Japan tries, again, to stop its universities from sliding down global rankings

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But researchers fear new law aimed at boosting six top universities could create fresh problems

 

Japan’s Tohoku University, which hosts this advanced synchrotron light source, has slipped off a list of the world’s top 100 universities. It recently won special government funding to boost its global standing.THE YOMIURI SHIMBUN VIA AP IMAGES

 

Twenty years ago, five universities in Japan were among the world’s top 100, according to an annual compilation by the ShanghaiRanking Consultancy. The University of Tokyo led the contingent in 19th place, with Kyoto University 30th.

 

But by this year, Tokyo had tumbled to 27th and Kyoto to 39th despite repeated efforts to keep the universities globally competitive. The other three schools dropped out of the top 100 entirely.

 

Now, Japan’s government has launched yet another effort to reverse the widely recognized decline. This month, lawmakers approved legislation that requires six top-ranked universities to establish new management policy councils designed to give outside experts a greater voice in decisions.

 

The councils, which will include the university president and at least three members independent of the school, will weigh in on “significant operational policies and oversee the execution of the president’s duties,” the education ministry’s higher education bureau said in a statement. And Masahito Moriyama, Japan’s education and science minister, has asserted that the measure will “enhance education and research.”

 

But critics fear the councils will only add to already cumbersome university bureaucracies and push academic scientists to emphasize applied research. And because Moriyama’s ministry will vet council members, they worry the new law will erode university autonomy and open the door to political meddling. The councils will lead to “increasingly complex and mysterious decision-making,” predicted sociologist Ryosuke Nishida of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in a critique published by The Asahi Shimbun, a prominent Japanese news outlet.

 

All sides agree that Japan’s research establishment has endured what some academics call “the lost decades.” In addition to the slide in university rankings, since the early 2000s Japan has dropped from second to fifth in the number of papers indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science, according to Japan’s National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP). And it fell from fifth to 12th in the number of papers ranking in the top 1% of citations, trailing countries including Spain and Iran.

 

There are a number of reasons for the decline in Japan’s rankings, says Masatsura Igami, a science policy researcher at NISTEP. But “crucial factors,” he says, including a “stagnation” in research spending and a decline in the size of the nation’s scientific workforce relative to other nations.

 

Many researchers trace Japan’s current academic malaise to a 2003 law that turned the nation’s 86 government-supported national universities into corporate entities with greater independence. At the time, policymakers argued that private entities outperformed public institutions, and that corporatization was a means of “improving efficiency and strengthening universities through competition,” says Kiyoshi Yamamoto, an emeritus professor at the University of Tokyo who specialized in university management.

 

While pursuing that strategy, however, the government steadily cut operating funds for the universities, which included some support for research. Overall, those funds dropped from $87 billion in 2004 to $76 billion in 2022, according to the Japan Association of National Universities. To compensate, universities were allowed to raise tuition, increase revenues from affiliated hospitals, and pursue contract research with industry.

 

The government also launched a number of competitive grant programs intended to promote promising areas of research and strengthen top universities. In 2015, for example, it created the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED) to move basic research discoveries into clinical trials. And just 2 years ago it also launched an initiative that will award up to $70 million annually to each university deemed capable of becoming world-class institutions. In September, Tohoku University won the first such award.

 

Although the competitive programs have helped some universities, they are “still far from being able to make up for … the reduction in government funding,” says Futao Huang, a higher education scholar at Hiroshima University.

 

The cost cutting, meanwhile, has led to a dearth of entry-level research jobs. And “the creation of a career ladder of low-paid, insecure jobs drove talented young researchers out of academia,” says Robert Geller, a geophysicist and emeritus professor at the University of Tokyo. Enrollment in Ph.D. programs has dropped precipitously.

 

Such developments are now undermining government efforts to boost innovation, some scientists say. To cope with budget cuts, for example, Japan’s national universities increased the clinical duties of their hospital physicians. But that meant they had less time for biomedical research, according to an analysis reported by physician-scientists Shotaro Kinoshita and Taishiro Kishimoto of the Keio University School of Medicine in an October letter in The Lancet. As a result, “research output has declined,” Kinoshita says—a trend that “may be hindering” AMED’s mission.

 

Critics of the latest tweak to university governance don’t believe it addresses the challenges universities face. Outsiders, they note, already have a voice in managing most universities. At the University of Tokyo, for example, independent advisers serve on the board and hold a majority of the seats on a 28-member Administrative Council.

 

Others worry about a provision in the new law that allows the education minister to veto council appointees, saying it could politicize university governance. As an example, they point to a recent controversy over appointees to the Science Council of Japan (SCJ), which plays a critical role in advising the government and is considered the nation’s foremost association of researchers. Breaking with historic practice, in October 2020 then–Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga blocked the SCJ appointments of six academics who had criticized the policies of his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), creating an uproar among researchers and the public.

 

Such concerns did not prevent the current LDP government from pushing the new measure through the legislature late this month. Opponents take some solace, however, from resolutions added to the bill that call for the protection of academic freedom and respect for a university president’s council nominations.

 

The resolutions are not legally binding. But Sayaka Oki, a historian of science at the University of Tokyo, says they could provide a “means to battle against possible harmful outcomes of the new law” by “different groups who had not seriously tried to cooperate before.”

 

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