Week5-Yiwen Bao

Yiwen Bao

ASA2 A01

Week 5

This week I read “The Imperial University: Race, War and the Nation-State” by Piya Chatterjee and Sunna Maira, and “Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence” by Darrell Y. Hamamoto. At my first attempt of reading and understanding, I had no idea how these two related to the topics in Asian American Studies course somewhat because of unfamiliar words about military and administrative side. Since the first longer one titles “Imperial University” which is the topic of week 5, I tried to focus on that one. After my second or third attempts of reading it, I could see how higher education plays important role in imperialism and some facts and characteristics of U.S. militaries in the shorter reading gave me insights about the first one. The universities are related to “repression, policing, containment” in the reading, and they are the representatives of how U.S. wants to be imperial not only in building an image of humanitarian but also to control aspects like gender, sexuality, democracy and so on. Those are most achievable by controlling higher education in universities. From the second reading, military increased the number of murders and killers due to development of violence. So it’s said that military would touch further on universities, academics and higher education, I feel scared. In those historical stories, an imperial state usually keeps silent about minority’s concerns. When a university is alike an imperial state, students in minority having issues would expect no response when speaking up against oppression. I believe that when US. is seeking for building up image of humanitarian who cares a lot about democracy, the way they control things by standing totally on majority side and including much authority isn’t democratic at all. Even just saying this own belief, I feel much safer when in this course. In other courses where majority are Americans, I won’t say those much in certain. As students, we can’t do anything with changes towards imperial universities such as increasing privatization of schools. The choices of public universities are limited and those are ones with lower tuition usually. This is similar to last week’s topic: corporatization of universities. However, I tried to look at it from Americans’ perspective because I couldn’t understand why majority oppressed minority so much continuously. I think I might also behave in this way if the majority is Chinese. The military protected us and saved our nation, why not include them wider into education? We already felt the sense of security from them, maybe more from them in other areas? Then the rights of minority couldn’t be avoided reducing. At last, I still don’t know much about imperialism of universities, not as corporatization, which I could compare to enterprises. I hope to learn more in next weeks’ lectures and discussions and re-value my ideas later.

Questions: 

1. In Japan and UK, many universities have “Imperial University” in their names, as “imperial universities” develop in US, will these words be in names of universities?
2. When was the idea of “imperial university” put into higher education? How deep has it been built? What about it compared to corporatization of universities?
3. The minority usually doesn’t take away benefits of the majority, so beyond considering their needs second, why the majority would even oppress the minority?

References:

Chatterjee, Maira, P. (n.d.). The Imperial University: Race, War, and the Nation-State. London: University of Minnesota Press. Retrieved October 20, 2017.

Chatterjee, Maira, P. (May, 2014). Cover of Sunaina Maira and Piya Chatterjee, “The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent”. Retrieved October 20, 2017. http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/17695/new-texts-out-now_sunaina-maira-and-piya-chatterje