Japanese Higher Education And Academic Capitalism: A Framework For Analysis

Abstract

The 2004 structural reform law that corporatized national and public universities in Japan, endowing them with broad administrative autonomy from the Ministry of Education, placed Japanese higher education under the microscope of scholars versed in the academic capitalism theory. Contrary to what this theory would suggest however, this shift in the governance of Japanese state universities, besides being inexorable, was in retrospect neither “a great deal of change”, nor a sudden one. Moreover, what is largely overlooked is its relation with other recent and compelling initiatives such as offering more English, entrepreneurial and technical courses in the university curriculum, as well as training students in global business and industry practices, whereby capitalism is served. To alternatively argue that Japanese universities are suddenly following global trends is also trivial to the understanding of this disposition, intended not to retire universities from their legitimate role as centers of scientific scholarship and humane critique, but to gradually increase their efficiency for the capitalist surrounding order. By merging the theory of academic capitalism with the model of incrementalism in policy, this article outlines a theoretical framework for addressing such small and gradual changes, arguing that they are all incremental stages in the augmentation process of a capitalist higher education.