ABSTRACT
There is a class of US academic fields that resists even the elaborate typologies proposed by leading analysts of university organization.1 Management science, communication research, criminology, and public administration: these are quasi-professional social science disciplines that, by some measures, have thrived in the expanding post-World War II American university. With roots in the inter-war period, each of these fields was, to varying degrees, organized as a stand-alone discipline in the decades after the war. By the yardstick of student enrollments and faculty hiring, criminology and its quasiprofessional brethren have been on a fifty-year tear. My treatment of one of these fields, communication studies, suggests that the packed lecture halls and swelling faculty ranks have, however, been won at the cost of these disciplines’ intellectual credibility.
