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The story
On October 30, the University of Tokyo’s Presidential Selection and Oversight Committee released details on how incoming president Yuko Fujigaki was chosen, explaining that she received the most votes from committee members in both rounds of voting. On 5ch, threads pointed out that this outcome differed from the results of an earlier “preference poll” of more than 1,000 faculty and staff, sparking a wave of criticism over why the committee wouldn’t clearly disclose the actual vote tallies and its reasoning. Others pushed back, arguing that presidential selection isn’t like a shareholders’ meeting and that the preference poll was always meant as nothing more than a reference opinion — turning the thread into a broader debate about the university’s governance structure itself.
UTokyo’s Next President Yuko Fujigaki Won the Committee Vote Twice — Selection Committee Explains the Process – Nikkei
October 30, 2026, 21:03
Regarding the University of Tokyo’s presidential selection, the Presidential Selection and Oversight Committee released detailed information on the 30th about how Professor Yuko Fujigaki was chosen, explaining that she won the most votes from committee members in both rounds of voting.
Source: nikkei.com / Original article here
What people said
So tell us the actual reason already.
They'll just keep changing the conditions and re-running it until their pick comes out on top.
Yeah, that's the old 'medical journal' trick (a jab at researchers who keep re-running stats until they get a significant result).
They literally just did say it.
The Faculty of Engineering has the biggest headcount of any department at the university.
So if a candidate runs out of Engineering, what happens to the preference poll? You can guess.
The University of Tokyo Shimbun (the student paper) actually dug into this: the top three candidates came from the sciences, humanities, and an interdisciplinary track respectively. The one who ended up getting picked came from the interdisciplinary track — and she got the most votes from OUTSIDE her own 'home faction' of any candidate.
Even so, she still only got half the votes of the #1 (sciences) candidate, simply because sciences/engineering has that many more faculty and staff.
So why didn't they just give that as the official reason? Probably because there were several reasons, each committee member had a slightly different one, and it was hard to boil down into one clean statement.
The media not being able to explain any of this properly is also part of the problem.
I'm disappointed in Kuniya-san from Close-Up Gendai (NHK's famous former anchor Hiroko Kuniya).
Also, why is a mere former announcer sitting on UTokyo's presidential selection committee in the first place?
And there are others too — people who just came up through writing/journalism now carrying the title 'professor.' That's messed up.
Generally speaking, elections exist to confer legitimacy.
It's become a problem precisely because the election result got overturned.
It's not an election though.
That's the weird part.
What company anywhere lets ordinary employees vote for the company president?
Actually, it's BECAUSE that's weird that the LDP said staff votes shouldn't decide it and changed the rules.
In a general partnership, that's exactly how it works.
In a joint-stock company it'd be the shareholders — so are UTokyo's 'shareholders' the selection committee?
Way too many idiots mistake it for an actual election.
That preference poll is nothing more than the opinion of the workers, i.e. basically a union poll.
Any company that picked its president based on that would go bankrupt for sure.
That's exactly why it works there.
Universities have absolutely nothing like that.
A staff election is still better than letting the top brass hand-pick their buddies as president and treat the university as their own fiefdom.
That's full-blown hardcore leftism right there.
Communism runs on democratic centralism, so there's no voting at all in actual communism — it's dictatorship by the Central Committee.
That's dictatorship, not communism.
Can you really not tell the difference between communism and dictatorship…
Prioritizing the workers is textbook communism.
Re: #74
So should we pick the governor by a vote of prefectural government employees too?
And while we're at it, pick the prime minister by a vote of Diet staff?
The real problem with university presidents is that they're picked purely by insiders, with zero check on that process.
Given that, a faculty/staff vote is still the lesser evil.
Haha, so should ordinary Diet staff get to vote for the prime minister then?
Is that your idea of democracy, hahaha.
I'm pointing out there's no check-and-balance function here, and you're desperately trying to dodge the point.
What was it for?
It's just there to hear the workers' side as reference, same as when a government or company runs a survey.
But you don't let survey results alone decide everything, right?
Neither governments nor companies do.
I'm pointing out that university leadership treats the place as their personal fiefdom with no check on it, and you're desperately trying to dodge the point.
Exactly — and that check-and-balance isn't supposed to come from the workers.
The real checks are politics, applicants, and industry.
The government holds the budget power, applicants decide whether to choose that university or not, and companies decide whether to partner with it or not.
What good does it do having ordinary staff — who are just employees of the university — do the 'checking'?
Seriously, are you stupid?
Isn't it faculty and staff?
Can administrative staff vote in the preference poll too?
Faculty and staff are also among the committee members.
So I mean the rank-and-file faculty/staff who AREN'T on that committee.
Either way, they're just hired employees — they have no authority to pick the top leader.
How were the selection committee members even chosen in the first place?
That the committee thought this candidate was the better one — we already knew that without them announcing anything.
What actually matters is WHY they thought so,
and whether that reason is strong enough to justify overriding the preference poll.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
Since the revision of the National University Corporation Act in the 2010s, final decision-making power over national university presidential selections has rested with the Presidential Selection Committee (now the Presidential Selection and Oversight Committee), not with a staff preference poll. The preference poll is treated purely as reference information, and there’s no obligation to pick whoever won the most votes in it. Without knowing this history, it’s easy to read the committee’s explanation as ‘ignoring the numbers’ or a ‘cover-up’ — and much of the backlash in the thread traces back to this misunderstanding.
The thread split largely into two camps. One side distrusted the process itself: ‘If you’re going to pass over the candidate who led the preference poll, what was the point of holding it at all?’ The other side argued that handing a management-level decision to a vote of rank-and-file staff is simply the wrong approach, and that treating the preference poll as mere reference is perfectly fine — a debate that kept circling back to comparisons with shareholders’ meetings and how the prime minister gets chosen. The committee’s failure to spell out its reasoning in detail seems to be fueling frustration on both sides.
*This article is composed of excerpts and a summary from the 5ch (News Express+) thread “UTokyo’s Next President Yuko Fujigaki Won the Committee Vote Twice — Selection Committee Explains the Process.”
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