Published on July 12, 2019.
Referring to an essay featured in Seiron and discussed on May 4, 2018, this passage raises the issue of political bias in Japanese universities by making it visible through the quantification of signature data.
It sharply questions the danger of scholars joining political movements under academic titles, the erosion of the political independence of scholarship, and the resulting decline of trust in higher education itself.

2019-07-12
Under the title, “A Must-Read for Examinees and Parents! What surprising tendencies were revealed by quantifying the university political bias ranking? A thorough criticism of the political activities of scholars,”
what follows is a chapter I published on 2018/5/4.
It is from a splendid essay by Hideki Kakeya, Associate Professor at the University of Tsukuba, published in the May 1 issue of the monthly magazine Seiron under the title, “A Must-Read for Examinees and Parents! What surprising tendencies were revealed by quantifying the university political bias ranking? A thorough criticism of the political activities of scholars,” an essay that it would be no exaggeration to call a rare work of labor in recent years.
Every Japanese citizen who believes himself or herself to be a person possessed of intelligence should go at once to the nearest bookstore and buy it.
All emphasis in the text other than the headings, and all passages between ~, are mine.
This is an essay that every Japanese citizen capable of reading printed text must read.
Scholarship must be independent from politics.
There is probably almost no one who would openly oppose this thesis.
However, in reality, it is not at all uncommon for scholars to use their titles and voluntarily commit themselves to politics.
What symbolizes this is the 2015 “Scholars’ Association Opposed to the Security-Related Laws.”
When the security legislation was passed in the Diet, it was a highly political group in which scholars opposing and protesting the legislation lined up their names, but the author thought that if one tabulated the institutions to which the signatories belonged and the academic fields in which they specialized, it would be possible to quantify the political bias of scholarship.
Below, I introduce the contents of the survey [1] conducted by the author and his colleagues.　
We investigated what tendencies could be found in the universities and fields of specialization of the 14,261 scholars who signed the “Scholars’ Association Opposed to the Security-Related Laws” during the period from 8:00 p.m. on June 11, 2015, to 9:00 a.m. on September 24 of the same year.
We obtained the list of signatories from the website and included emeritus professors and active faculty members in the tabulation.
Those who did not state their university affiliation or the like 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 standards, data on 9,409 persons affiliated with 868 institutions were obtained.
Table 1 is a list of the top 30 universities by affiliation.
Of 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 cannot necessarily be said to represent the size of that university’s political bias as it stands.
In the “Association Opposed to Security Legislation,” the top university in number of signatures was the University of Tokyo, while in ratio it was Rikkyo.
There must have been no small number of people who nodded in agreement merely on seeing this heading.
That is because Etsuro Totsuka, who at the time held a key position in the Japan Federation of Bar Associations and went so far as to travel all the way to the United Nations and proudly utter laughable nonsense to the effect that the wartime comfort women were not comfort women but sex slaves, thereby providing excellent material for the anti-Japan propaganda of the totalitarians of the Korean Peninsula and China, was a graduate of Rikkyo University.
Therefore, limiting the survey to universities ranked 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 ratio of signatory faculty members to the total number of faculty members was examined.
The number of faculty members used as the denominator was the total number of full-time professors, associate professors, lecturers, assistant professors, and assistants.
Table 2 on the next page shows the university-by-university ratios obtained according to this standard.　
It can be seen that religious universities occupy many of the upper ranks, including Rikkyo University in first place and Bukkyo University in third place.
Given their nature, it may in a sense be natural that religious universities are more prone to a weakening of value-neutrality in scholarship.
On the other hand, it is noteworthy that national universities such as Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Hitotsubashi University, and Fukushima University are also positioned in the upper ranks.
She tries to gloss over things by constantly scattering smiles around, but Kuwako, the anchor of NHK Watch 9, who is clearly a possessor of a masochistic view of history and sham moralism, is a graduate of the above-mentioned Tokyo University of Foreign Studies… and is also a junior of Yayori Matsui, the former Asahi Shimbun reporter who may without the slightest exaggeration be called in reality a spy of the North Korean Party, and who was the organizer of the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal, which involved those utterly outrageous North Korean operatives.　
Although this is not an exact ratio because emeritus professors are included only in the numerator and not in the denominator, with emeritus professors making up about 10% of the signatories, the fact that there are eight universities where, in rough terms, more than 20% of the faculty signed, and 31 out of the 75 universities where more than 10% of the faculty signed, shows how seriously the movement to abandon the independence of scholarship from politics has advanced in Japan’s universities today.　
Next, Table 3 on the right shows the top 20 fields obtained by tabulating the number of signatories by field of specialization.
Among the upper ranks occupied by humanities disciplines, 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 is in 17th place with 94 signatories.
At the time the signatures were made public, much mockery was seen on the internet, centering on the point that there were hardly any constitutional scholars, the very specialists in this issue.
However, that criticism misses the point.
What legal scholars should do is engage in academic discussion such as: this bill has this problem, if this part of the bill is changed that problem will be resolved, if the current situation is left as it is this kind of problem will remain.
On top of that, it would probably be within the acceptable range if, on a personal basis, one were to state support or opposition to the bill.
However, signing a political movement not as an individual but under the title of legal scholar is clearly an act that damages the political independence of scholarship.　
For scholars other than those in law, signing regarding the security legislation also poses a problem apart from the viewpoint of the political independence of scholarship.
For example, I have studied the security legislation to a certain extent, but even so, I would find it presumptuous to express an opinion on it under the title of scholar.
Just because one is knowledgeable in a certain field, to brandish the authority of a scholar and display the arrogant attitude that one can make a sounder judgment than ordinary people on all matters is a problem not merely as a scholar, but as an educator, and indeed as a human being.
And large numbers of university faculty members are openly doing exactly that.
It is also ironic that the largest number of them are teachers of education.
This article will continue.