It is problematic not so much as a scholar but as an educator and even more so as a person.
And a large number of university faculty members are doing it openly.
May 04, 2018
The following is in the May 1 issue of the monthly magazine "Sound Argument."
A must-read for prospective students and parents alike! University Political Bias Rankings, What Surprising Trends Did the Quantification Reveal? A thorough critique of the political activities of academics Activities.
The above is the title of a brilliant article by Kakeya Hideki, Associate Professor at Tsukuba University, a rare extertion in recent years.
All Japanese citizens who consider themselves intelligent people should head to their nearest bookstore to subscribe to this book immediately.
It is a must-read paper for all Japanese citizens who can read the printed word.
The emphasis in the text other than the headline and *~* is mine.
Academia must be independent of politics.
It is unlikely that anyone would outwardly disagree with this thesis.
In reality, however, academics often use their titles to commit themselves to politics willingly.
It is epitomized by the 2015 "Association of Scholars Opposing the Security Laws."
It is a highly political group of scholars who opposed and protested the Security Law when the Diet passed it.
The author thought it would be possible to quantify the political bias of academics by tabulating the affiliations and academic specialties of those who signed the petition.
The following is a description of the survey [1] conducted by the authors.
We surveyed the 14,261 scholars who signed the "Association of Scholars Opposing the Security-Related Laws" petition between 8:00 p.m. on June 11, 2015, and 9:00 p.m. on September 24, 2015, to see what trends existed in their academic affiliations and fields of specialization.
I obtained a list of signatories from the website, and professors, emeritus, and active faculty members were included in the tally.
Those who did not indicate their university affiliation when signing the form were excluded from the tally since their university names are not used for political purposes.
Data for 9,409 individuals affiliated with 868 institutions were obtained from the tabulation using the criteria described at right.
Table 1 lists the top 30 universities in terms of affiliation.
Of these 30 universities, public universities account for two-thirds.
However, public universities generally have a large number of faculty members, and the sizeable actual number does not directly indicate the magnitude of the political bias of the university.
The top signatory of the "Association Against the Security Treaty" is the University of Tokyo, while the ratio is Rikkyo.
*Many people must have nodded just by looking at this headline.
Etsuro Totsuka, who held a crucial position in the Japan Federation of Bar Associations at the time, is a graduate of Rikkyo University.
He went all the way to the United Nations.
He proudly stated that the military comfort women were not comfort women but sex slaves, providing good material for anti-Japanese propaganda by the totalitarians of the Korean Peninsula and China. *
We, therefore, narrowed down the list to the top 75 universities in terms of the actual number of signatories, obtained the number of faculty members affiliated with each university as of May 1, 2015, from each university's website, and examined the ratio of faculty members who signed the petition to the total number of faculty members.
The number of faculty members used as the population was the sum of full-time professors, associate professors, lecturers, assistant professors, and assistant professors. Table 2 on the next page shows the ratios by university obtained by this criterion.
Many religious universities, including Rikkyo University in first place and Bukkyo University in third place, are among the top-ranked universities.
In a sense, it may be natural that religious universities, by their very nature, tend to be less value-neutral in their scholarship.
On the other hand, it is worth noting that national universities such as Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Hitotsubashi University, and Fukushima University also rank high.
*Ms. Kuwako, the host of NHK's Watch 9, is a graduate of the above-mentioned Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
She has a smile on her face.
She is also a junior colleague of Yayori Matsui; in reality, she is a former Asahi Shimbun reporter who was a spy for the North Korean Party, which is no exaggeration, the organizer of the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery, which is the most outrageous of its kind, involving North Korean agents*.
Although not an exact ratio since only the numerator includes emeritus professors and not the denominator (emeritus professors account for about 10% of the signatories), the fact that an estimated eight universities have more than 20% of their faculty members signing the petition and 31 out of 75 universities have more than 10% of their faculty members signing the petition shows how seriously the current trend in Japanese universities to abandon academic independence from politics has become.
It shows how serious the movement to abandon academic independence from politics has become in Japan's universities.
Table 3 on the right shows the top 20 fields of study regarding the number of signatories, broken down by area of specialization.
While humanities disciplines dominate the list, physics, mathematics, and biology are ranked among the sciences.
Practical sciences such as engineering and agriculture rank low among the sciences.
Constitutional studies is in 17th place with 94 scholars.
At the time the signatures were published on this point, there was much ridicule, especially on the Internet, about the fact that few constitutional scholars specialize in this issue.
But that criticism is out of focus.
What legal scholars should be doing is engaging in academic discussions such as, "This bill has this problem," "Changing this part of the bill will solve this problem," and "If we leave the current situation as it is, this problem will remain.
It is acceptable to say that you personally agree or disagree with the bill.
However, signing on to a political campaign not as an individual but as a jurist is clearly an act that undermines the political independence of academia.
Signing a petition on the Security Treaty as a scholar other than a jurist is problematic not only from the viewpoint of political independence of academics.
For example, although I have studied the Security Treaty to some extent, I am indeed too much in awe to express my opinion on the subject under the title of a scholar.
It is problematic not so much as a scholar but as an educator and even as a human being for a scholar to arrogate the authority of a scholar and display the irreverent attitude that they can make more correct judgments than the average person on all matters.
A large number of university faculty members do this openly.
Ironically, the most significant number of them are pedagogy faculty.
This article continues.
Since I began my university teaching career, I have learned that there is a "discipline" that operates on a completely different set of values than the education we received.
May 04, 2018
The following is a continuation of the previous chapter.
Fighting Back Against Academics' Assumptions with Artificial Intelligence
Many of the findings of this survey are consistent with my empirical results.
I studied biochemistry at the Faculty of Science during my college years. During my graduate studies, I worked on research related to artificial intelligence at the Graduate School of Engineering.
Since then, I had a strong interest in academic and scientific theory.
So, I read many books on the philosophy of science and attended study groups in related laboratories, but I still vividly remember being surprised by a remark I encountered there.
'This is correct because Professor XXX says so.'
It was the moment when I was discouraged by authoritarianism.
This kind of statement is unthinkable in a science laboratory.
But this incident was only the beginning.
After taking up a teaching position at a university, I learned that there is a "discipline" that operates on a completely different value system than the one we received in our education.
In the natural sciences, students are strictly trained to interpret experimental results with as little subjectivity as possible.
Naturally, it is not acceptable to tamper with the results of experiments or distort the interpretation of the results for political considerations.
This is why academia must be independent of politics.
However, I have noticed that among humanities disciplines, there are many "studies" that, from my perspective as a science major, are indistinguishable from those of academia or politics.
While calling themselves the same academic discipline, they are engaged in activities based on entirely different norms.
To clean up this confusion, we must start with the definition of academia.
Therefore, in 2005, I wrote "What is Learning?'' (University Education Press).
The book states that disciplines called "science,'' such as the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, must meet the requirement of "systematic knowledge with predictive power.''
A discipline that manipulates experimental results for its convenience cannot, of course, have predictive power.
Research ethics has recently come under severe scrutiny in the wake of the research misconduct involving Ms. Obokata.
I encountered another startling scene at a symposium on promoting education in research ethics the other day.
A person with a medical background who served as the president of a national university for many years spoke on stage about the background behind research misconduct.
"When you fall into groupthink, injustice occurs. It's the same as the Liberal Democratic Party."
One cannot help but feel a sense of despondency when one thinks that there are people at the center of research ethics education who do not realize the inappropriateness of making political statements in such a forum.
Of course, if there is objective evidence that the LDP falls into groupthink compared to other parties, it is a different story.
However, at least in my research, I have found results showing the opposite to be true.
For about ten years, my research group and I have been researching document analysis using information technology to bring scientific methods to humanities studies.
The field is generally called big data, data mining, or text mining.
While most of the research is intended for business applications, I am mainly working on analyzing documents related to politics, such as the minutes of the Diet session.
Part of this work was the creation of an artificial intelligence that can tell which party a statement in the Diet was made by a member of that party.
The decision-making system, which was obtained by machine-learning the Diet proceedings from 1999 to 2008, was asked to choose which party each member of the Diet belonged to: the Liberal Democratic Party, the New Komeito, the Democratic Party of Japan (at that time), the Social Democratic Party, or the Communist Party. The Communist Party had the highest percentage of correct answers (93%).
In other words, it can be interpreted that the Communist Party was easy for the artificial intelligence to identify as the "Communist Party" because the opinions of its members were the most uniform. At the same time, the DPJ had the most diverse opinions, and finding common points took time, resulting in a lower percentage of correct answers.
The fact that the opinions of the members belonging to the Communist Party are uniform can be said to indicate that the party has the strongest tendency toward groupthink.
Conversely, the diversity of opinions among DPJ members suggests that the party is more likely to split, a prediction that has come true with the split in the DPP.
The LDP had the second-lowest percentage of correct answers at 70% after the DPJ.
Based on this objective data, the criticism that the LDP is groupthink is incorrect.
Based on the results of this study, I would like to know if the same system could be used to measure the political bias of discourses in the world.
It is possible to quantify the degree to which various discourses are similar to the statements of the members of which political party.
The first application we made was to newspaper editorials.
The Asahi Shimbun, Mainichi Shimbun, Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Yomiuri Shimbun, and Sankei Shimbun were targeted. The Asahi Shimbun had the highest similarity to the three opposition parties of the time (DPJ, Social Democratic Party, and Communist Party), while the Sankei had the lowest, a result in line with general perception, but all five papers had a similarity to the opposition party that was greater than the ruling party. However, all five newspapers were more similar to the opposition than the ruling party.
This article continues.
