5 THE POST-WAR DECLINE OF THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIES CONFERENCE 471wArning signs
Due to a shortage of time as a result of the extensive discussion of the
UNESCO question at the ISC’s thirteenth administrative meeting,
Manning’s paper was not explored in any depth. Rather, at the sugges-
tion of Manning himself, the question of the teaching of international
relations was referred to the ISC’s provisional executive committee, the
conference having recognised that discussion of this question was ‘one
of the essential elements of the continuation of the Conference.’^149
Although the ISC would not fully discuss the university teaching of
international relations until 1950, the subject was hardly neglected in
this and in other forums in the intervening years. For example, in August
1948 at Utrecht, a conference convened by UNESCO which was com-
prised of representatives of universities and which Manning attended as
an observer on behalf of the ISC, issued the following resolution: ‘all
universities where there are as yet no chairs or special sections for the
teaching of and research in international relations and that offer no facil-
ities of this type [should] be invited as soon as possible to establish such
chairs or sections or to discover all other available means of organizing
systematic teaching or research in this subject’.^150
In January 1949, in the wake of the Utrecht conference, a meeting of
representatives of nearly all the universities and university colleges in the
United Kingdom was held under the auspices of the BCCIS at the LSE,
the sole focus of which was the teaching of international relations.^151 In
an account of this meeting, Paul A. Reynolds noted that the discipline
of international relations met with opposition from the older academic
disciplines on the ground that the scholarship in the field of international
relations was superficial. Reynolds also noted that while the majority
(^149) International Studies Conference, Verbatim Report of the XIIIth Administrative ses-
sion, December 16 and 17, 1946, at the Centre d’études de politique étrangère de Paris,
IICI-K-XIV-12, UA, i, iv, 114.
(^150) Resolution of the Conference of Representatives of Universities held under
UNESCO, Utrecht, 1948, quoted in Vernant, ‘International Relations: The Work of
the International Studies Conference,’ 60. See also C. A. W. Manning, ‘International
Relations: An Academic Discipline,’ in Geoffrey L. Goodwin ed., The University Teaching
of International Relations (Oxford: B.H. Blackwell, 1951), 11, and C. A. W. Manning,
‘Out to Grass—And a Lingering Look Behind,’ International Relations 2, no. 6 (1962):
347–71, 356.
(^151) Manning, ‘International Relations: An Academic Discipline,’ 13.