Research On And Inspiration From The Corporatization Of Japanese National Universities

Corporatization of university is logical in theory and is also adopted in many countries. Universities in our country were endowed with corporation status by The Law of Higher Education in 1998. But the implementation of the university corporation system does not meet the initial expectations of the policy. Regarding the relationship among university, government and society, there are still some problems, such as unclearness of the attribute of university corporation, lack of specified regulations on the rights and obligations of university and government, governments' administrative intervention of university issues, ineffectiveness or lack of the third-party evaluation of university, and unreasonable resource-distributed system. The research on the corporatization of Japanese national universities can provide inspirations and experiences for us to solve those problems.This comparative research adopts a qualitative approach. Specifically, two methods are mainly used: interviews with scholars and teachers in universities and analysis of documents related. Besides, one university is decomposed as a case to demonstrate the practice of university corporatization. This research can contribute to the construction of university corporation system in China, as well as enrichment of theories of higher education.The Corporatization of national universities in Japan takes place under the background the administrative system reform, which aims to reduce the number of civil servants and improve the governmental working efficiency. Because of the civil servants' status of university teachers, the objective of administrative reform would not be reached if national universities were not changed to corporations and the teacher status to non-civil servants. Other factors that drive university corporatization are those such as university's rigid structure, president's lack of autonomous rights, deficient university evaluation system, university's being unable to meet social need, etc. Under the above backgrounds as well as the impetus coming from the western university reforms, all national universities were corporatized by the Japanese...