University of Tokyo President Shigehiko Hasumi on Thursday criticized the government's move to turn national universities into quasi-independent agencies, calling it a political gambit.

"University reform was proposed only as part of administrative reform that was aimed at reducing the number of civil servants," said Hasumi, leader of the Japan Association of National Universities, during a luncheon at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan.

Hasumi was referring to ongoing reforms to cut 25 percent of the country's 1.15 million public servants by fiscal 2010.

Japan's 99 national universities, which currently employ 120,000 professors, clerical workers and other staff, are a major target of the streamlining.

"However, unlike tax collection or immigration control, it is clearly not possible to make university education and research more efficient merely by meeting numerical goals," Hasumi said.

The Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry and some members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party are keen on privatization, reasoning that it will enhance the competitiveness and efficiency of the universities.

National universities, particularly in Fukuoka, Saga, Nagasaki and Kumamoto prefectures, have voiced strong opposition to the move, saying the efficiency achieved by the cuts will sacrifice educational principles.

Many national universities in rural areas have also called on Tokyo to re-examine privatization, saying it will threaten their already fragile financial status.

Hasumi also highlighted Japan's low public funding for higher education. "Japan invests only about 0.5 percent of its GDP in higher education," as compared with 1.1 percent in the United States and 0.9 percent in France, he said.

"We have asked (the government) that if that ratio cannot be doubled, then at least it should be increased to 0.7 percent or 0.8 percent," he said.

Hasumi will step down as president of the nation's top university at the end of March.