PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE

How long Barker would have stayed at King's College London had a new Chair of Political Science not been founded at Cambridge in 1927 is an open question. He had certainly grown tired of the constant pressure of affairs by that time and desired a return to the quieter life of scholarship. It does not seem, however, that he was particularly anxious to secure the Cambridge Chair which was funded by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial of New York. In his statement to the Council of King's College on his resignation he emphasised that he had (at first?) refused to be a candidate for the Chair although he had been pressed to allow his name to go forward. When offered the Chair, he felt it was his duty to accept. By explaining his resignation in this way, he was evidently concerned to avoid offending those with whom he had worked closely in the college. Nonetheless, there was an ambivalence in his attitude to the post which made his hesitation in applying a very real one. His doubts about the Chair must have centred especially on its title; whilst he had readily envisaged himself as a Professor of Political Theory and Institutions at Oxford two decades earlier, the role of Professor of Political Science was less appealing. This emerged in his inaugural lecture, where he expressed considerable scepticism about the scientific status of his subject.