Downsizing

When I opened X, I found a controversy (or rather, a low-level squabble) taking place regarding the phrase "downsizing of humanities and social sciences" found in a portion of the government's Basic Policies.

The government's usual tactic of pitting the humanities and social sciences—the so-called "liberal arts"—against the so-called "sciences" is itself outdated and painful to watch. The distinction between liberal arts and sciences is less about academic fields and more of a derivative concept dependent on the entrance examination system; it is, in a sense, a "position." Just like the ecosystems of public servants versus private sector employees, career-track versus general-track staff, or even (within the small organization of a university) faculty versus administrative staff, each has different duties, mentalities, cultures, and interests. Japanese people tend to value this "position" more than life itself; speaking out across these lines is considered taboo, and when that taboo is broken, it is almost always done with aggressive intent. The only interaction that occurs across these positions is through exchanges where the liberal arts side mocks the sciences, or the sciences side mocks the liberal arts. I think if you open X, you will understand this well.

Now, since this position is a derivative defined by society, it can become precarious or, conversely, rise to prominence depending on the growth or decline of society. It can gain or lose reputation, and be met with expectations or disappointment. Everything depends on society.

Conversely, I believe that academic fields must have the power to define society. Society may talk about "sciences" or "liberal arts," but our attitude is to pursue what we want to know in the most optimal way. As a result, people in fields generally recognized as liberal arts sometimes use approaches similar to those in fields recognized as sciences (or vice versa), but that is not because society demanded it. It is because that is what they wanted to do.

I find the term "fusion of liberal arts and sciences" to be an eerie gesture, where society, having already defined these categories, once again meddlesomely urges them to "get along." I belong to the research field of linguistics, and I choose or develop various scientific methods depending on the subject I want to clarify; I don't think anyone is conducting research while consciously thinking about whether they are in the liberal arts or the sciences.

In short, the subject of interest (e.g., human language) and the approach (fieldwork, experiments, using large-scale corpora, etc.) are determined by the professionals, and as a result, the research field is defined, which society then utilizes in terms of implementation or in the form of liberal arts education at universities and the like. When we say research is "useful," it refers to the intellectual exchange that arises from this flow (I wrote about this in a separate article).

However, the policy mentioned at the beginning takes the institutional distinction between liberal arts and sciences—which is rigidly defined by society and rooted in the entrance examination system—that is, the "position," as a given, and attempts to steer people from one side to the other. I believe that is where the problem lies.

How one holds research interests is a form of academic freedom. For example, let's assume that the department I am in (a humanities research unit) is reorganized into something like a "Data Science Faculty" (lol) due to this policy. My research field is the study of endangered languages; I cannot access massive data to begin with, and it requires steady, on-the-ground fieldwork. It takes an agonizing amount of time to transcribe the scarce audio data obtained from speakers and convert it into a database that can withstand academic scrutiny.

However, if there were unnecessary pressure to shift toward a "data science" style of research (hypothetically speaking), I would likely stop field research and instead digitize existing materials that seem usable in large quantities, calling it an "archive" (lol), or I would shift my research interests themselves, thinking, "To do data science-style research in these few years, it's more cost-effective to work on that language which already has dictionaries and texts, rather than the language I'm currently working on." As a result, the high-quality, profound documentation of that language—which only I in the world could have done—would end up half-baked, becoming something low-quality, superficial, and something anyone could do.

Personally, to answer the question inherent in my own research—"With little time left to conduct field research, is there a way to record and preserve large amounts of data for the future?"—I have chosen to use engineering methods from adjacent fields like natural language processing in addition to traditional fieldwork (for example, as shown below). This is not because I thought, "I must change my liberal arts style," and certainly not because someone told me to. It is because it was necessary for my research, and I am the one who knows that.

Also, if we change the perspective from a researcher to a high school student, and suppose the field I am interested in is Japanese literature, I could have pursued it to my heart's content by entering the literature department of a national university. But if that department suddenly becomes a "Data Science Faculty" (lol) and I am told, "If you want to do Japanese literature, go to a private university in another prefecture," then ultimately, my choices will change based on economic advantages or disadvantages. The important point is that options that existed normally until now are being cut off by the government's steering policy.

Many people say (you can see this by looking at X) that since tax money is invested in universities (especially national universities), the above steering is a natural response by the government. However, the primary purpose of tax money is to maintain infrastructure to uphold the rights of citizens guaranteed by the Constitution. Restricting that indirectly with a pleasant-sounding term like "downsizing" is fundamentally contrary to the purpose of using tax money. If that is permitted, the government might think it is also permissible to say "downsizing of college graduates" and steer high school students who want to study at university into "industries with labor shortages," and there might be no stopping it, leading to "downsizing of longevity" or "downsizing of happiness." I think this: if one is to use the concept of so-called downsizing, shouldn't we be setting the problem as,

how can we carry out the "downsizing of society as a whole" while maintaining all the rights of citizens stipulated by the Constitution as the population declines?The constraint of "while maintaining the rights of citizens" is important.

To tackle this difficult problem, we will likely need the knowledge of various academic fields that are not defined by the current themes (problem awareness, strong interests) of society. In doing so, it is important not to let the existence of academic fields be defined by society. For example, by the time society makes a fuss that this is the era of physical AI, the era of physical AI as research has already begun somewhere in the world. Even if we reorganize the academic structure now to try to catch up, by the time it grows, the theme will have shifted to another problem. This chasing of themes is similar to so-called momentum investing. Rather, it is better to assume that we do not know which knowledge will be useful for which social challenge and when, and it is definitely better to diversify investments thinly and widely across all basic fields.

Pitting the interests (rights) of specific positions in society against each other to make them fight over resources (tax money), and watching the outcome while letting one side be sacrificed, could be called the unchanging modus operandi of the Japanese administration. Citizens should be angry about this, and should be worried about the abuse of "downsizing" mentioned above, or about changing the very mechanism where everyone has the potential to be a target of downsizing. However, there were few such voices of concern on X. Instead, people easily entered the "arena" prepared by the state, with the sciences bashing the liberal arts, the liberal arts bashing the sciences, and ordinary people who vaguely dislike researchers jeering at the discussion as spectators. And then, the usual scene unfolds where everyone forgets about it after a few days. I was never able to find people who would use this as an opportunity to recall the difficult problem written in bold above and discuss it constructively together.