Since Japan has already decided to reorganize national universities into public corporations in fiscal 2004, it would be useless now to discuss the pros and cons of the plan. I happen to feel the plan will do neither harm nor good.
Whether a university operates as a corporation or not has little to do with its research activities. The current stagnation in research at national universities stems from systems and practices peculiar to Japan that hinder active research by the teaching staff. Solving these problems will encourage the teaching staff to do more research work and improve research performance. Five points should be considered in reforming the systems and practices:
* National universities should promote employment of young foreign researchers as assistant professors to improve the quality of their teaching staff. U.S. universities are full of young and capable scholars and scientists, many of them from China. U.S. universities actively recruit teaching staff from abroad, but their Japanese counterparts are unwilling to do so. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that U.S. universities have better-qualified teaching staff.
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