The Idea And Institutional Design Of Faculty Academic Governance

In a broad sense, faculty academic governance refers to the university professors have engaged in the study of attributes of academic activities. In a narrow sense, it has different meanings according to the different times, backgrounds and developments of each single country. This paper selected China and Japan to make a comparison. The main reason is because that China and Japan have the similar backgrounds in culture, social developments and so on. In China, faculty academic governance means professors are engaged in academic researches. In addition to this concept, in order to avoid the problem in which the administrative power over-intervene the academic power, it is allowed that professors have certain power to manage academic affairs. In Japan, the author used the national university corporation reform as the central policy to discuss. Before the reform, the faculty of professors was the most powerful organization in university. After the reform, the faculty still has power on teaching and scientific research, the power on management, personnel and other affairs were gradually weakened. It is worth to discuss and explore the differences of ideas and system designs between China and Japan. Following the research procedure, “problem-defining, problem-analyzing and problem-solving”, this paper used the historical research method, literature research method and comparative method to analyze the contents as follows.Through the study of the idea and institutional design of faculty academic governance,we found that there are lots of common trends such as in the idea of faculty academic governance,Both of China and Japan are aimed at achieve achieve the university autonomy and academic freedom.In the content of faculty academic governance,they are trying to give professors more autonomies.In the field of institutional design both of them are using bureaucracy management mode as the way. At the same time, there are some differences in the following three aspects: the difference of the strength of the power of university governance, university internal governance mode and the difference of the internal governance structure.According to the present situation of the development of higher education in our country, and through the comparative research between China and Japan professors differences and similarities, we can learn some experience from Japan, mainly has three aspects: first, improve the legal system, the professionalization of management; second, to realize the management of the open, the introduction of outside persons to participate in decision-making consultation; third, perfect the internal power distribution system, promote the reform of the management system of higher education. In order to provide a useful reference for our philosophy of professor and perfect institutional arrangement.