A University Under Fire

Abstract

This is the first of two ethnographic chapters describing the situation at a private university (referred to using the pseudonym ‘MGU’) in the early 2000s as it was about to hit the bottom of a rapid decline in the number of applications and students. This account draws on kinship studies, anthropological theory, and ethnographic methods. It sets out the background history of MGU and the way it had positioned itself in the private higher education sector. It outlines the key features of its academic faculty, support staff, and students. It shows how well MGU was doing at the height of the 18-year-old population in 1992 and how badly by the mid-2000s. In particular, the account highlights two features. The first is that MGU was part of a conglomeration of family-run institutions. The second is the general level of dissatisfaction among staff towards management as the institution faced an increasingly insecure future combined with an equal level of frustration of management towards staff who would not change their practices to confront the problems the institution faced. These two features were perceived to be linked. Staff claimed that they had no information about the real state of affairs in the institution and hence felt powerless to do anything to change it. Management claimed to feel—reflecting the priorities of the classic kinship system in Japan—that it was their personal responsibility to sort out the problems; they felt a sense of duty towards those who had set MGU up, those currently running it and its linked institutions, and those who would take over in the future.