The State University as a Political System

Abstract

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES are dull exercises as a rule for the rank and file listeners in a professional organization. Personally, I have never believed that they were functional to the discipline even if perhaps therapeutic to some individuals delivering them. Also, I have always considered that a presidential address was predicated on a certain assumption of personal arrogance-regardless of the fact that the people delivering them are not as a rule either arrogant or pompous but simply honest human beings trapped in a set of role expectations arising out of traditions no one on the scene today can defend or curtail. I suspect that many of my predecessors took the same dim view of this procedure. But I shall take advantage of this requirement as they did to say what i's on my mind. My reflections as a political scientist regarding one direction into which research in our discipline might go, and I believe should go, were fortified by events of last spring and this fall. I refer to the student rebellions of last spring and the neighborhood school rebellions in New York City that precipitated the bitter teachers' strike of this fall. These events were not totally unrelated in my mind as they seem to have sprung from the same inattention to the need for rigorously designed research and from a preference for loose thinking without any empirical foundation. I firmly state at the outset that we have failed to analyze the immediate world of the campus of which we are a part, and we have left it without depth of understanding or the kinds of skills and data we ought to be able to provide to meet these crises. It is our own world of higher education and our research obligations to it-not just administration per se but representation of faculty and students, their politics and ways to formulate goals-that I wish to discuss now. One of the problems complicating our thinking about university life and problems is that some political scientists like sociol-