“Those Aspects of the Social Sciences…”

Extract

For a discipline that lies beyond the boundaries of what traditionally has been considered the domain of the humanities, political science has not fared badly at the endowment established to promote humanistic knowledge. However, that is a subjective judgment: One of the dubious charms of the NEH has been its failure, until recently, to implement a data collection and retrieval system that could yield information concerning the magnitude of support received by a given discipline. At long last an ADP system, known to its friends as AUGUSTUS (its enemies call it other things), is undergoing debugging. It is scheduled to be fully operational by the end of the current fiscal year.

Two additional factors make it difficult to isolate grants awarded in political science. The Endowment, unlike the National Science Foundation, divides its workload principally by the type of audiences at which funded projects are aimed—e.g., the general public, research scholars, educators, community groups—rather than by discipline. Thus, just as there is no English program, so there is no political science program at the Endowment. Projects conducted by political scientists are eligible to compete in all of the funding categories administered by the Divisions of Fellowships, Research Grants, Public Programs, and Education Programs. To the extent that they express local or regional interests and involve a general out-of-school public, they may also compete for funds offered by the State Humanities Committees which serve as regrant agencies for the Endowment.