Published on January 30, 2020. This is a revised republication of a chapter originally posted on July 12, 2019. Citing an article by Kakeya Hideki, Associate Professor at the University of Tsukuba, published in the monthly magazine Sound Argument, this essay analyzes the universities and academic fields of 14,261 scholars who signed the statement of the “Association of Scholars Opposed to the Security-Related Legislation.” It discusses the political independence of scholarship, political activism by university faculty, and the problem of scholars using their academic authority to claim superior judgment in fields outside their expertise.

January 30, 2020
Just because one is knowledgeable in a certain field, to flaunt the authority of a scholar and show the arrogant attitude that one can make more correct judgments than ordinary people on every matter is—
I am republishing, after correcting paragraphs and the like, the chapter originally posted on July 12, 2019, under the title: “We investigated what tendencies could be found in the universities and specialized fields of the 14,261 scholars who signed.”
The following is from a splendid article by Kakeya Hideki, Associate Professor at the University of Tsukuba, published in the monthly magazine Sound Argument, released on May 1, under the title: “A Must-Read for Examinees and Parents! University Political Bias Rankings: What Unexpected Trends Were Revealed by Quantification? A Thorough Criticism of Scholars’ Political Activities.”
It is no exaggeration to call it a rare labor of scholarship in recent times.
Every Japanese citizen who thinks of himself as an intelligent human being should go immediately to the nearest bookstore to buy and read it.
It is a must-read article for every Japanese citizen who can read printed text.
Emphasis within the text other than headings, and the passages marked with ～, are mine.
Scholarship must be independent from politics.
There is probably almost no one who would openly oppose this thesis.
In reality, however, scholars often use their titles and voluntarily commit themselves to politics.
Symbolic of this is the 2015 “Association of Scholars Opposed to the Security-Related Legislation.”
It was a highly political organization in which scholars opposing and protesting the security legislation listed their names when the legislation was passed by the Diet.
The author thought that if one tabulated the institutions and academic fields of the people who signed it, one could quantify the political bias of scholarship.
Below, I will introduce the contents of the investigation conducted by the author and his colleagues [1].
We investigated what tendencies could be found in the universities and specialized fields of the 14,261 scholars who signed the “Association of Scholars Opposed to the Security-Related Legislation” 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 as subjects of the tally.
Those who did not state their university affiliation or the like when signing were excluded from the tally, since there was no political use of university names in their cases.
As a result of tallying according to the above criteria, data were obtained for 9,409 people belonging to 868 institutions.
Table 1 is a list of the top 30 universities by affiliation.
Among these 30 universities, national and public universities account for two-thirds.
However, national and public universities generally have large numbers of faculty members, and a large absolute number cannot be said to directly indicate the size of that university’s political bias.
The University of Tokyo Tops the Signatures for the “Anti-Security Legislation Association,” While Rikkyo Tops the Ratio
There must be quite a few people who nodded simply upon seeing this headline. That is because Totsuka Etsuro, who went all the way to the United Nations and proudly made the ridiculous statement about the so-called comfort women that they were not comfort women but sex slaves, thereby providing perfect material for the anti-Japanese propaganda of the totalitarian forces of the Korean Peninsula and China, was a graduate of Rikkyo University and at the time held an important position in the Japan Federation of Bar Associations.
Therefore, narrowing the data to universities whose absolute number of signatories ranked among the top 75, we obtained from each university’s website the number of faculty members belonging to that university as of May 1, 2015, and examined the ratio of faculty members who signed to the total number of faculty members.
The number of faculty members used as the denominator was the total of full-time professors, associate professors, lecturers, assistant professors, and assistants.
The university-by-university ratios obtained using this criterion are shown in Table 2 on the next page.
It can be seen that many religious universities rank high, including Rikkyo University in first place and Bukkyo University in third place.
Given their nature, it may be natural in a sense that value neutrality in scholarship tends to be weaker 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 are also ranked high.
Although she tries to cover it up by constantly scattering smiles, Kuwako, the presenter of NHK Watch 9, who clearly possesses a masochistic view of history and pseudo-moralism, graduated from the above-mentioned Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. She is also the junior of Matsui Yayori, a former Asahi Shimbun reporter whom it would not be an exaggeration to call, in reality, a spy of the North Korean party, and who was the organizer of the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal, which involved North Korean agents of the most outrageous kind imaginable.
Although it is not an accurate ratio because emeritus professors are included only in the numerator and not in the denominator, and although emeritus professors account for about 10 percent of the signatories, the fact that, by rough estimate, eight universities had more than 20 percent of their faculty members signing, and 31 out of 75 universities had more than 10 percent signing, shows how seriously the movement to abandon the independence of scholarship from politics has deepened in Japanese universities today.
Next, Table 3 on the right shows the top 20 fields when the number of signatories is tabulated by specialized field.
While humanities and social science fields occupy the top ranks, physics, mathematics, and biology are ranked among the natural sciences.
Among the sciences, practical fields such as engineering and agriculture are not ranked high.
Constitutional law is in 17th place, with 94 signatories.
When the signatures were made public, there was much ridicule, especially on the Internet, about the fact that there were almost no constitutional scholars, the specialists on this issue.
However, that criticism misses the point.
What legal scholars should do is engage in scholarly discussion, such as pointing out what problems exist in this bill, which part of the bill should be changed to resolve those problems, and what problems would remain if the current situation were left as it is.
On that basis, it would be within an acceptable range for them to say that personally they support or oppose 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 outside the field of law to sign regarding the security legislation involves problems beyond the perspective of the political independence of scholarship.
For example, I have studied the security legislation to some extent, but even so, I would be too awed to express an opinion on it under the title of scholar.
Just because one is knowledgeable in a certain field, to flaunt the authority of a scholar and show the arrogant attitude that one can make more correct judgments than ordinary people on every matter is problematic not only as a scholar, but also as an educator, and further, as a human being.
A large number of university faculty members are doing this openly.
It is ironic that the largest number among them are faculty members in education.
This article continues.