Within the limited scope of this chapter, we explore national university (NU) governance generally, looking at not only how government policy has affected NUs, but also presenting the organizational structure, management schemes, and system of financing at these institutions. Our aim is to be as descriptive as possible so as to capture a snapshot of NU governance for those who are not involved directly in the management of a national university, but for whom NU governance might be important to understand. In particular, we have in mind as an audience academic staff working at NUs who might wish to better understand the organization of the institution in which they are members.

Introduction

National universities are diverse in institutional mission and respective roles within the Japanese higher education (HE) system, unsurprising given both their sheer number (86 institutions) and considerable scale in terms of enrolled students and academic, research, and administrative staff employed. In spite of this diversity, every national institution of HE has been affected by the (neoliberal) approach toward governance implemented by the state over the past decade or more—the 2004 “big bang” in Japanese HE. This “corporatization” of national universities (CNU), “hōjinka,” was an attempt to infuse autonomy, independence, and entrepreneurialism into the governance of NUs, a considerable challenge given that these institutions are financed mostly by state tax monies.

The scope of this chapter will be first to discuss the background of NUs in Japan, reflecting on the roles played by these institutions; then to explore how governance and finance are operated at NUs; and finally, we will attempt to unpack the change that the state corporatization policy (CNU) has had in terms of autonomy. (It should be noted that as of April 2004 what are still commonly known as NUs—National University Corporations, to be exact—are in fact officially designated as independent legal entities.) The basis for our discussion here refers to past scholarship both in Japanese and English, government and institutional documents, as well as qualitative, empirical evidence from various NU actors. We conclude that for the most part the ideology of autonomy has not been achieved in practice at most national institutions and that the government still demands strict oversight on most critical matters of governance.