大学と文部科学省との関係 : 文科省幹部職員の再就職問題に関連して

The 2017 scandals that the Education Ministry continued to seek new jobs for retiring senior officials, despite its being banned by the National Public Service Law, caused a greater decline of trust in the Ministry. An Investigation team in the ministry found that many bureaucrats moved to private universities after retirement from the ministry through the intermediation of a retired official having close relationships with the ministry’s personnel department. The report also made clear that quite a large number of senior officials obtained a director and secretary general of national university corporations through temporary transfer from the ministry. National universities are now legally independent from the Education Ministry and the President has authority of appointing the Director at his or her own discretion. These findings indicate some possibility that the Ministry might influence universities whether public or private through its personnel management. Therefore the contents of the investigation report, the publications on reemployment of retiring senior officials by the Cabinet Office, and the annual reports of national universities were analyzed. As a result, it was determined that the personnel system expanding the recruitment, transfer, promotion, and after-retirement worked as an informal network contributing to make education policy successful and effective other than keeping high loyalty of officials to the ministry. At the same time, it must be said that the system had shortcomings in impartiality and transparency of public policy, especially on subsidies and regulations to universities.