Last week, from May 31 to June 2, Fujita Health University hosted the Times Higher Education (THE) Asia Universities Summit. The event was superbly organized with visitors from >20 countries. I did not join all events, but probably more than half of them, and was especially impressed by the presentations by the three Nobel prize laureates Prof. Hiroshi AMANO, Prof. Yoshinori OHSUMI, and Prof. Kocihi Tanaka, and the chairman and representative director of Toyota Motor Cooperation, Takeshi UCHIYAMADA. The organization did a great job in having everything smoothly organized, as well as in the audio-visual setup — the camerawork was very professional and our Fujita Halls 500 and 2000 looked very good.
From 1971 to 2008, THE (Times Higher Education) was affiliated with the British newspaper The Times, weekly releasing The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES). In 2011, THE started rankings of universities by a somewhat complicated system that can change every year. The rankings also include a survey with >10,000 respondents for estimating the reputation of universities and, by coincidence, this year I received an invitation to join that survey (Fig. 1). Rankings affect research money and to some extent are subjective and can be gamed. However, listening to the THE officials at this summit, I felt that they are idealistic and genuinely try to correctly summarize the important properties of universities and thereby help those universities improve. In 2019, Fujita Health University achieved a 7th position in the THE ranking among Japanese universities, which for a private university is quite impressive.
The title of the summit this year was “Facing the future, creating academic talent” and a key term was “a VUCA world.” VUCA is short for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, and using this term succeeded very well in giving the summit a problem-solving direction. Many of the sessions that I attended were about optimizing or potentiating academic talent, namely by:
• promoting creativity
• increasing diversity among decision-making staff (e.g., more women)
• increasing cooperation between different universities
• increasing cooperation between universities and communities
• listening to communities for their needs
These words carried weight because they came, amongst others, from the three Nobel prize laureates. The chairman of Toyota even said that companies have to start working together (instead of the usual competing!) in order to be able to tackle the climate change problem.
Living here >20 years, I feel partly Japanese, and it is worrying to me that at the world level the Japanese universities are falling behind those of other countries. In the THE world ranking of universities 2022, only two Japanese universities are in the top 100, with The University of Tokyo at 35 and Kyoto University at 61. The Asian university with the highest ranking is Peking University at 16. I have twice visited a Chinese university and I understand the enormous power and infrastructure behind it. There are also four universities from Hong Kong alone in the top 100 (at 30, 49, 66, and 91), which may also benefit from the drive and infrastructure in the rest of China. However, even a small city-state like Singapore has two different universities in the top 100 (at 21 and 46), one of them, the National University of Singapore, positioned above the University of Tokyo. In my estimation, Australia definitely has a poorer technical infrastructure than Japan for doing research, but even this country has six universities in the top 100 (at 33, 54, 54, 57, 58, 70). At the summit, it was shown that in 2022 Japan also stays behind in field-weighted citation impact (FWCI), being a measure for how many citations are generated compared to what is expected in that field. I could only find a picture for that for the years 2012-2016 (Fig. 2) but at the summit it was shown that since then several Asian countries among which China have surpassed Japan in FWCI and that the FWCI of Australia stays clearly above Japan as it did in 2016. Some of it can surely be explained by Australia having English as a native language, but maybe part of it can be explained by academic culture. Maybe Japanese and Australian universities could both benefit by intensifying their cooperation.
There is, also a point that, in my opinion (which is shared with other people I spoke to), is better in Japanese academics than anywhere in the world. The Japanese probably have the best ability to combine thinking with manual work (doing experiments), and I know several Western researchers who prefer postdocs from Japan.
Finally, I like to point out that in our CMS Seminar Club we have had speakers (and guests) from several of the top 100 universities: Prof. Jim Kaufman, University of Cambridge (position 5); Dr. Nina Le Bert, (Duke Medical School which is connected to the) National University of Singapore (position 21); Dr. Naoyuki Kataoka, The University of Tokyo (position 36); Prof. Eleonora Leucci, KU Leuven (position 42); and Prof. Hans Clevers, Utrecht University (position 69). Please keep joining these seminar events, as it gives you a chance to listen and communicate with these researchers in a relaxed setting.
