Coalition of Organizations and Individuals Against the Bill of National University Corporations
We are a broad coalition of organizations and individuals acting against the Bill of National University Corporations (BNUC), mainly consisting of teachers and researchers of Japanese national universities over the country. We advertised our opinions against the bill on national papers twice (April 23, Asahi, morning ed.; May21 Mainich, morning ed.) with the names of 1997 college teachers and citizens since the Diet started to discuss the bill. This bill, proposed by the Ministry of Education, was passed in the House of Representatives on May 22. The bill is expected to be actualized at next April with high probability if the things are not to be changed. This bill is not only an educational problem for Japanese national universities, but also an economic problem that may cause disastrous economic results to the future of Japan and the world.
Japan has been suffering a serious economic stagnation for more than ten years. Despite countless times of economic stimulus policy, Japanese government has yet to put the country's economy on the track of continuous recovery and growth. The root of the problem is that the current situation is not similar to any ones we have experienced since the end of World War II, and our experience and the system of past economic success (whose core is a rigid central bureaucratic system) turned out to be totally useless for the present situation. In short, the whole country has been standing still in front of the gate to a post-industrial society refusing to recognize that our time of industrial society is over.
Finally, however, the country seems to reach a common recognition that we need to systematically produce more productive and creative talents for the sectors other than mass-productive manufacturing to newly start a really continuous and stable economic growth and that the key to this economic rebirth is the quality of education, especially of higher education and that our national universities should become more independent and autonomous to offer the education of thus needed quality. The country seems to finally realize that what we need is not an education based on discipline but an education based on spontaneity. This is how the Ministry of Education came to propose BNUC, we thought, since they say that the purpose of the bill is to produce more independent, more autonomous, and more various national universities. When, however, the bill was made public at the end of February, we couldn't believe our eyes since the bill designs the total national universities to be centrally controlled by the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Education. For example, according to the bill, the Minister of Education is to establish intermediary objectives (for the term of six years) for each national university corporation (Article 30), and the latter has to prepare an intermediary plan for realizing intermediary objectives, and that plan has to be approved by the Ministry of Education (Article 31). Please don't laugh! It's neither a joke nor a description of a system of past Soviet Union. It is a system proposed by Japanese government for more independent and autonomous national universities!! Such a system will soon suffocate the academic freedom of Japanese national universities since it makes the presidents of national universities despotic within universities and obedient to the Ministry of Education. Moreover, the bill creates more than 500 positions of meaningless trustees and high officials for national universities all over the country. Needless to say, they are served for being a paradise for retired high bureaucrats as all Japanese know the trick as "amakudari" (literally means, descending from the sky). It considers only the organizational interests of outdated Japanese bureaucracy and the private interests of its bureaucrats.
It is only recently that Japan really recognized the need of higher education of quality based on the principle of spontaneity, and the whole country just started to think about how to redefine and reconstruct national universities in our society. We should not waste time but it just started. However, if BNUC is actualized, the last realistic hope for the rebirth of our society and economy will be permanently lost. For it will turn the whole national universities into a Kafkaic machinery for meaninglessly consuming educational budgets and producing meaningless documents. It will be a powerful self-perpetuating mechanism. It will steal our future forever. The world asks Japan to overcome its deflation for the stability of world economy. However, the actualization of BNUC will make it almost impossible for us to carry out this responsibility. This is why we call it an economic problem for the world. We ask you the press to let the whole world know this ridiculous and dangerous situation about Japanese universities being created by the Japanese government.