tokyo

Shigehiko Hasumi, the outspoken president of Tokyo University, has strongly criticized a government plan to turn Japan's ‘national’ universities into semi-autonomous agencies with greater administrative independence.

Hasumi, who is also chairman of the Association of National Universities, said at a press conference last week that the government's proposal would be “unsuitable for the university's management, education and research”. He added that a plan to introduce evaluation by the Management and Coordination Agency — which oversees government administration — “would further restrict” the universities' freedom.

Hasumi's statements came after a committee of researchers and academics set up by the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture (Monbusho) decided it was important to increase competition between universities, even at the risk of threatening research and teaching at some of them.

The 99 national universities have been targeted by government reforms aimed at improving administrative efficiency by restructuring government ministries and agencies (see Nature 389, 897; 1997).

Changes have already been proposed for institutes attached to science-related ministries and for the 14 basic research institutes under Monbusho, including the Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences (ISAS) and the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (see Nature 398, 272; 1999).

The government had postponed its plan to restructure national universities because of fierce opposition from the academic community and Monbusho (see Nature 395, 730; 1998). But such moves have gathered momentum recently as the result of strong pressure within the government to reduce the number of civil servants by giving agency status to government-run organizations.

In a bid to reduce tension over the move, Monbusho recently set up an ad hoc committee to discuss how the universities might be reformed without affecting the standard of research and education.

The committee — whose members include Minoru Oda, former director of ISAS, Hiroo Imura, former dean of Kyoto University, and Leo Esaki, former dean of Tsukuba University — held its first meeting last week. It concluded that the current government proposals, which emphasize performance targets related to costs, could jeopardize research and teaching at universities.

But they agreed that some competition must be introduced, perhaps by targeting funding at research groups and institutions with good track records, as opposed to Monbusho's current system, which disperses funds to universities without adequate consideration of their performance.

The committee hopes to agree on a general direction by the autumn and reach a final decision by next summer. But sources close to Monbusho say the ministry sees the creation of agencies as ‘inevitable’, and that the final decision is likely to be imposed on universities by the government whether they like it or not.

“The administrative reform plan is being forced upon us by the bureaucrats,” said Hasumi. “But a serious conflict [between the government and universities] would be inevitable at some point.”