The latter half of this year's 150-day regular Diet session, which ran through mid-June, was mostly preoccupied with the questions surrounding a plan by Kake Gakuen, which is headed by a close friend of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and which runs several academic institutions, to open a new veterinary science department at a new university campus in Imabari, Ehime Prefecture. Although the issue was taken up again in the Diet in a one-day session in late July while the legislature was in recess, suspicions over the Kake Gakuen issue have yet to be cleared.
It is perhaps hard to comprehend wherein lie the problems related to Kake Gakuen's plan. From my own experiences of working at universities for many years and taking the lead in setting up the department of data science at Shiga University in my capacity as its president, I would like to explain what is unusual and incomprehensible about the procedures for creating that new veterinary medicine department.
When an application is filed for establishing a new university or creating a new department, the education minister is required to seek advice from a panel responsible for screening the plans. A majority of the panel members are university professors. There are a series of processes that must be followed before the education minister decides to seek the panel's counsel. To make the story easier to understand, I will focus on what an existing university needs to go through in seeking to open a new department.
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