Organizational Paralysis:
The Case of Todai

Ivan P. Hall

Among the various subsystems of Japanese society today, the university must rate rather close to the bottom of the scale in terms of organizational adequacy and effectiveness in decision-making. The violent campus upheaval of 1968–1969 and the calls for drastic reform emanating from the government as well as the general public reflect the fact that the universities have adjusted far more slowly than have other subsystems to the requirements of Japan's emerging postindustrial society. Meanwhile, the inability of the universities to initiate meaningful reforms by themselves underscores serious flaws in their decision-making processes.

Nowhere have these problems surfaced more dramatically than in the case of Tokyo University (ab: Todai, pron: Todai^[*] ). As Japan's first (and until 1898, only) modern university, as the model for the other national (formerly imperial) universities, as the bellwether of Japanese higher education as a whole, and as the training ground for Japan's bureaucratic, political, intellectual, and social elite, Todai for all its special features provides important clues to the ailments of Japanese universities in general.

This paper will discuss organization (primarily structure) and decision-making at Todai today. In order to place patterns and problems in a broader evolutionary perspective, each of these two themes will be introduced by a brief historical account. The final section will mention some of the proposals for the future.

I should like to make it clear here that by contrasting Todai to a somewhat abstracted American pattern, I do not mean to imply any value

judgments. The yardstick I aim to use is functional performance. If much of my language about Todai is negative, this simply reflects my impression, as an outsider, of considerable organizational dysfunction—an impression fortified by loudly voiced Japanese frustrations with an institution which seems to be operating less than adequately in its own terms and in its own context.

Organization:
Structural Characteristics

Japanese universities today are prisoners of their past. At Todai, too, inherited structure has created not only the specific problems that urgently require decisions for reform, but also many of the obstacles that lie in the way of reaching those decisions effectively. The case of Todai serves as an eloquent reminder that behavior in a modernizing society is a product not only of traditional cultural conditioning but also of objective structural realities—whether imported or homespun—which have been arbitrarily created and imposed at specific historical points.

The most basic structural characteristic at Todai—with far-reaching implications for the decision-making process—is its organization into the highly distinct and quasi-independent Faculties or Gakubu (these are administrative units; this usage will be capitalized throughout to avoid confusion with "faculty" in the sense of teaching staff). There are nine Faculties—Law, Medicine, Engineering, Literature, Science, Agriculture, Economics, Education, and Pharmacology, all located on or near the main campus in the Hongo^[*] district. The College of General Education, which enrolls all undergraduates during their first two years, is located apart from the main campus in the Komaba district, but organizationally it is the equivalent of a tenth Faculty.

These Faculties are far more comprehensive and powerful than the typical department on an American campus, and they are considerably more independent of the university's central administration than even the graduate professional schools attached to American universities (such as law, medical, and business schools), which they resemble in some respects. Since general or liberal education at Todai has its own plant, faculty, and curriculum outside the main Faculty structure in the College of General Education, the Todai Faculties concentrate on undergraduate teaching at the professionalized third- and fourth-year levels, and on postgraduate teaching and research. The Faculty staffs, however, are burdened primarily with undergraduate teaching, which is Todai's main mission. With the best and most lavishly funded graduate and research facilities in Japan, Todai still has only four thousand of its sixteen thousand students in the graduate school (daigakuin ). The graduate school is little more than a loose association of research divisions (kenkyuka^[*] ), which are in effect extensions of the respective Faculties. Todai's fourteen research institutes (kenkyujo^[*] ) have independent staffs, but their members retain strong

personal ties with their former Faculties. In many cases, the best research and graduate training in Japan today is found outside the university system, in the government and business sectors.

The overall result has been an articulation between general education, specialized education, and research quite different from the pattern in the United States. If the typical American university may be viewed as an upright T —with a smooth vertical articulation between general and specialized courses in its four-year college, crossed at the top by the robust horizontal of its professional and research-oriented graduate schools, then perhaps Todai may best be described as an upside-down T —with the massive vertical components of its ten Faculties resting uneasily on the detached freshman-sophomore course and petering out at the top in impoverished, inadequately organized, and clique-ridden research facilities.

This paradigm, for all its clumsiness, pinpoints the three major structural problems facing Todai today: (1) its division into rigid vertical units that often paralyze university-wide decision-making in the name of Faculty autonomy; (2) the orphaning of general education; and (3) the weakness of research.

The Historical Background

The autonomous spirit of Todai's Faculties derives in part from their initial constitution as separate colleges (bunka daigaku , literally "branch universities") under the Imperial University Ordinance (Teikoku Daigakurei) of 1886. While the 1886 ordinance is responsible for the basic physiognomy of the school, there are two other watershed dates that are important in the university's historical evolution: 1918, when the University Ordinance (Daigakurei) officially divided the graduate school into Faculty-related research divisions; and the late 1940s, when an expanded and in some respects debased preparatory course at the former First High School (Daiichi Kotogakko^[*] ) at Komaba was telescoped from three into two years and tacked onto the prewar course at Hongo^[*] in an attempt to realize general education.

In 1877, Tokyo University was established on the "amalgamated college" pattern then popular in the United States, with four departments but no graduate school. Its Department of Medicine was the direct descendant of the medical school of the Shogunate government (Igakusho^[*] ), while the three other departments (law, science, and literature) were the collective heirs of the government's School for Western Studies (Kaiseijo). The old Confucian Shoheiko^[*] (Samurai School), which had formed the "Main Campus" (Honko^[*] ) of the 1869–1871 Daigakko^[*] (university) and supported traditionalism during those years, disappeared without a trace after the establishment of a modern Ministry of Education

(Monbusho^[*] ) in 1872, and left the new university with a Western-oriented, strongly utilitarian spirit.

In 1886, Education Minister Mori Arinori gave Todai its "imperial" sobriquet, placed it firmly under the control of the Ministry of Education, provided it with an independent and comprehensive graduate school, and reorganized it into the five colleges of law, medicine, engineering, literature, and science—incidentally taking a lead on Germany, France, and England with the engineering college. The colleges were to "teach the theory and application of the arts and sciences," while the graduate school was entrusted with "mastering their secrets," i.e., basic research.

Mori's aim was to raise up as rapidly as possible the bureaucratic, technocratic, and academic elite, as well as the fund of modern scientific and technological knowledge needed to bring Japan abreast with the Western powers. His frame of reference, often criticized for having been too "statist," was not all that different from the policy of present-day developing countries, which have to allocate resources rather narrowly for maximum impact. Likewise, his importation of the German graduate-school and research ethos was simply in line with a modern trend that was beginning to infect the Anglo-Saxon countries at about the same time. The imperatives of forced modernization, however, were not congenial (then as now) to the cultivation of humanistic, general educational, interdisciplinary approaches.

The vertical configuration of Japanese higher education owes much to this initial scramble for expertise—the effort to push each field ahead as fast as it would go. The concern for the totality and interrelatedness of knowledge—which the Western universities had inherited from their early nurture at the hands of medieval philosophy and Renaissance humanism—was lost by the Japanese when they found their own Confucian tradition wanting and abandoned it.

The colleges of 1886 operated with little concern for each other. Each college had its own faculty, regulated its own curriculum and examinations, and issued its own diplomas—subject to ministerial approval and standards. From an early date the teaching staff of each college began to meet informally in a Faculty council (kyojukai^[*] ) to discuss the practical running of their school. Coordination of the university as a whole was accomplished through a president (socho^[*] ) who was the direct appointee and representative—the proconsul, in effect—of the Ministry of Education and who kept tight control over the several college principals (gakucho^[*] ) who in turn, although professors in their respective colleges, were also selected by the education minister. The principal dealt with the university authorities and concerned himself with matters on the intercollege level. Intracollege affairs were in the hands of a vice-principal (kyoto^[*] ), who was likewise appointed from the professorial corps by the minister and who was responsible for "maintaining order in the classroom," and for "supervising

the work" of the professors (kyoju^[*] ), assistant professors (jokyoju^[*] ), dormitory masters, and clerks attached to his school. Each college had several departments (gakka —for instance, English law, French law, and politics in the Law College), and in 1893, Education Minister Inoue Kowashi introduced the koza^[*] (Lehrstuhl , or "chair") system in order that every major subject might be covered by an eminent scholar with sufficient funds, assistants, and prestige to devote himself wholeheartedly to his specialty. The need of the times, Inoue explained, was for the expert, not the amateur or jack-of-all-trades.

The central role of Todai in the development of Japan's higher education is underscored by the fact that, until the establishment of the second imperial university at Kyoto in 1898, it was the only recognized university in Japan. The ordinance of 1918, which finally granted university status to the private colleges and government higher technical schools in order to accommodate the swelling demand for higher education, also transformed Todai into a more unified, "comprehensive university" (sogo^[*] daigaku ), with the former colleges now becoming Faculties and their principals transformed into deans (gakubucho^[*] ). The University gradually won autonomy from the ministry, which gave it a greater cohesiveness than it had enjoyed in 1886, but to this day the Faculties have retained the basic identity and independence of the original colleges.

The graduate school, in Mori Arinori's original concept, was to stand above and apart from the colleges, and to coordinate research at the higher levels of all branches of learning. The idea of sharply differentiating teaching and research while maximizing the horizontal flow between various research facilities is one that has found favor with reformers again today. Inevitably, however, the vertical affinities within each discipline came to the fore. The research divisions, informally established in 1887, enabled the graduate student to spend two more years in his college before entering the graduate school proper, but after 1918 the graduate school became primarily a mechanism for administrative liaison. The postwar reforms revised the content and methods of graduate education in the direction of greater breadth of learning and more formal requirements (such as the accumulation of credits) but did not alter its structural grounding in the Faculty system.

The continuing hiatus at Todai between general and specialized education has deep historical roots in the fact that before the war the Japanese, like the major European nations, considered the university a place for professional (or at least academically specialized) training, with liberal or general education something to be fully mastered in the rigorous secondary courses of the kotogakko^[*] —the Japanese counterpart to the lycée, Gymnasium, or English public school. Both types of education before the war in Europe and Japan were for a limited elite. The introduction of general education into the university under the American occupation was redolent of an alien social system (if not of the dilatoriness of American

secondary education) and overlooked the fact that the prewar higher schools, while catering to the few, had provided imperial university students with an excellent general education.

In today's Japan, with the expansion and democratization of higher education, there is a general acceptance of the need for some sort of general education at the university level and for its meaningful integration with the specialized programs. At the time of the postwar reforms, however, Todai had no other choice than to accept a rather mechanical fusion with the general education program offered at Komaba, which, for all its changes, remains in many respects a yobimon , or preparatory department. For this there has been ample precedent. The Ministry of Education's Tokyo^[*] Eigo Gakko^[*] (English School) had been attached to the university and was officially known as the yobimon from 1877 to 1886. The state-operated higher schools established by Mori (and supplanting the yobimon ) were intended to serve as terminal secondary schools as well as to provide preparation for the university; but they soon confined themselves to the second function. The seven top-ranking higher schools before the war prepared exclusively for the neighboring imperial university, and the curriculum at the old First Higher School at Komaba dovetailed smoothly into the several Faculties at Todai.

Todai Today:
Patterns and Problems

The main structural components of Todai today are its ten Faculties, fourteen research institutes, the graduate school, and the administrative office (jimukyoku ) that serves the university as a whole. There are also six research facilities for joint interfaculty or interuniversity use, including the Joint Nuclear Energy Research Center and two computer centers.

Both in the breakdown and arrangement of fields of learning and in the relative importance of successive levels of administration, there are significant departures from the usual American pattern. In the United States, at the larger Ivy League schools and at most state universities, there are traditionally several fields such as law, medicine, or business that are strictly professional and reserved for the graduate level. They are organized as separate schools, which possess their own full set of administrative organs, are subject in the final instance to control by the president and board of trustees, and are generally closed to undergraduates. Even where undergraduates may attend lectures, they are enrolled in their own undergraduate college, where the full roster of humanities and social and natural sciences is organized under a Faculty (or School) of Arts and Sciences, divided into departments of roughly equal standing (though not size), which offer a variety of courses—the menu shifting with the availability and preferences of the staff or with student demand. These departments also offer graduate training in fields not represented by the professional schools and cooperate in a variety of interdisciplinary

programs at the graduate, undergraduate, and general-education levels. Each department, under its chairman, exercises general control over the development of its own program and has the primary say in appointments, but matters of a campus-wide nature are taken up at meetings of the entire arts and sciences faculty, in which professors more often act as individuals rather than as representatives of their own departments. The structure here is flexible and permits a high degree of lateral exchange and contact between specialized fields.

At Todai the articulation of fields is very different. What would be professional graduate schools in America—the Faculties of Law, Medicine, Education, Pharmacology (and in many cases Engineering and Agriculture)—at Todai enroll primarily third-and fourth-year undergraduates. Students are now earmarked for their Faculties upon joining the university and begin preparing for them actively during their second year at Komaba. A premedical student (as he would be called in America) studies not in the biology or biochemistry department of the Science Faculty (which trains only pure scientists) but in the medical department of the Faculty of Medicine. And the education major, although entitled to attend lectures in other Faculties, will rarely do so and will be deep into his specialty of educational psychology or school administration by his third year.

The other familiar departments of the typical American arts and sciences faculty are scattered throughout the remaining three Todai Faculties of Economics, Science, and Literature (the bungakubu , perhaps best translated as humanities or liberal arts), in various shapes and sizes. Economics rates an entire Faculty, albeit a small one. Politics (or government) crops up as one of the three courses (kosu^[*] ) that constitute the Law Faculty, reflecting the traditional role of the Law Faculty since 1887 as the seedbed of Japan's higher civil service. The former departments of sociology, anthropology, and psychology within the Literature Faculty simply appear as course offerings or as seminars (kenkyushitsu^[*] ) under one of the four broad areas (rui ) into which the Literature Faculty recently has been divided: cultural studies (primarily philosophy), history, language and literature, and psychology and sociology. The social sciences have been cited here because their mutual isolation at Todai is particularly striking.

Neither do the various administrative levels at Todai necessarily correspond to those at most American institutions, despite the similarity of names. The Faculties are the main administrative entities, but in terms of scope the three we have just mentioned obviously fall somewhere between an American faculty of arts and sciences and an ordinary American department. The Faculties at Todai are further subdivided into departments (gakka ), but these too are highly variable units: the Engineering Faculty, for instance, has twenty; the Medical Faculty only two, although it enrolls nearly one-third as many students as engineering. In the Science

Faculty, the departments represent familiar fields such as mathematics, physics, and chemistry, but in the Economics Faculty (as in Pharmacology and Medicine) they are virtually synonymous with the Faculty itself. Economics has only the two departments of economics and business management.

Below the department, finally, come two smaller structural units. The basic element for budgeting and staffing at Todai is the chair (koza^[*] ). Engineering, for instance, has 163 chairs, law 51, literature 54, and science 76. In several faculties two or more chairs are grouped together in a number of seminars (called either kenkyushitsu^[*] in literature, for instance, or kyoshitsu^[*] in science and medicine—both terms are best translated as "research room" or "Seminar" in the German usage). The effective operating unit varies greatly from one Faculty to another. Where the Faculty has no departments, as in the Law Faculty, or where the departments are of a nonfunctional, catch-all nature, as in economics, the individual chair must be reckoned with in intrafaculty deliberations. Where there are many chairs but few departments, as in the Medical or Science Faculties (with respective ratios of 49:2 and 76:8), the seminar seems to gain operational weight. The department, however, is more important than the seminar in Faculties where there are few chairs, and where the departments themselves correspond closely to well-defined, traditional disciplines. This holds for the Education Faculty (with a 15:5 chair-to-department ratio) and the Literature Faculty (where the ratio is 54:18). In the latter, the present-day seminars are in effect the former eighteen departments in a new guise, and so they remain the effective subdivision of the Faculty.

The new postwar national universities have been established on the more familiar departmental model, without the chairs, which remain a distinctive feature of the eight former imperial universities—a distinction that helps perpetuate the gap in prestige and budgeting largesse between the older and the newer schools. More aptly (if somewhat facetiously) described as a "sofa" than a "chair," the koza is a unit for instruction in a given subject up through the doctoral level. It is staffed by a prescribed and uniform complement of one full professor, one associate professor, and one research assistant (joshu )—or two of the latter in subjects involving experimental laboratory work. The research assistant functions variously as a laboratory teaching assistant in science, engineering and medicine; as a prestigious, full-time research fellow in law; and as an instructor and often as not as a personal aide to his professor in literature.

The budgetary allocation from the Ministry of Education is identical for all chairs within each of three categories: those with laboratory work (jikken koza ), those without laboratory work (hijikken koza ), and those with clinical work (rinsho^[*] koza ). Since the funding for experimental chairs is approximately four times that for nonexperimental chairs, great efforts are made to get new chairs identified as experimental chairs, especially in

borderline cases. In any event, the allocation is for the chair as a unit, and in Faculties where the chairs are especially strong, the funds are placed entirely in the hands of the senior professor to use at his own discretion for research and teaching purposes. This money, commonly called research expenses (kenkyuhi^[*] ), comes from the budgetary category known as "integrated school expenses for teachers" (kyokan^[*] atari sekisan kohi^[*] ) and is in addition to the professor's own salary as a civil servant, which derives from "personnel expenses" (jinkenhi ) in the budget.

Although there are minor variations (chairs that stop at the masters' level, or the undergraduate course—kamoku —structure at Komaba), the doctoral chair remains the basic building block at Todai and contributes to the rigidities and lack of horizontal mobility in Todai's structure—what Professor Eto^[*] Shinkichi has called the "petrification" and "octopus" effects. The chair, once it has been established, is permanent, and its creation and abolition is an elaborate process involving the consent of the Faculty, the university, the Ministry of Education, and ultimately the Ministry of Finance. The vested interest in established chairs is enormous. The chair allocation, however, prescribes fixed and uniform amounts for closely defined academic fields, without regard to the varying competence of teachers, the shifting demands of the students, the needs of society, or advances in human learning. The only way to get the money to keep abreast of new developments or strike out into new areas is to create new chairs for them.

Once established in his chair, the chief tends, in the words of two Todai professors (Nakamura Takafusa and Kumon Shunpei) to become "the absolute monarch of his little universe." He retains a free hand regarding standards, the content of lecture courses and research, and the duties of his subordinates. As a civil servant, he cannot be fired for incompetence and holds his position—blocking the advancement of lower staff—until he retires (at age sixty), dies, or resigns. His subordinates are beholden to him for their appointments, his ordinary pupils are beholden for proper introductions and placement in the outside world after graduation, and his graduate students generally fit their own research into that of the chair. Accordingly, the chairs (or the multiple-chair seminars, or small-scale departments in certain faculties) tend to become closed, highly specialized baronies competing with one another for money, space, and equipment—but there is little intellectual competition.

Graduate training at Todai gets short shrift. The student's own interests often do not coincide with the research priorities of the chair, and there is the almost universal necessity for part-time employment (arubaito ). Graduate fellowships from the government or university are few, salaries for the young research assistants are niggardly, and there are no university scholarships for study abroad. Professors teaching at the graduate level belong either to the Faculties or to the research centers, and devote their primary energies to undergraduate teaching or center work. The graduate

school has no plant, library, faculty, administrative staff, or budget of its own. It is, in fact, no more than a framework for sorting out graduate students into appropriate degree programs.

The graduate school consists of ten research divisions which correspond to the ten Faculties except for the College of General Education, which is not represented, and the excision of sociology from the Humanities Research Division (the graduate extension of the literature Faculty) to make the tenth division. Each research division offers several specialized courses of study (senmon katei ), which correspond to departmental or other subdivisions in the appropriate "servicing" Faculty (sewa gakubu ), and are taught by senior professors from the sewa gakubu with occasional assistance from members of other Faculties or research institutes. The funding of graduate training depends entirely on how the senior professor chooses to divide his chair money between his Faculty and graduate-school activities. The Graduate School Council (Daigakuin Iinkai), convened and presided over by the president, includes the chairman and two elected members of each research division committee (kenkyuka^[*] iinkai ). These chairmen are without exception the deans of the corresponding Faculties, with the result that the Graduate School Council simply repeats the existing faculty rivalries and has virtually no role in university-wide decisions.

Another, and very basic, weakness of the graduate divisions is that they train exclusively for academic careers—in effect for the replenishment of the Faculties—and therefore lack the leaven that comes with training students for careers in the outside world. The graduate school is viewed as an extension of the undergraduate course—an extension preferably avoided by those anxious to get ahead in their careers. Many government bureaus and large private companies now provide better graduate-level training for their own researchers and other staff than the universities—including Todai in some fields—and there is a peculiar shunning of advanced academic degrees as a handicap to career advancement by young men headed for business or government work.

Not only in graduate-type training but in research as well much of the best work in Japan today is being performed at government- and business-operated research centers outside the university system. This is part of the price now being paid for decades of emphasis on practical application and immediate technological return at the expense of basic research. The funding of all research at Japan's universities today amounts to less than that of the business-supported centers. Todai has the finest facilities in the country taken as a whole (its fourteen research centers include the Institutes for Medical Science, Earthquake Research, Oceanography, Far Eastern Culture, Social Science, Newspaper Research, Historical Compilation, Industrial Technology, Applied Microbiology, Solid State Physics, Aeronautics and Space, Cosmic Ray Observation, Research on the Atomic Nucleus, and the Tokyo Astronomical Observatory). The funding is better than for the chairs but is spotty in important

areas such as the humanities, social sciences, and basic science. Research at Todai suffers from the lack of a powerful graduate-school structure. The institute directors are not represented on the influential inner conclave known as the Deans' Conference (Gakubuchokai^[*] ) and the centers have often complained of their exclusion from the mainstream of Todai's decision-making process.

There is no reason why research activities should be confined to or even primarily conducted at university centers, and many of Japan's research needs promise to be adequately filled off-campus, subject of course to government and business priorities. What will increasingly suffer, however, from the skimping on university-centered graduate training and advanced research is the academic profession itself—that is, scholarship in the broader sense. The future quality of Japan's premier university is at stake when Todai professors can no longer compete with industry and bureaucracy for their own top students.

This disjunction between general and specialized education at Todai is not only curricular but physical as well. With half of the university's population crammed into its modestly expanded facilities at Komaba, halfway across the sprawling metropolis from Hongo^[*] , the College of General Education has found itself on the short end of money, space, facilities, library books, prestige, and general appeal ever since its establishment in 1949. Although some teachers from the main Hongo campus occasionally give "outside lectures" (mochidashi kogi^[*] ) at Komaba, the college has its own separate staff and resembles an American arts and sciences faculty, but caters only to the first two years. Many of the original college staff were carried over from the old higher school, where they had learned to teach from a broad, humanistic viewpoint but found themselves overwhelmed by numbers and by the inevitable debasement of standards. Professors in the Faculties at Hongo—like the students at Komaba—tend to view the two years in the college as a period of exile, which cuts into precious time needed for specialization and provides no more than an accumulation of fragmentary knowledge, much of which the student already has learned in high school.

There are, of course, sequential breaks between general and specialized education in the typical American pattern, but the sharpest disjunction (involving different administrative and curricular structures, and often a separate plant) falls between the undergraduate college and the professional graduate school rather than midway through the undergraduate course as at Todai. The American undergraduate enjoys far more flexibility in formulating his total program both forward and backward between introductory and advanced courses, and sideways among the various disciplines. A freshman or sophomore in good standing can often mix work toward a prospective major (which involves quasi-professional training in such fields as premedicine, engineering, education) with required "Gen-Ed" courses, while a senior is permitted to dip back into

elementary courses outside his chosen field in order to cultivate late-blooming interests. During all four years, electives provide lateral mobility throughout the college, and the procedures for switching majors or degrees are relatively simple, with no more backtracking than is needed to make up the prerequisite courses.

At Todai, the applicant sits for only one of six possible entrance examinations covering six general areas: "Literature 1 (for law); "Lit. 2" (for economics); "Lit. 3" (for literature, education); "Science 1" (for physical, chemical and engineering sciences); "Sci. 2" (for biological and agricultural sciences); and "Sci. 3" (for medicine). If successful, he is already slotted for one or possibly two Faculties at Hongo^[*] before he even starts his studies at Komaba. Final Faculty assignment depends on his performance at the College of General Education. It is theoretically possible for the student to switch his area up to the middle of his second year, but barring an outstanding scholastic record, it is extremely difficult to shift targets, particularly from a less prestigious or popular Faculty to a more popular one or, for that matter, to get out of a slot for a prestigious Faculty (such as law) into one for a highly popular department of a less prestigious Faculty (such as sociology or psychology in the Literature Faculty). While at Komaba, the underclassman has no access to the regular departments or "star" professors at Hongo, while the upperclassman at Hongo has little practical leeway in his heavily specialized Faculty major for courses nominally available in other Faculties. In the extremely intensive scientific fields, it is simply a matter of time; in the humanities, more a matter of inclination, specifically of group feeling. As one Todai scholar has put it, "A student would feel lonely taking courses outside his own Faculty, away from his closest friends." If the would-be degree-switcher cannot effect his switch during his sophomore year, he has no other choice than to drop out altogether and sit for a new entrance examination in his preferred area, or graduate in his originally assigned Faculty and then take a special examination (gakushi nyugaku^[*] ) for admission to another Faculty at the third-year level. There is no switching of Faculties (which grant the degrees) once the student is at Hongo.

One exception to this pattern is the highly limited, prestigious four-year course at Komaba. The College now retains over two hundred honors students through their third and fourth years, awarding the bachelor's degree in its two departments of liberal arts and basic sciences. Any student is eligible on the basis of his first- and second-year record. The production of graduates has given the College a taxonomical equality with the other Faculties, and the tiny minority of undergraduates who do remain for the flexible but well-integrated four-year course experience something roughly similar to an undergraduate education on an American campus. As a new and less prestigious Faculty, however, the College of General Education is more malleable to the wishes of the administration and suffers from a very weak voice in university decision-making.

The College at Komaba was established in response to the greatly felt need after World War II for an infusion of general education into Japan's university curriculum, and under the vision and strong leadership of President Yanaibara Tadao, Tokyo University went further than any of its sister institutions in implementing the general education concept. The Komaba "experiment" remains a distinctive feature of Todai, but what successes it has achieved have been bought at the price of sundering the undergraduate experience, both social and intellectual, at the midriff.

Decision-Making:
Autonomy Versus Administrative Efficiency

The inability of Todai to take practical measures for reform from within is simply the latest symptom of the increasing paralysis of the university's decision-making processes. These processes display in a more extreme form features often found in Japanese decision-making, such as the preponderant weight of lower strata, the existence of figurehead entities toward the top, the osmosis of consensus from the bottom upwards, the principle of unanimity rather than majority rule, and the long strung-out shingikai hoshiki^[*] (deliberative consultation method). When it comes to consensus and decisions, Todai is a bowl full of jelly.

This state of affairs derives primarily from a weak university administration caught between the autonomy of a powerful faculty, with their own chairs, and a powerful Ministry of Education, which controls the budget and to a significant degree runs the university. The potential leverage of the Japanese state through finances has evoked a strong defensive reaction under the banner of university and Faculty autonomy, and in recent years the requirements of university administrative efficiency have been sacrificed to this pressure for autonomy.

For the modernizing Meiji state of 1886, national administrative efficiency came first, under the tight control of the Ministry of Education and of its proconsul, the president. By 1918 Todai had achieved a large measure of autonomy from the state, with the president now representing the university to the ministry as primus inter pares of the academic staff. Before World War II the major points at issue concerned the relation of Todai to the world outside, and the president generally enjoyed strong and cohesive support in his efforts to guard the university's autonomy against the pretensions of an increasingly totalitarian state. Since the war, with a fresh measure of independence from the ministry, the focus of attention at Todai has shifted inward toward the internal adjustments required first by Occupation policy and more recently by the momentous changes in Japanese society. The system, which had worked reasonably well before the war, broke down as the effective locus of autonomy itself shifted from the university to its component parts.

Complicating the decision-making process, meanwhile, is the fact that it

remains a clumsily joined composite of two very different systems, which neither singly nor together are equal to today's needs. One is the typically authoritarian pattern (largely Western in inspiration) of direct ministerial control, dating from 1886. There are important residual elements of this, particularly in the area of budget-making and in the operation of the university's administrative services. The other is the typically Japanese pattern, with the features we have mentioned, which governs the relations among the various component units of the university itself. The aspect of upward osmosis is especially evident in the selection of new chairs in the annual budget requests, while deliberative consultation and unanimity figured heavily in the recent discussions of the Reform Chamber (Kaikakushitsu). The Central Council for Education (Chuo^[*] Kyoiku^[*] Shingikai), finally, has made proposals that attempt to improve internal cohesion and administrative efficiency while securing the independence of the university from political control or intervention by the state.

The Historical Background

A high degree of Faculty autonomy over matters such as curriculum, staff appointments, and the selection of university officials has been a traditional feature of university systems operated by the state, as in Germany and other continental countries. With money and basic policy both controlled by the government, academic affairs represented the only area in which the community of scholars could exercise independence, and they have claimed it to the hilt. In this area, as a matter of fact, they enjoy more freedom from their own founding or administrative authorities than the teaching staffs of the private or locally operated universities of the American tradition—where boards of trustees, churches, regents, and governing corporations retain considerable power of intervention in matters of instruction and personnel.

Japan's opting in mid-Meiji for a state-run university system on the German-French model was perhaps inevitable given the limited resources of the central treasury, the need for strong national leadership, and the precedent of placing the nation's leading schools of Western learning under direct control of the Shogunate government in Edo. The trend among the Western democracies, however, has been to approximate the ideal already realized by Britain and many of the American state universities of "support without control," whereby funds from the treasury are turned over to an autonomous body such as the University Grants Committee in Britain, which includes university-related members, makes the allocations entirely as it sees fit, and is not even required to report to Parliament. Japan has been slow to follow this trend, and there has been a tenacious resistance to the idea—now, as right after the war, when the Occupation promoted it—of an independent body including nonacademic members standing between the government and the universities them-

selves. There is the underlying fear that, given the lack of a strong liberal tradition in Japan, such a body would rapidly become the handmaiden of the state and prove responsive to various political forces. And at Todai there is a more subtle reason for resistance: the reluctance to forfeit the patronage and prestige it enjoys as the capstone of the state educational system.

In 1886, decision-making worked downwards from the ministry through the president, a man who was chosen for his administrative talents (in 1886 it was Watanabe Kyoki^[*] , ex-governor of Tokyo; from 1905 to 1912 Hamao Arata, who had been a ministry bureaucrat since 1872). The man was dispatched from the Ministry of Education, not elected by Todai, and held a tight rein over the principals (in effect deans) of the several colleges. The principals, although professors, were also appointed by the minister and exercised real authority in their respective colleges. The arrangements in 1886 also provided for a senate (Hyogikai^[*] )—composed of the principals and two professors (selected, again by the ministry) from each college, and presided over by the president—to be the highest deliberative council in the university.

Mori Arinori's system met with resistance and calls for greater independence from the very start—beginning with Kato^[*] Hiroyuki's refusal to continue his services as president—and in 1893 the seeds of autonomy were firmly planted. In that year, under Inoue Kowashi, the senate was given fresh powers which gradually enabled Todai to have its own way in curriculum and personnel matters, and which made the senate in effect the university's supreme decision-making as well as deliberative organ. The president was no longer required to report the senate's deliberations to the minister, nor permitted to convene the senate on the ministry's premises; and he was ordered to drop his ex officio function as principal of the Law College with its powerful ties to the government bureaucracy. The professorial representatives in the senate were now elected by their colleagues, and the senate was empowered to create and abolish departments within the several colleges; to recommend the fields of Inoue's new chair system; to make university regulations on its own initiative or present proposals to the ministry where special ministerial decrees were required; and to grant degrees.

The Faculty councils officially established in each of the colleges in 1893 also weakened the ministry's grip on the university. Regular membership was restricted to full professors, but assistant professors and lecturers (koshi^[*] ) could also attend at the discretion of the principal, who chaired the meeting. The Faculty councils were empowered to discuss curriculum, examinations, and degree requirements, and by 1914 had won primary say in the teaching appointments in their own colleges.

In 1907, the Imperial Universities Special Account Law (Teikoku daigaku tokubetsu kaikeiho^[*] ) set aside certain amounts of money for the imperial universities each year and gave them full responsibility for

making budgetary allocations from this source—which included income from capital investments, tuition fees, gifts, and treasury grants. The final step toward prewar autonomy was taken in 1915, when Kyoto Imperial University elected one of its own professors as president—strictly speaking, a nomination requiring the minister's approval. By 1920, the precedent had become the rule at the state universities, and the ministry has never vetoed a Todai nomination. Deans, too, were now similarly chosen by their own Faculties, with pro forma approval of the ministry.

After 1918, decision-making at Todai worked upwards from the former colleges—now the Faculties—to the president, who now represented the university to the ministry as the spokesman for his own peers. The effort to protect the autonomy of the campus in an era of rampant thought control was conducive to intramural cooperation and effective leadership from the president. The ministry, however, retained important powers of inspection and the specifically stated right of control (kantoku ).

The Occupation reforms reduced the powers of the ministry without, however, supplying clear-cut procedures to govern the relations between the universities and the government or spell out the lines of authority and formalize relations between the divisions within a single university. The basic legislation needed to fill this gap has been shelved by the Diet ever since the early 1950s. The LDP, from the Ikeda administration onward, has tended to link its calls for tighter university control with attacks on the leftist bias of the professors; and the academic profession has responded by opposing almost any sort of effective management as the thin edge of a totalitarian revival. The complete paralysis of the normal decision-making procedure in the violent upheaval of 1968–1969 was met with the Temporary Universities Control Law of August 1969, which only postponed real reform. In the meantime, it has become virtually an article of faith that university autonomy from the government is best preserved by the autonomy of the individual Faculty—which is borne out neither by logic nor by the historical record.

Residual Powers of the Ministry

The Ministry of Education Establishment Law of 1949 confined the ministry's function to counseling, coordinating, and assisting universities. At Todai and the other state universities, the ministry retains the right to approve promotions of staff and the appointments of teachers, deans, and presidents, but in practice follows the university's own recommendations. It also has the right to determine staff qualifications, pay schedules, student fees, and the budget; to establish new Faculties, institutes, and chairs; to set standards for graduate training and degrees; to fix staff-student and graduate-undergraduate ratios and specify the budgetary allocation per student (thereby influencing the size of enrollments); and has the ultimate right to establish or abolish the institutions themselves.

The possibilities for direct intervention or policy control by the ministry since the war have been severely limited, although the new national universities established after the war bend more easily to the ministry's will than the proudly independent former imperial schools. The powers that are not nominal are passive and serve a limiting function. The only way, for instance, that the ministry could pressure Todai and other state schools to bring order to the campuses in 1969 was to have the Diet pass the Temporary Control Law, which threatened the universities with closure or, if that failed, dissolution.

The ministry, nevertheless, retains considerable leverage at Todai through negotiations over the budget and the running of the university's administrative office. The fact that money from the central treasury is released today directly through the Ministry of Education rather than through an independent body as in Britain, and the fact that officials from the ministry still run the university's administrative services, go a long way to explain the teaching staff's lingering fear of political control and its tenacious clinging to the doctrine of autonomy. The academic staff remains highly sensitive to anything reminiscent of the thought control of the 1930s, and views the ministry's effective control of money and other residual powers as the loosely hinged door to a Pandora's box of totalitarian repression. The government bureaucracy, for its part, remains reluctant to relinquish control over funds and policy to the institutions, which it considers not only administratively incompetent but also ideologically given to leftist, antigovernment postures.

The financing of Japan's national universities is a murky business for anyone unfamiliar with the chair structure, or untutored in the backstage negotiations during the budget-making process. It is one of the great ironies of the postwar reform that the Special Account Law was rescinded in 1947, depriving the national universities of their independent budget management and throwing them back on the annual approval of the Ministries of Education and Finance for their allocations.

Since salaries and research expenses are geared to the chair system, the only way a university can get more money for either new or existing fields is to petition the ministry in its annual budget request for the creation of new chairs. Each level, from the departments through the faculty councils and the university president, in consultation with the heads of the administrative office (jimukyokucho^[*] ) and its accounting bureau (keiribucho^[*] ), annually discusses and sets priorities for new chairs. When the Ministry of Education receives the university's priorities in the form of its annual budget request, it sets them in line with its own policy and submits the list to the Ministry of Finance (Okurasho^[*] ).

This annual scramble for more chairs represents the only occasion for anything resembling the consideration of a university-wide policy on education and research. The processing of the individual chair application may take as long as five years, with the liveliest point of contention usually

being whether the chair should be designated as experimental or nonexperimental—since the research expenses for the former are so much greater than for the latter. Once a label is applied at one school, it sticks for any similar chairs in the national university system.

Certain budgetary allocations are fixed. The chair structure determines the number of salaries, and the appropriate civil service grades set salary levels. The minor category of "integrated school expenses for students" (gakusei atari sekisan kohi^[*] ) is likewise not open to negotiation, since it is predetermined by the number of students.

Apart, therefore, from requests for major expansion of physical plant, most of the annual budget-bargaining concerns the actual disposition of research expenses, which nominally should go in full amount to the heads of chairs for their research and teaching needs. As a matter of fact, a certain proportion of the research expenses (I have heard estimates ranging from 5 to 10 percent) are siphoned off at each succeeding administrative level—ministry, university, Faculty, department—for plant maintenance and other administrative expenses, leaving the chair professor at the end of the line with considerably less than his original allocation. The portion withheld by the Ministry of Education from the MOF appropriation is a point of negotiation between the Ministry of Education and the universities, and provides the former with important leverage. The apparent reason for this practice is the inadequate provision for property expenses (bukkenhi ) and administrative expenses (jimukyoku keihi ) in the annual budgets. Property expenses, including maintenance and operation of the existing plant, are pegged to a table of expenditures that is uniform for all government bureaus—and that overlooks, for instance, the whopping electricity bills run up by some of Todai's experimental laboratories. Therefore, there is pilfering from research expenses as the money is passed down through the administrative channels to pay for lighting, heating, repairs, and the ordinary running of administrative offices. There is nothing the academic staff can do about it except bargain for the least injurious settlement. This places a high premium on choosing deans and presidents who can "get the budget" within the rigid and unresponsive financing system.

Since the administrative staff members are employed directly by the Ministry of Education and few of them are specialists in the administration of higher education, the teaching staff must assume much of the actual administrative work. The situation further confuses functions already badly scrambled by administrative office leverage—through budget-making—on academic programs and planning. The director of the administrative office is a powerful figure, who serves under the president but is responsible to the minister. He takes charge of business, financial, and to some extent student affairs, and he sits in Todai's two highest councils—the senate and the deans' conference. The administrative staffs at the Faculty and departmental levels also tend to side with the ministry

against the university, and to be jealous of their own bureaucratic prerogatives.

The Intramural Decision-Making Process

What the academic staff at Todai has lost in budgetary powers, it has perhaps more than recouped by its firm grip on teaching and appointments. A typical American university would respond more rapidly and flexibly to reasonable budgetary requests from the teaching side, but there would also be a greater chance for the administration and faculty as a whole to impose a chosen and coordinated educational policy on the university's various subdivisions.

At Todai the downward flow of the ministry's budgetary powers and the upward filtering of educational and other campus policies are not only poorly meshed. The latter also tends to fall apart in a decision-making process where authority is fragmented and has gravitated steadily toward the bottom; where individual Faculties retain an effective veto over university-wide decisions; and where consensus within the Faculty itself is little more than an amorphous confluence of the wills of individual professors, or of small, tightly-knit, intra-Faculty groups. Although the relative importance of the departments, seminars, and chairs varies considerably from one Faculty to the next, the effective decision-making (or blocking) power tends to lie with one or the other of the sub-Faculty groups.

The chair has become the most basic unit of autonomy within Todai today. The senior chair professor, with his subordinates roped in by a web of personal obligations and unremovable himself, exercises the preponderant power in intra-Faculty deliberations. He is also eligible for the position of subdivision chief, which is either assigned on a seniority basis or rotated among the heads of the constituent chairs. If temperamentally so inclined, the department or seminar head can be a formidable figure in Faculty deliberations. Although not formally binding, decisions at the department or seminar level are generally respected when the formal decisions are taken by the Faculty council.

In Faculties where the departments are powerful, for example, all important questions are first hammered out in departmental meetings; and especially in the selection of teaching staff, other departments will never veto the choice of the department that has the vacancy. A retiring senior professor is consulted about his possible successor, but as a rule he is excluded from the Faculty committee that makes the final decision.

To be precise, the Faculty council is the faculty meeting in each Faculty—since there is no regular meeting of the entire professorial staff at Todai. Each Faculty has its own rules of procedure, but at Todai all Faculty councils include both senior and junior professors, and in most the lecturers as well. In addition to electing their own deans, the Faculty

councils make the official nominations for staff positions, formulate the Faculty's budget request, and lay down rules affecting admission, graduation and credits. In the larger Faculties, the councils operate of necessity on a subcommittee basis, but in the smaller Faculties, or where the issue is of unusual importance, individual professors are reluctant to delegate their personal powers, throwing the council into time-consuming plenary sessions without the benefit of subcommittee work or referral to purely administrative echelons. The need to discuss many (and often trivial) issues in great (and often personal) detail immobilizes Faculty-wide decisions, widens existing divisions by inflaming latent jealousies, and drives the sub-Faculty groups into a conspiratorial, secretive frame of mind through this constant threat of exposure. Decision-making, accordingly, starts off badly hobbled at the Faculty level. And even when the respective Faculties do reach an internal consensus, "Faculty autonomy" often blocks the way to university-wide decisions.

Nominally, it is the senate that formulates university policy and functions as the supreme decision-making organ. Todai's senate today consists of the president (as chairman), the deans and two professors elected from each of the ten Faculties, the directors of the research institutes, the chairmen of the ten divisional research committees of the graduate school, and the head of the administrative office. The prerogatives of the senate look impressive on paper, and include the creation, amendment, and abolition of university regulations; approval of the budget; the establishment of Faculties, departments, and other facilities; the determination of personnel standards and student numbers; the setting of policy on student affairs; the coordination of Faculties and institutes; and the discussion of matters affecting the administration of the university as a whole. Decisions must be carried unanimously and any Faculty or institute can exercise an effective veto simply by absenting itself from the meeting.

The senate, however, is a purely ornamental assemblage that does little more than rubber-stamp decisions taken by the deans' conference, an informal conclave with no basis in formal laws or regulations which exercises the only effective campus-wide authority at Todai. Since the deans act strictly as the spokesmen for their own Faculties, however, any decisions of the deans' conference reflect no more than an adjustment of individual Faculty positions, which leaves the ten Faculty councils as the most powerful voices in Todai's decision-making process. Here, as within each individual Faculty council, the lack of clear-cut statutory location of responsibility (as with a company president or a ministerial chief in the bureaucracy, whatever the informal consultation procedures of the business or government sectors) leaves decision-making at Todai at the mercy of unadulterated, consensus-style democracy: anybody can veto, nobody can decide.

The deans' conference (which dates from 1918) meets once every week

and includes the president, the ten Faculty deans, and frequently the administrative chief, who does not, however, join as a full-fledged member. The deans' conference functions as an advisory body to the president and as his channel of liaison with the Faculties, but in fact discusses and holds a veto over all major administrative decisions. The president cannot move without the support of his deans, yet the deans must constantly refer matters back to the Faculties that elected them to represent their interests. The inability of the university to go against a single Faculty in the larger interest was dramatically exposed when former President Okochi^[*] Kazuo in March 1968, respecting the autonomy of the Medical Faculty, passed on to the Senate for approval without emendation that Faculty's prescription for punishing some of its own students in the fast-spreading dispute over a new internship system. Okochi himself considered the formula unfair and unwise, and inasmuch as the controversy had kindled violent student passions all over the campus it was clearly no longer a simple, one-Faculty affair. When the Senate backed up the Medical School, student militancy burst out in all the other Faculties. A solution was finally reached for ending the confrontation with most of the students, but this was achieved through the strong initiatives of the new president, Kato^[*] Ichiro^[*] , backed up against his deans and other faculty opposition by the new President's Office (Sochoshitsu^[*] ) set up in 1969.

The President's Office is a genuinely advisory staff of capable and trusted lieutenants, who help prepare policy options. It was able to move most effectively during the extreme crisis mood of 1969, and it has been able to speed up decisions in areas that do not pit it directly against important Faculty interests—such as a highly adroit mediation of an intramural dispute at the Microbiology Institute. But its creation has been resented by the traditional seats of power, and it cannot go against real opposition from the Faculties. Moreover, it operates mainly in areas that the deans' conference has left to others.

Under the present system the most important factor in moving matters toward a decision is the personal effectiveness of the president in dealing with his deans, and, to a lesser degree, of the deans in dealing with their professors. Any professor may be elected dean, and the deans—who serve only two years as a rule—are almost always glad to be rid of a chore that deprives them of nearly all time for their own study and research.

By contrast, until 1972 the president was elected for four years and if reelected served another two years. Today he is restricted to one four-year term. Chosen by his own peers, the president of Todai needs special talents and qualifications in order to succeed as a prophet in his own country. Traditionally these have included an outstanding reputation as a scholar; the ability to move with ease among and command the respect of Japan's bureaucratic, political, and social elite; and of course, managerial and negotiating skills for dealing with the ministry as well as his own teaching staff. In the past the presidents of Todai have been men of national stature

and fairly advanced in years. According to some sources, President Kato^[*] was handicapped by his youth (he was the first president ever to be referred to in the familiar mode, as "Kato-kun"^[*] ), while his predecessor, Okochi^[*] , reportedly suffered from being insufficiently well known.

Todai has its own unique and traditional formula for electing presidents. It is the only occasion where the teaching staff participate in a university-wide, majority-type decision free of the usual Faculty barriers. All senior and junior professors participate in the vote, and lecturers may possibly be admitted in the near future. As the first step, seven delegates from each Faculty, and three from each institute, meet to put up names for nomination. The names are submitted anonymously on slips of paper and are written on an enormous horizontal banner. Any Japanese citizen is eligible—but the first round invariably produces a few tongue-in-cheek nominations which have included Eisenhower, Stalin, and the popular singer Miss Misora Hibari. The delegates then vote on the list and report the top five without tallies. Finally, the entire professorial body votes but is not restricted to this slate of five. Since no candidate has ever secured a majority on the first vote, there is inevitably a run-off between the top two.

One final element in the university's decision-making process are the commissions (iinkai ), which have been established from time to time both before and after the war to deal with problems of unusual magnitude, such as university reform. They operate under the president in a purely advisory capacity, however, and cannot execute their recommendations without the approval of the senate, which in the end means the approval of the individual Faculties. Their procedure often follows the deliberative consultation method, where great numbers of people explore and discuss a problem in great detail only to create proposals which are less decisions, really, than a summary of the elements that went into the final, vaguely worded consensus.

Good examples of the commissions in operation were provided by the faculty study groups for university reform set up in response to the violent campus disturbances of 1968–1970. The Preparatory Investigation Commission for Reform (Kaikaku Junbi Chosakai^[*] ), established in January 1969 while police battled radical students for control of the Hongo^[*] campus, produced a flurry of literature and proposals in record time in response to the crisis of the moment. As the sense of crisis waned, however, so did the interest in reform and the capacity to develop strong, broadly supported proposals. The Reform Commission (Kaikaku Iinkai), established in April 1970 to work out reforms in staff discipline, presidential elections, university structure, and student participation, originally suggested, for instance, a drastic reduction in the number of Faculties. The Reform Chamber set up in May 1971 to develop the recommendations of the Reform Commission, however, changed its mind by October 1972. Having obviously met determined opposition from vested Faculty interests, the chamber concluded that a few mammoth Faculties were perhaps

not such a good idea; that mammoth-, medium-, and mini-sized Faculties all had their merits and could be considered, but that it probably was best to work on a medium-sized model—all of which left no one badly bruised but brought the whole matter right back to square one. By 1973, with the crisis mood gone, talk of reform at Todai ground to a virtual halt. In the words of one Todai professor, "No fundamental changes can be expected short of another violent campus dispute, which we may get in another five years' time, but even then there probably will be many reports, but no serious action."

The Future of Todai

"The university will carry on as is, gradually disintegrating as good researchers abandon it for business and government institutes," says another Todai professor. "Eventually it will simply collapse—in about thirty years' time." There is an emphatic consensus that the government's sweeping proposals will fail at Todai.

Unlikely scenarios for Todai's future are contained in the recommendations of the university's own Reform Chamber—what Todai would do if it were able to move itself; and in the section on higher education in the final report (June 11, 1971) of the Central Council for Education—what would happen to Todai if a massive nationwide educational reform ever did get underway. These recommendations are summarized here, not as predictions for the future, but as present perceptions of the problems at hand.

With regard to the three basic structural problems of the Faculty-chair system, general education, and research, the consensus was reflected as follows in the May 1971 and October 1972 issues of Todai's reform newsletter, Kaikaku foramu^[*] :

1. There is a strong preference for making the department (with a staff of approximately twenty to forty) the fundamental unit of teaching and administration. The later report hedged earlier recommendations for abolishing the chairs, but there is agreement that the Faculties should be reduced in number and serve primarily to facilitate liaison between related departmental fields.

2. There is unanimous agreement that the horizontal rift between Komaba and Hongo^[*] should be eliminated; general education should not be abolished, but it must be integrated with the specialized courses by transferring responsibility for it to the several Faculties.

3. There are suggestions for subdividing the research institutes along quasi-departmental lines for closer articulation with the graduate school, and a pronounced aversion to seeing research facilities slip out from under university control.

The most difficult deliberations on reform have been those concerning structural renovation. Above all, no one at Hongo wishes to move to

Komaba, which will have to receive some of the restructured units if the General Education College is abolished and its courses are integrated vertically into the Faculty structure. The Reform Chamber has postponed a decision on the ostensible grounds that it cannot decide between a new highrise campus at Hongo^[*] , retaining the two old campuses, or rebuilding Todai from scratch in the country; but by 1973 the deliberations actually were stalled over the question of how to rescramble the various academic divisions.

The proposals of the Central Council for Education for the restructuring of Japan's higher education are far more drastic. The basic suggestion—to create five new types of mutually independent institutions, sharply differentiated in function—would largely do away with Todai as we know it today. In addition to junior colleges and technical colleges much on the present pattern, there would be new universities offering three parallel three-year programs (nonspecialized, academically specialized, and professional-occupational). New graduate schools would offer a two-to-three year master's-level program as well as mid-career training for the public in general. Research centers would provide training in advanced research and guidance for the doctoral degree.

The Central Council further proposes a rigid separation of teaching and research facilities and of their organizational structures in the interest of greater functional efficiency. One presumed benefit would be better teaching at both graduate and undergraduate levels. It emphasizes, however, that individual scholars should be allowed to engage in both teaching and research activities, and that there should be free movement of students, faculty members, and administrators (and where feasible, coordinated management) both vertically between different levels in close physical proximity and horizontally with other institutions of the same type. The formal distinction between general and specialized education would be abolished and the university would offer maximum flexibility in structuring multidepartmental programs to fit the individual student's need. The plan for new universities, which passed the Diet in September 1973, is aimed at correcting many of the problems cited here. Beginning with the new Tsukuba University, other national universities are to have more powerful central administrations, less rigid faculty procedures, and more flexibility in creating and disbanding research teams.

The new graduate school would aim to make advanced academic training attractive once again to the general public and to bring young scholars into greater contact with the nonacademic world. The research centers, finally, would have teaching staffs of their own, either independently or in affiliation with a graduate school, one of the existing on-campus research institutes, or even appropriate facilities in the business or government sector. Doctoral and advanced research would at last receive the guidance and funding it deserves, and the maximum interflow of

personnel and ideas between the research centers and other institutes would be encouraged without regard to the individual researcher's formal academic qualifications.

Structural reform would not of itself, of course, bring about any improvement in the decision-making process. Improved decision-making would require fundamental and clear-cut redefinitions of the lines of responsibility and authority, both between the Ministry of Education and the national universities, and within Todai itself. The new framework would have to provide concrete assurances of academic freedom while managing somehow to keep the normal Japanese propensities for factionalism within practical working bounds.

Todai's several reform study groups have not dealt with these fundamental questions of ministerial and intramural authority. The Central Council for Education, on the other hand, has presented two alternative plans for more effective administration free of both ministerial dictation and the trammels of a hypertrophic Faculty autonomy. One is to free the national universities entirely from the Ministry of Education by transforming them into public corporations, depending on the government only for a regular supply of funds—the British model, in short, but with a vague rider to the effect that the government would retain the right to decide whether each university corporation was "worthy of being granted public funds." The second choice would be to remain an agency of the government, with a new administrative organ within each university, which would include persons from outside the university community and would be given a greater range of authority over campus administration than is now the case, but would not carry the principle of autonomy from the government "beyond what it originally means."

Todai faculty are not happy with either proposal. Much depends on one's reading of the government's actual intentions. Many Todai professors fear that the government is not prepared to grant genuine financial autonomy on the British model and is, in fact, determined to maintain ultimate political control under one guise or another. There are also fears that, given the historical weakness of Japan's private sector in the face of government pressures, any laymen appointed to the governing board from outside the university would bend easily to bureaucratic and party-political pressures. Of course, what immediately skews any comparison with the British system is the extent to which the Japanese universities themselves have been politicized, and the depth of the ideological confrontation that divides government and academe in Japan. Of the two proposed alternatives, Todai probably would prefer the latter, inasmuch as it preserves a comfortable old dependency along with the strong likelihood that, whatever the new administrative devices, they will eventually succumb to the irresistible tug of autonomy.

Decision-making at Todai breaks down, in summary, at several levels and for several reasons. Basic is the pitting of the university's traditional

claims to autonomy against the financial prerogatives (and fear of political intervention) of the central government—a struggle played out against the extremely fuzzy postwar backdrop of minimal statutory guidance. The confrontation over prerogatives and ideology is carried onto the campus itself, where a jealous teaching staff hesitates to delegate business to the ministry's local administrative staff, who often are poorly trained in academic affairs. The lack also of legislation establishing a clear-cut chain of command within the university itself has left decision-making at this complex modern-day institution to find its natural level—which turns out to be something oddly reminiscent of the quasi-egalitarian consensus politics of the traditional Japanese village. We have traced the independence of the individual Faculties to various historical and structural circumstances. The heavy weight of even the lower echelons would seem to be the result, in part, of (1) the effective control of teaching appointments at very low, sub-Faculty levels; (2) the overload of nondelegated business that hamstrings the Faculty councils; and (3) the Japanese social and psychological structure. The chairs, seminars, and departments at Todai are examples of primary, face-to-face social groupings that have never been galvanized to common effort by the profit motives of Japanese industry, or by the effective regulatory framework or national-interest achievement orientation of the Japanese bureaucracy, and have been left by special historical circumstance to cultivate their lush sectionalistic egos in the hothouse of "university autonomy."

Despite all the organizational problems, where good teachers and students are gathered together good learning tends to override material or political obstacles. Organizational efficiency per se is no guarantee of good education. Todai continues to possess the best faculty and the most talented and highly motivated students in Japan. Public complaints about faculty diversions in writing and commenting on public affairs, and about the students' lack of interest in attending classes, apply far more to other, especially the private, universities than they do to Todai, where attendance rates remain relatively high, and where the faculty speaks and writes for the public less for the money than to enhance prestige, or because of a sense of cultural or political mission.

Todai's controversial role at the apex of Japan's academic and social pecking order is a problem that transcends mere organizational dysfunction. Pride and a sense of history do, of course, embolden Todai professors in their claims to autonomy. But some proponents of university reform seem to forget that it will take not only the universities alone but the efforts also of government, industry, and society at large to make any real dent in the hierarchical social patterns that have favored Todai—such basic changes start with the pattern for hiring university graduates.

During the late 1960s, Todai as a symbol of Japan's elitist establishment became the lightning rod for a bewildering complex of political, academic, and personal grievances among the younger generation, and it was only

natural that student protest should have turned its fury against an institution that was familiar, highly symbolic, and eminently vulnerable. The pressures of the campus upheaval would have placed the most efficient university administration under considerable strain, and at Todai, they penetrated like an x-ray to bring all of the organizational weaknesses into glaring relief.