Call for review of appointment of Tokyo’s first female president

The appointmeCall for review of appointment of Tokyo’s first female presidentnt of Yuko Fujigaki as the first female president at the University of Tokyo has led to an unprecedented intervention from the Japanese Education Ministry, but experts caution that the real controversy concerns university autonomy in Japan rather than women’s leadership.

The professor of science and technology studies has been chosen by the presidential selection committee as the first woman to lead the institution in its near 150-year history.

She will take the helm as president of Japan’s most selective university from April next year, serving a six-year term until 2033.

However, Fujigaki’s appointment has stirred controversy in Japan because she was not the top choice in internal staff voting, coming second in the poll and receiving half the number of votes as her male counterpart Takao Someya.

A group of staff and faculty members publicly questioned the decision and submitted a request to the selection committee chair asking for an explanation.

The Ministry of Education then urged the University of Tokyo to review the management and selection process, the first time such a request has been made to an institution.

The university is not legally required to reconsider or reverse the appointment. It is not yet clear what further action the university will take in response to the ministry’s request.

Akiyoshi Yonezawa, professor at Tohoku University Gateway College, told Times Higher Education that “it is not rare that the top vot[e] gainers are not selected”, explaining the same thing has happened at other universities.

In June, Kyoto University selected a male president who placed third in an internal faculty vote. However, the Japan ministry did not ask Kyoto University to investigate his appointment.

According to Yonezawa, part of the problem is that the use of presidential selection committees is still “a recent development” in Japanese universities. Previously candidates were chosen through a staff vote “as a symbol of academic autonomy and democracy” but now the results of the vote are weighed against a broader set of criteria, including interviews.

While he felt the transition from election-based nomination to committee-based selection “has increased transparency”, Yonezawa explained that many faculties “still believe that votes should be respected”.

“The voting-based nomination also has the serious problem that larger faculties such as engineering and medical sciences tend to dominate, and these faculties are historically highly dominated by male professors.”

Japan has made slow progress to tackle gender disparity in university leadership. Among Japan’s 84 national universities, only four are currently led by women.

Many institutions set targets to promote diversity and inclusion in higher education, including the University of Tokyo which set a goal of increasing the share of female faculty to 25 per cent by 2027. According to the most recent data, the share of female faculty sits around 17 per cent.

Futao Huang, professor at the Research Institute for Higher Education at Hiroshima University, agreed that the dispute reflects a “longer-running tension in Japanese national universities between internal academic participation and the stronger role given to university leadership and governing bodies”.

In that sense, Huang argued the interesting question is not only “why Fujigaki was selected” but “what the case tells us about who should have the strongest voice in choosing university leaders: the academic community or the formal governing body”.

He added that Fujigaki’s appointment “sends an important message about institutional change and diversity at Japan’s most prominent university” given “the continuing under-representation of women in senior academic leadership in Japan”.

Miyoko Watanabe, former vice-president of the Science Council of Japan, said Japanese society may not yet be “fully prepared to accept” the selection of a woman for the position at the top university in Japan. Watanabe interpreted the University of Tokyo’s decision as a sign of the “intent to change” and “an acknowledgement that the status quo is no longer tenable”.

Although Chisato Kitanaka, sociologist at Hiroshima University, did not feel gender was a factor in Fujigaki’s appointment, she criticised committee-based selection which often involves “external figures”, and can leave academic staff “bewildered and resentful” of an “opaque” decision-making process.

“For quite some time now, the government has been pursuing the erosion of university autonomy...This method is used to control academic staff who do not conform to the government’s or businesses’ wishes.

“Many national universities have already lost their internal democracy in this way,” she remarked.

rosalind.skillen@timeshighereducation.com