By analyzing the 14,261 scholars who signed the “Scholars Opposed to the Security-Related Laws” petition, this essay quantitatively visualizes the political bias embedded in Japanese universities and academic disciplines.
It sharply probes the erosion of scholarly independence from politics, with particular focus on the irony that the largest number of signatories came from faculties of education.

2019-04-13
And large numbers of university faculty members are doing exactly that openly.
It is also ironic that the largest number among them are faculty members in education.

I am reposting the chapter I published on 2018-05-04 under the title:
I investigated what tendencies could be found, in terms of affiliated universities and fields of specialization, among the 14,261 scholars who signed the petition.
What follows is from a magnificent essay by Associate Professor Kakeya Hideki of the University of Tsukuba, published in the May 1 issue of the monthly magazine Sound Argument under the title:
A Must-Read for Examinees and Parents Alike! University Political Bias Rankings — What Unexpected Tendencies Were Revealed by Quantification? A Thorough Critique of Scholars’ Political Activism.
It would not be an exaggeration to call it one of the finest works seen in recent years.
Every Japanese citizen who believes himself or herself to possess intelligence should go at once to the nearest bookstore and buy it.
It is essential reading for every Japanese citizen capable of reading printed text.
All emphasis in the body except for headings, and all passages between asterisks, are mine.

Scholarship must be independent from politics.

There are probably very few people who would openly oppose this thesis.
And yet, in reality, it is not uncommon for scholars to use their titles and voluntarily commit themselves to politics.
A symbolic example of this is the 2015 “Scholars’ Association Opposing the Security-Related Laws.”
When the security legislation was enacted in the Diet, this was a highly political body in which scholars opposing and protesting the bills lined up their names.
The author believed that by tabulating the institutions and academic fields of those who signed it, one could quantify the political bias of scholarship.
Below, I introduce the contents of the investigation carried out by the author and his colleagues [1].

We investigated what tendencies could be found, in terms of affiliated universities and fields of specialization, among the 14,261 scholars who signed the “Scholars’ Association Opposing the Security-Related Laws” between 8:00 p.m. on June 11, 2015, and 9:00 a.m. on September 24 of the same year.
We obtained the list of signatories from the website and counted emeritus professors and active faculty members.
Those who did not enter the name of their university or similar affiliation when signing were excluded from the tabulation, because there was no political use of a university name in such cases.

As a result of tabulating according to the above criteria, data were obtained for 9,409 individuals affiliated with 868 institutions.
Table 1 is a list of the top 30 universities by affiliation.

Among these 30 universities, two-thirds are national or public universities.
However, national and public universities generally have large numbers of faculty members, and a large absolute number does not necessarily mean that the magnitude of political bias at that university is equally large.

The largest number of signatories to the “Anti-Security-Law Association” came from the University of Tokyo, but the highest ratio was at Rikkyo.

There must have been not a few people who nodded simply upon seeing this heading.
That is because Etsuro Totsuka, who at the time held a senior position in the Japan Federation of Bar Associations and proudly made the ludicrous claim at the United Nations that the wartime comfort women were not comfort women but sex slaves, thereby providing ideal material for the anti-Japanese propaganda of the totalitarians of the Korean Peninsula and China, was a graduate of Rikkyo University.

Accordingly, narrowing the analysis to universities ranking within the top 75 in the absolute number of signatories, the number of faculty members belonging to each university as of May 1, 2015, was obtained from each university’s website, and the proportion of signatory faculty members relative to the total number of faculty was investigated.
The total number of faculty used as the denominator was the sum of full-time professors, associate professors, lecturers, assistant professors, and assistants.
Table 2 on the following page shows the university-specific ratios obtained by this standard.

It can be seen that religiously affiliated universities are prominent near the top, including first-ranked Rikkyo University and third-ranked Bukkyo University.
Given their nature, it may in one sense be only natural that value-neutrality in scholarship is more likely to be weak at religious universities.
On the other hand, it is noteworthy that national universities such as Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Hitotsubashi University, and Fukushima University also rank highly.

Though she tries to gloss over everything by constantly flashing smiles, Kuwako, the anchor of NHK watch9, is clearly a person of masochistic historical views and pseudo-moralism, and is a graduate of the above-mentioned Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
She is also a junior colleague of Matsui Yayori, a former Asahi Shimbun reporter who, it is no exaggeration to say, was in substance a spy for the North Korean party, and who organized the utterly outrageous Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal involving North Korean operatives.

Although the ratio is not exact because emeritus professors are included only in the numerator and not in the denominator, about one-tenth of the signatories were emeritus professors.
Even so, the fact that, in rough terms, there were 8 universities where over 20 percent of faculty members had signed, and 31 out of the 75 universities where over 10 percent had signed, shows how seriously the movement to abandon the independence of scholarship from politics has advanced in Japanese universities today.

Next, Table 3 on the right shows the top 20 fields when the number of signatories was tabulated by field of specialization.
While humanities disciplines occupy the top ranks, physics, mathematics, and biology appear from the sciences.
Among the sciences, practical fields such as engineering and agriculture do not appear in the upper ranks.

Constitutional law ranked seventeenth, with 94 signatories.
At the time the signatories were made public, there were many mocking comments online to the effect that almost no constitutional scholars, the specialists in this issue, were present.
However, that criticism misses the point.
What legal scholars ought to do is engage in scholarly discussion such as: this bill has this kind of problem, if this part of the bill is changed the problem will be resolved, and if the current state is left as it is, this problem will remain.
On top of that, it would probably remain within acceptable bounds if they were to say, on a personal level, that they support or oppose the bill.
But to sign a political movement not as an individual but under the title of legal scholar is clearly an act that harms the political independence of scholarship.

There are also problems, beyond the viewpoint of the political independence of scholarship, with scholars outside the field of law signing on to security legislation.
For example, I have studied the security legislation to some extent, but even so, I would not dare express an opinion on it under the title of scholar.
Even if one is knowledgeable in a certain field, to brandish the authority of a scholar and display the arrogant attitude that one can make more correct judgments than ordinary people about everything is problematic not merely as a scholar, but as an educator and indeed as a human being.

And large numbers of university faculty members are doing exactly that openly.
It is also ironic that the largest number among them are faculty members in education.
To be continued.