Sir

You pointed out the necessity of external review of Japanese universities (Nature 397, 371; 1999). It is true that external evaluation works efficiently if universities have equal opportunities in research — that is, if the ‘losers’ after evaluation have a chance to become ‘winners’ one day. But, because of the hierarchy among Japanese universities, the losers will have no such chance. This explains why professors in reputable universities are scared of external evaluation.

Table 1 shows a comparison of the two leading national universities, the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University, with two typical local national universities, Niigata University and Tottori University; the best two private universities, Waseda University and Keio University; and the best private science university, the Science University of Tokyo. Waseda and Keio have the best reputation in literature, economics and politics. There are remarkable differences between the scientific grants obtained by the best national universities and the rest.

Table 1 Comparison of Japanese national and private universities
Full size table

But lower grants do not necessarily imply lower scientific quality of faculty members. They are more likely to reflect a lack of time for research, because of heavy teaching duties, especially in private universities. And note the differences in the ratios of students to faculty members. As a result of the heavy teaching load, good scientists at private or local national universities rarely publish important papers.

The income of private universities is almost completely dependent on tuition fees from students. Faculty members are not allowed to draw their salaries from scientific grants from the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture (Monbusho), and the private universities are not allowed to get overheads from the grants. National universities, on the other hand, are subsidized by the government without any assessment. Private universities receive only about one tenth of the subsidy per student that is given to national universities.

Given this unfair situation, who can expect fair competition in research? The situation is similar to the issue of the trade imbalance between Japan and other countries. Although Japanese markets are officially declared open to foreign companies, they cannot gain ‘fair’ access. Similarly, it is impossible for private universities to compete with national universities in research.

This problem seems to be intrinsic to Japanese society. Recently, the Council on University Education, an advisory body to Monbusho, published a report proposing a plan to stimulate competition among universities. Amazingly, however, there is not a word in the report about problems caused by the hierarchy among universities.