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In 1953, the Carnegie Corporation gave $90,000 to the department to study the problems of political science and to develop an improved curriculum for undergraduate and graduate instruction and training in political science. Known as the Curriculum Development Project, it was headed by Prof. Charles S. Hyneman, who also chaired the department from 1953-55. The grant funded (1) visits by NU faculty to other institutions, (2) conferences held at NU on political science education and training, (4) preparation of memoranda relating to the topic, and (4) revising of existing courses and creation of new ones.[1] Over the length of the project (1953-56), the faculty grew from four to fourteen members.[2] Many papers presented at the project's conferences were collected in a book, Approaches to the Study of Politics: Twenty-Two Contemporary Essays Exploring the Nature of Poltiics and Methods by Which It Can Be Studied.[3] Three selections in that collection came from scholars who had been teaching elsewhere when they participated in the conferences at Northwestern. In this way, we recruited Scott Greer (political sociologist), Harold Guetzkow (international relations), and Richard Snyder (foreign policy). Approaches to the Study of Politics became required reading in graduate programs that were oriented toward quantitative, behavioral, or scientific inquiry in the discipline. Behind the publication of the book was a radical innovation in graduate education that was incorporated into a series of four core courses under the heading, "Fundamentals of Political Analysis." To quote from the 1958 final report to the Carnegie Corporation:
The new Northwestern program of graduate education attracted attention across the nation. Prior to the curriculum project, the Department of Political Science had not been a serious player in the professional league. Before the Northwestern program was publicized and before Approaches to the Study of Politics appeared, the department did not appear among the top fifteen departments in the nation in a 1957 survey of department chairs.[4] Surely no one mentioned it in the same breath with Harvard and Yale. But in 1963, Northwestern emerged in 1963 as the 13th top-ranked department in a systematic survey of members of the American Political Science Association.[5] Somit and Tanenhaus, who conducted the survey, reported that departments were ranked very differently according to the members' orientations. They note, "Yale and Northwestern, for example, are commonly said to be behaviorally oriented, whereas Harvard and Columbia are thought to be traditional in approach."[6] They continue: The probehavioralists rank Northwestern fifth, Harvard seventh, Indiana eleventh, North Carolina twelfth, Cornell in a tie for fourteenth, and Johns Hopkins in a tie for seventeenth. Antibehavioralists, however, rank Johns Hopkins ninth, North Carolina eighteenth, and Northwestern twentieth.[7] Clearly, the 1953-57 Carnegie grant for curriculum revision put the department on the professional map and in the vanguard of the behavioral movement in political science.
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