ABSTRACT
A key institutional constraint that was present from the beginning of the Atlanta University doctoral program was the department's ambivalent relations with Atlanta University and the other institutions in what soon would be formalized as the Atlanta University Centre. During the 1970s and into the 1980s, the discursive centre of gravity of black Americans' institutional encounter with political science as a discipline was set largely by the departments at Howard and Atlanta Universities. The university's reluctant commitment to the program no doubt stemmed partly from small-minded penuriousness. It may also have reflected a more widespread anxiety among faculty and administrations at the other institutions in the Atlanta University Centre. Behaviouralism and pluralism, its interpretive expression in the American politics field, were, ironically, both foil and unacknowledged conceptual backdrop for calls for an autonomous, more race-conscious and politically relevant black approach to political science.
