The past decade has been a tumultuous one for Japanese higher education with faculty pitted against students, students against government, and government against both in an often chaotic and seemingly incessant search for an answer to the question “Who governs Japan's universities?” The answer given by many analysts is “no one”—that the conflict between these three bodies have rendered Japanese universities ungovernable. Failure to achieve consensus and implement needed reforms in higher education has been attributed largely to the decentralized internal organization of the leading universities and the tradition of deep-seated hostility between academic intellectuals and the Japanese government. Although the more violent and dramatic of the conflicts in the late 1960s and early 1970s have received considerable attention by observers outside Japan, the long tradition of conflict over university governance which provides such a significant part of the intellectual and political context for those caught up in the contemporary debates has received far less attention. The purpose of this essay is to provide an historical perspective on this conflict by sketching in the prewar background that constitutes the heritage of academic self-government at Japan's oldest and still foremost universities, the imperial universities of Tokyo and Kyoto.
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