Sources of Japanese University Conflict

Campus protest occurred all over the world in the 1960s. This study follows earlier attempts to explain not student protest in general, but why protest severity varied among colleges and universities. Using published data on nineteen different forms of conflict, the overall amount of conflict in each of Japan's four-year colleges and universities during the 1968-1969 period is measured by a scale of conflict severity. This dependent variable is then regressed on two sets of explanatory variables—the protest issues on each campus and the variable organizational characteristics of the schools themselves. The Japanese findings largely replicate earlier American observations: the severity of campus conflict was greatest in large, structurally complex (differentiated) and high-quality schools. The internal differentiation of the university and other structural characteristics explain more of the variance than do the issues specific to given campuses. The causal importance of structural differentiation is traced to the “antistructure†ideology of the radical student organizations.