How the mission of the University of Oklahoma Department of Political Science was reoriented toward research-circa 1968-1975*

Abstract

When I joined the Political Science faculty at the University of Oklahoma in the Fall of 1968, I became a minor participant in a broad process of social change that was to alter the face of American higher education over the next two or more decades. An important example of successful bureaucratic mission change is the one that occurred during the decades of the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s on the campuses of most state universities. At different times, administrators and some faculty began to attempt to move their institutions' missions from emphasizing undergraduate teaching to emphasizing research and its associated enterprises of graduate teaching and grant getting.