Liberal and Liberal

72 61 63 62 64 57 55 51 45 41 32 38 38 35 20 24 13

*Includes the percentage of the field with scores in the range of the two most supportive (liberal) quintiles for the faculty as a whole.

**Some 7,664 respondents did not answer the question, "What is your principal teaching field?" and are excluded from the total. Included in the total are some fields not shown in this table.

character of the political thinking of American college and university professors."

We are not willing to describe support for student control of admission policy as liberal, or opposition to this as conservative; but it is apparent that for the faculty there is some overarching conceptual dimension which extends across the four scales.

11 We are using ideology in the sense Philip Converse has ("The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," in David Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent [New York: The Free Press, 1964], pp. 215-216), as the imposition of "a relatively abstract and far-reaching conceptual dimension as a yardstick against which political objects and their shifting policy significance over time [are] evaluated." The four scales are very highly intercorrelated (Pearson rs):

Liberalism Campus activism Student role

Campus Student activism role

.75 .53 .58

Black support

.62

.61 .57

III. The Politics of Political Scientists: Differences within the Profession Having located the political orientations of political scientists in the context of faculty opinion generally, we can now examine the correlates of divisions within the profession. Three sets of characteristics of professors thought possibly to be associated with different political orientations were systematically explored as to their influence. One of these is social background. We know from studies of the general public that ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic background contribute significantly to differences in political opinions and behavior. The professoriate, of course, is not the general public; it is comprised of men and women who have undergone lengthy training and internship in an advanced profession, who now do similar work in similar institutions, and who occupy roughly

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comparable class positions. The relationship of social background to present political views should be much weaker for such a professional group than for the population at large.

A second set includes age and academic generation. Young political scientists are closer to the experiences of students than their older colleagues. And they are, typically, more recent arrivals at the institutions where they are presently teaching, with looser ties to them. They have had less time to move to positions of security and influence in their university and their profession. Faculty in the several age strata are also members of different academic generations, having arrived at different times in what has been the rapidly changing context of academic life. They are of different political generations generally, having come of age politically in varying climates and concerns.

Thirdly, professors differ as to the course their careers have followed. Some have been successful while others have failed- admitting the varying applications and understandings of these terms. Some earn large salaries, others relatively small. They have made different commitments, for example, between having close associations with students and the teaching function, and following the goddess research. They teach in quite different sorts of institutions, from St. Rita's to Berkeley, are part, then, of contrasting university subcultures. One very important facet of career in academe is, of course, held constant in this analysis; we are dealing with faculty members who have entered just one of the discipline "houses" of the academy, political science.

A fourth type of association, as we noted in the introduction, cannot be examined here -that between area of specialization in political science and political views. It is surely an interesting one, but the Carnegie survey did not ask political scientists to state their subspecialty.

Social Background Whether the faculty member was brought up in a working class family of parents who had not completed the 12th grade or was the child of a university-trained professional is of little importance to his present political opinions in any of the areas covered. Neither parental occupation or parental education is significantly correlated with any of the indexes, or for that matter with any political opinion variable in the Carnegie survey. This holds for all fields; and it is true for faculty in the several academic generations. There simply are no significant class-related differences in political orientation within the professoriate.

The one important association is with ethnocultural background. There are too few black political scientists to justify any general comments, although blacks in the faculty as a whole are more left-of-center and change-committed than white professors. The principal ethnocultural division within political science is between Jews and Gentiles. 2 The data in Table 2 show that faculty of Protestant and Catholic backgrounds are not consistently different in their political positions, but that Jews are in all cases more "liberal."

The differences between political scientists of Christian and Jewish backgrounds are greatest in national politics, smallest in the campus questions on student role. The relative political liberalism of American Jews really does not require further treatment here, and Jewish political scientists obviously share in that tradition. When one moves in campus politics away from issues which link up with national questions to matters with a purely academic dimension-and the student role questions are a good example of the latter-Jews and Gentiles show not very dissimilar opinion distributions.

12 The survey question was: "In what religion were you raised?"

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Table 2

The Positions of Political Scientists on the Campus Activism, Black Support, Student Role and Liberalism-Conservatism Scales, by Religious Background and Age

(as percentages of n)

Religious Background

Protestants (n =770) Catholics (n=163) Jews (n=201) Age Over 50 Years of age (n=219) 40-49 (n =293) 30-39 (n=480) Under 30 Years of age (n =275)

Campus Activism Scale Percentage


Supportive

63 57 78

39 56 68 77

Black Support Scale Percentage


Supportive

48 49 57

33 50 52 52

Student Role Scale Percentage


Supportive

57 64 68

44 46 52 68

Liberalism- Conservatism Scale

Percentage Very Liberal and Liberal

60 56 81

40 54 68 73

Age and Academic Generation No other variables discriminate as powerfully among the political opinions of political scientists as those revolving around age. We cannot untangle that mixture of interests and experiences which define the positions of the age strata in the professoriate; but the overall impact of the components is massively apparent.

Looking at Table 2 we see that the direction of change in opinion distribution is everywhere the same across the four scales with movement from the oldest to the youngest stratum, but that the amount of change from one stratum to another varies substantially with the policy area. Political scientists over fifty years of age, most of whom did their graduate work before World War II, are in all the areas the most "conservative." On questions involving student role in university decision making, however, they show an opinion distribution not significantly different from their colleagues ages 40 to 49 who were in graduate school mostly in the 10 years after the war. On the other hand, the big divide in support for new university responses to meet the needs of blacks is between the pre-war and post-war (in time of graduate training) political science generations:

the differences among the 40-49, 30-39, and under 30 strata here are insignificant.

On questions of campus activism and student role, the gap between faculty members who did their graduate work in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and those in graduate school in the 1960s, is immense. These issues are "newer" ones, and they comprise interests which are directly age-related. The youngest political scientists are obviously much more in sympathy with student demands and perspectives than their older colleagues.

Such extensive differences among the several age groups on the general liberalism scale were not expected. We naturally looked for young political scientists to give a lot more support for campus activism than their older brethren, but thought that there would be much more agreement among the age strata on political issues outside academe. Instead, the margin between the percentage very liberal and liberal in the 50 and over and in the under 30 strata- 33 percent-is greater than that between these two strata for comparable positions in two of the other scales, and is exceeded only slightly by the margin in the campus activism scale-38 percent. Forty percent of

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Table 3

Political Positions of Political Scientists, by Age and Religious Backgrounds (Percentages are very liberal and liberal, or strongly supportive and moderately supportive)

Age 50 years and over 35-49 Under 35

Liberalism-conservatism scale Protestant Catholic

42 50 56 63 75 68

50 years and over 35-49 Under 35

39 57 74


40 56 68


33 45 52

the political scientists over fifty years of age had scale scores which put them in the two "more liberal," quintiles, the same distribution, that is, as the faculty as a whole. In contrast, 73 percent of the youngest members of the discipline occupy these more liberal positions, and only 13 percent the two more conservative.

Political scientists gave much less backing to Eugene McCarthy in his 1968 bid for the Presidency than their colleagues in the other social sciences. The overall preference of the discipline for Humphrey over McCarthy conceals a distribution highly skewed by age. Political scientists over forty were overwhelmingly for Humphrey: 77 percent of those sixty and over; 66 percent of those in their fifties; and 61 percent in their forties. On the other hand, political scientists in their thirties split about evenly- 53 percent for Humphrey-and those under thirty were for McCarthy by a margin of exactly two to one. Sharp age differences in the political views of political scientists extend, then, across a broad range of

Campus activism scale 33 58 65

Student role scale 45 53 67

Black support scale 39 41 45

national issues and controversies. Together, age and religious background exert an extraordinary differentiation upon the political orientations of American political scientists. Thus Jews are more "liberal" than Gentiles in each of the opinion areas; and younger political scientists are more "liberal" than their older colleagues within each religious group (Table 3).

The difference in the percentage very liberal and liberal on the liberalism- conservatism scale between faculty of Jewish backgrounds under thirty-five years of age (87 percent) and Protestants over fifty (42 percent) is really quite striking, especially since we are dealing with a group of professionals in one quite specialized discipline, and since the age and religious distinctions are so gross or generally inclusive.

Career in Academe None of the variables associated with the course of the political scientist's career in the university-the standing he has acquired,

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Jewish 65 78 87

47 74 81

53 62 68

47 45 65



his salary relative to his colleagues, his achievements or the lack thereof in scholarship, the type of college or university he has settled in, and so on-are independently correlated with political views nearly so highly as are age and religious background. Rank does show comparably high correlations, but controlling for age we find the differences by academic rank and tenure to be very modest. For example, the simple correlation between rank and the student role scale is .23 (instructors and assistant professors the most supportive), but the partial correlation coefficient, holding age constant, is -.02.

We were especially interested in comparing the views of two general groups of political scientists as defined by career commitments and success-those highly published and research oriented, located disproportionately at the major colleges and universities; and those who had not engaged, at least not successfully, in scholarly research, who thus were not on the principal ladder to academic success, and who for the most part occupied positions at the lesser institutions. There was reason for some contradictory expectations concerning the politics of political scientists so distinguished. On the one hand, there is a large body of literature dealing with the critical role of intellectuals. Inherent in the work of intellectuals- probing, questioning, examining the basic premises on which societies operate-are commitments which have made them everywhere opponents of the status quo, proponents of reform and change. And in the United States in this century, this change- directed politics of intellectuals has for the most part been a liberal or left-of-center politics, critical of the polity for not realizing fully the equalitarian premises on which it was built. It would follow from this that academics the most involved in creative scholarship-and thus the most engaged in the work of the intellectual -should be the most liberal politically.

On the other hand, one might plausibly hypothesize that since scholarly achievement

means success in academe, and success in turn makes he who possesses it a "have" with a position to defend against demands for change, that those most successful in research and publication should be the most conservative. Academic "failures" should be the most discontented, the most receptive to change, especially to change within the university. It is also possible, of course, that both sets of hypotheses are valid, and thus that contradictory pressures are at work. And in fact, this seems to be the case, although our data do not permit us to resolve the question in any conclusive fashion.

The highest correlations, in the range of .12 to .25, are between the variables associated with scholarly achievement and the general liberalism-conservatism scale. Political scientists committed to research, currently publishing at a high level and teaching at major universities are, in each age stratum, the most liberal.

On the other hand, looking at campus controversies, there are no significant or consistent correlations between political position and the variables associated with scholarly achievement and success. Young political scientists (under 35) who have acquired positions at the major schools are slightly more supportive of campus activism and demands for a larger student voice in university policy making than their counterparts at lesser schools; but young members of the profession who have not published any scholarly works and are committed primarily to teaching are here more supportive than their peers who claim a substantial level of publications and who are oriented to research activity. In general we did find that political scientists holding a lower rank than most colleagues of their age level are more in favor of change in the campus context, but are not more liberal in national affairs.

All this gives loose support, then, to the conclusion that scholarly members of the profession are pushed by their

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intellectuality to a more critical position in national controversies; but as more successful academic men have a greater stake in the university status quo and hence in campus politics are less "liberal."

V. Conclusions Contrary to speculation which seems abundant, political science is not a "conservative" discipline, in either the national or the campus dimension; certainly not if comparison is made to the entire professoriate, and not even if it is limited to the social sciences. The Carnegie data make clear that political science is among the most liberal disciplines in academe. Only when the politics of political scientists is set against that of sociologists do the former appear as relatively "conservative."

Among the faculty as a whole, field powerfully differentiates as to public opinions. Within political science, as in most disciplines, academic generation and religious background are associated with much larger differences than any of the other variables included in the Carnegie survey. The magnitude of the difference in the political opinions and perceptions of young political scientists of Jewish background and the most senior members of the field of Protestant parentage is on the order one would expect to encounter among such grossly differentiated groups as blacks and whites in the larger society, but not among fellow professionals. It seems likely that the sharp generational divide points to a long-range shift in the basic political orientations of the profession, that the more critical and change-supporting young political scientists will carry something of these commitments with them as they advance in their careers, while perhaps sloughing off part as they acquire higher status.

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Documents

The Politics of American Political Scientists