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The neoliberal management and administration of Asian HE as knowledge pro-
duction machinery comes at a high price. The first victim is academic and intellec-
tual freedom and the loss of subjectivity. Then, even the social projection of
knowledge or KT in Asia has become a lip service. As Kuan-Hsing Chen argued,
there is a need to formulate a critical proposition to transform the existing knowl-
edge structure and, at the same time, transform ourselves, so that Asian societies can
become each other’s points of reference to “develop a more adequate understanding
of contemporary cultural forms, practices, and institutions in the formerly colonized
world”(Chen 2010 , p. 1).
I think this is possible and should be done although fewer, critical discourses on
HE do exit in the West. In what constitutes an alarm bell for academics and intel-
lectuals, Henry Giroux critiques the relative silence of the Western (American in
particular) university intellectuals on the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic
bombing (Giroux 2015 ). He says that, overwhelmed by decades of public education
in a culture of violence and warring, treating the socially marginalized as “dispos-
able people” and abandoned dead bodies, the US HE intellectuals are in a state of
moral coma in respect to the country’s darker and unexamined past. The cause, he
argues, is the rampant neoliberalism that transformed an entire civilization with loss
of intellectual capability to put itself under the skin of others. The consequence is an
“esthetics of catastrophe” that exults the violence and glorifies cruelty, in which
social imagery is hijacked by a mental state of numbness dictated by a “neoliberal
disimagination machine.” Giroux has faithfully reflected on what is going on in the
university campuses:
The lesson to be drawn here, however tentative, is that under the reign of neoliberalism the
roles and responsibilities of the intellectual are being devalued, reduced to a stance marked
by a flight from moral and political responsibility, infused by an indifference to the unpleas-
ant necessities of mass violence, and safely tamed within public spheres such as higher
education that have given themselves over to a crude instrumental rationality and endorse-
ment of market-based values, practices, and policies. (Giroux 2015 , pp. 108, my
emphasis)
This caution is not only for the West. I believe it is the kind of structure and agency
that Asian HE knowledge production should never buy wholesale and that Asian HE
has an imperative homework of healing the wounds of colonization and the Cold
War; the damage inflicted by a borrowed neoliberal outlook and all-administrative
HE should be criticized and, if possible, halted.
Brace, the Worst May Be Ahead
This section attempts to outline some desirable or promising directions for Asian
HE. The section showcases a recent Japanese education policy to underscore that
the issues previously raised in the chapter are pressingly current.
Japan’s Ministry of Education was founded as an independent department of the
Meiji government. Its early education policies were aligned with an imperialistic
4 Higher Education Knowledge Production in Postcolonial-Neoliberal Asia