[explanation]
The Minister of Education, according to the bill, establishes intermediary objectives ("chuuki mokuhyou") for each national university corporation (Article 30), and the president of national university must prepare an intermediary plan for realizing these objectives and the plan must be approved by the Minister of Education (Article 31). This system, which is apparently wrongheaded for universities, was originally introduced in the Law on General Principles Concerning Independent Administrative Institutions. This law was established for the administration of such institutions as National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan or National Institute of Sea Training, which have specific and limited social functions. Therefore, what the BNUC is going to do is like applying the same administrative system to NASA and UC Berkley.
[explanation]
According to the proposed system, the Ministry of Education gives each national university corporation the subsidies for its administration according to the evaluation by the evaluation committee in the Ministry of Education. On the other hand, the bill creates more than 500 new positions of high administrative officials under the name of "trustee"("riji") and "supervisor"("kanji") at national universities over the country (Article 10). What is expected to happen in such a system is that the president of national university hire retired officials of the Ministry of Education as its trustees and supervisors expecting more subsidies as a reward for offering lucrative jobs to their seniors. Thus the largest concern for the administration of national universities will be not the better education and research but how to please officials of the Ministry of Education. Such a phenomenon already happened in many national universities, but the BNUC will make it more universal and systematic.
[explanation]
Usually the board of trustees and the administration of a university are headed by different persons, and the president of the university as the head of the latter is elected and evaluated by the former. The BNUC calls the boards of trustees "board of officials" ("yakuinkai" in Japanese, Article 11). One of most unintelligible aspects of the BNUC is that it stipulates that the board of officials and the administration of university be headed by the same person, namely, the president of university. Moreover, according to the bill, the president is elected by the university president screening council, but the president can appoint up to the two thirds of council's members (Article 12). This means that the total management of university is entrusted not the university corporation itself as an independent organization, but to the president as an individual who is controlled by the Ministry of Education. We might call it a puppet dictatorship of university president. The BNUC gives neither independence nor autonomy to the national universities.
[explanation]
According to the BNUC, the administrative subsidies are given to each university from the government in accordance with the system established by the Law on General Principles Concerning Independent Administrative Corporations (Article 35, which refers to relevant articles of the Law on General Principles Concerning Independent Administrative Corporations). According to this system, the amount of administrative subsidies of each university is substantially influenced by the evaluation of evaluation committee in the Ministry of Education. As a result of such a system, each national university will be induced to give priority to the researches that fit short term interests and demands of the government and big businesses that financially sponsor it. Thus the BNUC makes it impossible for national universities to carry out their proper social function of serving the long term interests of the whole society in terms of education and scientific research.
[explanation]
Since the BNUC makes the financial basis of national universities unstable, it is expected that many national universities, especially local national universities, are forced to raise their tuitions. This will rob the people of Japan their equal right to higher education, which is at least partially protected by the current system of national universities, though their tuitions are more expensive than the average tuitions of the State Universities of U.S.A.