Main Role of Universities and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology

Background Ideas of the Policy Makers

Abstract

　Initiatives such as the plan to implement reforms at national universities and the requests to revise humanities and social sciences have led to the continued presentation of comparatively strong proposals to revise the current status of universities. What is important for universities at present is to have an overarching view rather than respond to these individual opinions. These proposals calling for reforms are possibly a result of various ways of thinking. This paper aims to capture such up-to-date research perspective of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, the universities’ perspective and the society perspective by investigating the Ministry’s latest policies concerning science and technology. In particular, we considered policy proposals for the 3 science and technology related bureaus and the higher education bureau in the Ministry’s budget requests for FY2016 to look at aspects that can be directly deployed in university research facilities rather than materials that promote plans for reform at national universities. This allowed us to focus on the views of the policy makers such as the Directors of these bureaus and their advisors who have direct responsibility for policy proposals.