The GENERAL BOARD beg leave to report to the University as follows:
1. Politics is a central and enduring fact of life, and understanding it is central to humanistic education. All the important universities in the West have long included it as a subject for reflection and analysis; a number have devoted themselves to applied work on public policy and public administration; and many contain institutes and centres engaged in work of a more directly practical nature commissioned from outside. As a more purely academic subject, Politics ranges across the humanities and social sciences. In Cambridge, the subject is taught as part of the Social and Political Sciences Tripos, but has developed the strengths it has at least as much from connections with History and Philosophy and the related discipline of International Relations. The demand for courses in Politics (including its international aspects) has been steadily rising.
2. The Faculty of Social and Political Sciences has, since January 2004, been organized into the separate Departments of Politics, Social and Developmental Psychology, and Sociology, together with the Centre for Family Research. Of these four institutions, the Department of Politics is the only one with no established Chair. The two Professorships currently established in the Department, that of Political Theory, established for Professor J. M. Dunn, and that of International Politics, established for Professor G. P. Hawthorn, lapse in 2007 and 2008, respectively, on the holders' retirement. The General Board review of Social and Political Sciences in 1998 firmly recommended establishing a Professorship of Politics. The Faculty's five-year strategic plan in 2004 specified the establishment of a Professorship of Politics by 31 July 2007 as one of its research objectives. The Faculty Board believe that such a post is vital to the strategic development of Politics as an academic subject in Cambridge.
3. An appointment to a Professorship of Politics by October 2007 at the latest would greatly strengthen the University's Politics and International Studies submission for the next Research Assessment Exercise (RAE 2008). The establishment of a Professorship of Politics would provide leadership for the Department after 2008, allow the Department to develop its capacity to pursue externally funded research, reinforce the increasingly active research culture between the Department and the Centre of International Studies on questions that connect domestic and international politics (in political theory, the analysis of foreign policy, security, international political economy, political reconstruction after conflict, and the politics of Europe), enable the Department to strengthen its graduate training, and permit it to sustain its reputation for high-quality undergraduate education.
4. The Council of the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Faculty Board of Social and Political Sciences have therefore recommended to the General Board that the University establish a Professorship of Politics. The Council of the School have agreed that the post of University Lecturer currently underlying the office held by Professor Dunn should be suppressed with effect from 1 October 2007 to underpin the new Professorship. Additional funding for the new office would be provided by the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences for one year and thereafter by funding identified within the existing recurrent allocation to the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
5. The General Board accordingly propose that a Professorship of Politics be established in the University from 1 October 2007 and assigned to the Department of Politics. The Board propose that election to the Professorship should be made by an ad hoc Board of Electors and that on this occasion preference would be given to candidates whose work complemented the fields of the Professorship of Political Science in the Faculty of History (political thought) and the Professorship of International Relations and reflected the present strengths of the Department of Politics in the study of the politics of modern states, including their international dimensions.
6. The General Board recommend:
That a Professorship of Politics be established in the University from 1 October 2007, placed in Schedule B of the Statutes, and assigned to the Department of Politics.
| 11 January 2006 | ALISON RICHARD, Vice-Chancellor | M. J. DAUNTON | ROGER PARKER |
| JOHN BELL | RICHARD HUNTER | PATRICK SISSONS | |
| TOM BLUNDELL | D. W. B. MACDONALD | LAURA WALSH | |
| H. A. CHASE | MELVEENA MCKENDRICK | I. H. WHITE |