BY FRANK BALDWIN
The Hollywood Ten knew they were on a blacklist. The House Un-American Activities Committee held televised hearings to vilify screenwriters and other cinema professionals and cited them for contempt of Congress. Studio executives fired the group in a press release, a warning to the film industry that subversives were not employable. Public shaming was a standard tactic of intimidation during the Red Scare of the 1950s.
More recently, in an ideological twist, a South Korean nongovernmental organization published a “blacklist” of unqualified (corrupt) politicians to inform voters. Justice is served and viewers cheer when James Spader takes down a criminal on The Blacklist. In the real world, however, political blacklists are typically covert or informal and the target is unaware . . . until the job or the fellowship doesn’t come through. Silent but deadly.
How would a fellowship applicant in 2019 know if s/he is on a blacklist? Okay, alright. The question may seem more appropriate for Breitbart or Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist, hangouts for the conspiracy crowd, than for Academe Blog. I happily aver that despite our polarized politics, perversion of meritocratic selection is not a burning issue. At least I found no wisps of smoke in the leading chronicles of higher education, except for Koch money that crossed many ethical lines to favor free-market proponents. Whatever we make of affirmative action for conservative economists, it’s not a blacklist.
For the real McCoy, consider the case of applicants for the prestigious Abe Fellowship, which attracts mid-career American and Japanese social scientists working on that second book to nail tenure. My article “’Book Burning’ in Japan” in the current volume of the Journal of Academic Freedom examines an instance of nationalist pressure on the fellowship program. The application process is daunting, the competition is stiff, and the fieldwork is in a different culture and language. There are no casual, half-hearted aspirants for an Abe, only serious people ready to rearrange their lives (kids’ schools, pets, mortgages) for two years.
The fellowship is the flagship award of the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership (Tokyo) in cooperation with the Social Science Research Council (New York). This year’s competition closed September 1; the selection committee meets in November. Between now and then, according to journalistic and scholarly accounts, behind the scenes in Tokyo government officials will look into the Abe candidates. Unlike academic gatekeepers committed to scholarly norms, bureaucrats are wary of topics and applicants that might offend the prime minister’s office, the powerful Kantei, and look askance at an unfavorable reference to Prime Minister Abe Shinzo in a Los Angeles Times op-ed or an online journal.
So academic freedom is on the line when the eight professors evaluate this year’s hopefuls, who are entitled to an objective, fair-minded assessment. Independent selection is the touchstone of a merit-based fellowship. At issue is committee autonomy versus government intervention.
While most Japanese long ago expressed remorse for Imperial Army actions in China and embraced the nation’s postwar “peace” constitution, the premier anachronistically champions historical revisionism. Nationalists and right-wing politicians can’t get over World War II. The hot button issue for decades has been compensation for the “comfort women,” the euphemism for women pressed into service as prostitutes for the Japanese military. The list of taboo subjects reportedly has now expanded to include territorial disputes with neighboring countries.
Will Abe applicants be tripped up by politicized vetting? Let’s see who makes the cut in November.
Guest blogger Frank Baldwin was Japan Representative of the Social Science Research Council from 1996 to 2011 and has written extensively on East Asia.
Read the complete volume of the 2019 Journal of Academic Freedom at https://www.aaup.org/JAF10.
