Reform from within

Administrative reform is also high on the agenda — and has been for a while — at the third and most recent UIRE recipient, Kyoto University. Director of Global Communications David Hajime Kornhauser has been involved with several aspects of their reforms, especially its URA programme.

“Until 15 years ago, every academic centre had its own administrative section. There was a lot of discrepancy throughout the organisation. So they brought everything together into these big administrative offices, leaving only a skeleton crew of admin staff in each section,” he says.

“An unintended consequence was that researchers became more distant from administrators. Our attempt to reform that relationship, including with the URAs, predates UIRE, but the accreditation gives the university a much larger institutional framework within which to pursue it, and of course the necessary resources.”

This is a pattern across the first three UIRE recipients: the universities were already making changes that aligned with the accreditation's requirements. This is unlikely a coincidence, and suggests UIRE could be seen as an accelerator of sorts. Rather than imposing reforms, MEXT appears to be providing resources to scale and coordinate efforts that are already showing promise.

Institute of Science Tokyo clearly illustrates this. Given their recent reboot, strategic transformations and university-wide reorganisations were already taking place.

“UIRE rewards breaking away from existing frameworks, and our merger demonstrated our drive for that. But we are also undergoing a full revitalisation of our research organisation with what we call the Visionary Initiatives,” says Professor Inoue.

“The idea is for research to be focused towards vision-driven goals set in key areas such as the environment or society. Our key goal indicators will be related to social impact, so we are preparing impact reports inspired by the Research Excellence Framework report in the UK.”

A route back to global relevance

Internationalisation is another key area of UIRE — it’s in the name — and Tohoku University was already a few steps ahead. “We started programmes on internationalisation several years ago, but we still need to become more international in the way we recruit researchers and other staff,” says Professor Osumi.

“Tohoku University is famous within Japan, but it is not so well known internationally. Following UIRE accreditation, many researchers abroad, as well as international students, are paying more attention to Tohoku. This is important not just for increasing diversity, but there is data that papers based on international collaborations gained more citations compared to those authored solely by researchers based in Japan.”

That comes full circle to the origins of UIRE and the pressures behind it: Japan’s position on the global higher education stage. Japanese universities have been noticeably slipping down the international rankings for decades, a trend reflecting the nature of Japan’s economy in the post-bubble era of the late 1980s and early 1990s and strongly connected with declining research impact, a key component of university ranking.

Although there are multiple reasons already stated for UIRE’s existence, it’s undeniable that the ranking situation has played a big part. This becomes apparent when looking at the areas of current ranking methodologies that overlap with MEXT’s goals.

“There is certainly some overlap in the outcomes UIRE expects and rankings bodies observe, for example, research impact, international talent, research funding and international collaboration. But I would not regard UIRE simply as a rankings exercise,” says Asli Colpan, Professor of Corporate Strategy at Kyoto University.

“Rankings are primarily comparative measurement systems, whereas UIRE is a long-term institutional transformation programme intended to change the conditions under which excellent research is produced. For that reason, success should not necessarily be judged by whether a university moves immediately upward in a particular ranking. Improvements in research environments, researcher development, international openness and institutional capacity may take considerably longer to become visible in ranking indicators.”

The 25 year test

While most attitudes towards UIRE from players in Japan’s academic sector have been positive, there is a potential — though avoidable — downside. Accreditations so far have gone to some of the country's best performing and best equipped universities, with more likely to follow. So what will become of those lower down the ranks that arguably have more to gain from inclusion in the programme? Will there be increasing division between universities, or will the blueprint for Japan’s 21st-century research university propagate through the sector, raising the whole sector with it?

That may be the ultimate test of Japan’s bold experiment.