Almost 50 years after the Robert Hutchins-William Mosher debate the contribution of research to knowledge about the field, Research methodology in public administration remains weak and fragmented. Considerable uncertainty exists regarding the criteria that public administration research should meet, and this uncertainty is being transmitted to doctoral students entering the field. Data from doctoral dissertation research suggests that the lack of methodological progress is due to inadequate standards among leading university programs in public administration as well as to the nature of the field itself. Public administration has not come to grips with questions of research that should be settled in a mature field of study.