Japanese Higher Education's Fragility: Bureaucracy and Risk's Dialectic

The scope of risks facing Japanese higher education institutions stems from both local conditions and global developments.  Among the local factors are the steady decline of the 18-year-old population, difficulties in establishing internationalized programs to attract more foreign students, government disinclination to increase funding due to high deficits, strong linkages with vocational orientations and post-graduate employment guarantees, and underdeveloped graduate school education.  Other more global risks include the growth in online education, for example MOOCs, administrative overload as a result of expanding academic and non-academic functions of universities, and challenges resulting from the trilemma (Kariya, 2011) of costs, equality of opportunity, and quality assurance.

Strong central bureaucratic management by the Ministry of Education (MEXT) is a notable feature of Japanese higher education in the form of shido (guidance), so that, for example, universities must follow stringent guidelines to implement new programs and create new departments.  In addition to this layer of administrative control from outside and above, many universities rotate management positions within the organization.  Insiders who have worked for long periods in the same university often become presidents, vice presidents, deans and heads of centers, and top administrators.  The emphasis on strong administrative stability entails that risk is customarily dealt with from a defensive posture, i.e. risks are preempted wherever possible by lengthy discussion and delays in action.  A recent example was the discussion at Tokyo University of changing the start of the academic calendar, reported with much fanfare in the media, to the autumn to match many other countries, which, after much consideration, was deemed too radical.

In the paper, I analyze the admixture of a strong bureaucratic management facing risks to higher education in a dialectic relation whereby the risks threaten to become more ad-hoc and unpredictable by failure to act in a timely manner.