In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The South Atlantic Quarterly 99.4 (2000) 669-696



[Access article in PDF]

The University and the "Global" Economy: The Cases of the United States and Japan

Masao Miyoshi


Iwao Nakatani, deputy chairman of the government's Economic Strategy Council, joined Sony Corp.'s board on June 29 after resigning from his full professorship at Tokyo's state-run Hitotsubashi University. Nakatani had applied earlier this year to the National Personnel Authority for permission to take up Sony's offer. This was a perfect opportunity for the mandarins to show a change of heart. But they rejected his request, citing regulations that bar public servants from running their own companies or serving on the boards of profit-making firms. Prime Minister Obuchi and the Education Minister spoke up in Nakatani's defense, but to no avail. So Nakatani will teach part-time at Hitotsubashi and consult at several startups.

—Irene M. Kuni, "Memo to Japan: Set Your Academics Free," Business Week, July 10, 1999

By now we are sufficiently alerted that the touted "global" economy means capital's maximal pursuit of profit and productivity and excision of the unprofitable and unproductive throughout the world. Both the cause and the effect of the vast advances in electronic and biogenetic technology, the productivity and efficiency in communication, transportation, manufacture, and medicine, have been immensely [End Page 669] enhanced during the last decade. Capital can reach anywhere in the world practically without cost. "Globalization" aims at the concentration of wealth by taking full advantage of uneven development. The few rich are immensely rich, while the poor are unprecedently deprived and multitudinous, and the gap between them is deep and wide. The distribution of wealth is uneven not only between the developed and developing nations but also within each of these nations and regions, both industrial and unindustrialized. What is most striking in this development, however, is the pervasiveness of this "neoliberal" principle and practice. It is evident in the nearly worldwide project to privatize public resources and to convert all political concerns into economic ones. In public policy discourse, "rational" choice is assumed to be gainful and acquisitive above all other interests. In personal consideration, too, self-interest is taken to be normative and legitimized. This is the moment of triumph for neoliberalism, and critical ideas such as opposition, resistance, and liberation are all but forgotten and discarded as useless and irrelevant in a supposedly seamless globe of capitalism.

This article examines the impact in the United States and Japan of globalization on the university, a site that might be expected to document, interpret, criticize, and intervene in the face of such an event. Several prefatory remarks need to be made here as regards the foci and limits of the article. First, the corporatization of the university is by now in progress nearly everywhere in industrial nations. My choice of these two countries is not meant to be contrastive or typical; it is primarily randomly exemplary. Second, the history of the university is widely discrepant and variant everywhere, even between France and Germany, not to say the United States and Japan. Here, however, I will have to restrict myself to today's state of affairs, leaving the forces of history to chance comments and suggestions. Third, I have elsewhere written about the corporatized university in the United States, especially around the issue of technology transfer and the withering of the humanities. 1 I am fairly certain that my documentation is accurate and up to date. On the other hand, there are developments in Japan about which I am not quite clear, nor, it seems, are most native scholars because of the particular nature of the political discourse in today's Japan. I will discuss that subject more fully later. Finally, my purpose is not just to present the current stages of academia's surrender to business in the two countries but, by comparison, to suggest divergent ways globalization is unfolding in the world. [End Page 670]

* * *

The alliance between the university and industry in the United States is not a recent...

pdf

Share