When he joined the Northwestern faculty in 1955, Richard Snyder brought with him the Foreign Policy Analysis Project he headed at Princeton. He asked the Carnegie Corporation to support a broader, institution-wide commitment to a program of graduate training and research in international relations as "an outgrowth, continuation, and application of the activities and resources" of the Princeton project. Carnegie provided funds to support the project for five years, and the IR Program got its own housing in a building at 1735 Chicago.

In the early 1960s, international relations was the program at Northwestern. Carnegie funds supported conferences, publications, graduate students, and faculty activities in several pioneering areas, including

simulation of inter-nation systems

decision-making approaches to the study of international relations

factor analysis of the dimension of nations

Because they usually revolved about issues in research method, weekly bag-lunch meetings of the IR program were attended by students and faculty from all fields in the department. It was not uncommon for political behavior faculty to offer opinions of research measurement or design.

Snyder's work on decision making in foreign policy drew the attention of Gordon Scott Fulcher, who had written popular works on decision making and a long-time patron of Northwestern. Although Snyder had attracted Fulcher's interest in the department's work and arranged for Fulcher to endow a chair in Decision Making, the first chairholder was Prof. Harold Guetzkow, who was doing pioneering work in man-machine simulation of international relations.

Snyder left the department in 1969 to head the Mershon Center at The Ohio State University. Leadership of the international relations program was taken over by Harold Guetzkow.