In an era of academic retrenchment and pinched research budgets, new public universities are rare. In post-disaster Japan, struggling with plummeting tax income and the developed world’s worst public debt, they are unheard of. Yet this fall, the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University will begin its first intake of students after securing almost $1-billion in government money, five-plus years of guaranteed research financing, and the backing of five Nobel laureates.
The mysteries of Japan’s newest university, a graduate institution that will accept only 20 students this year, don’t end there. In a country with a notoriously rigid, Balkanized academic structure, the new institute has no departments. More than half its 47 faculty are foreign—10 times the norm at the average Japanese institution—and most are on an American-style tenure track. In place of the stuffy hierarchies of Japanese academe, professors, students, and staff from more than 26 different countries mingle freely, keep their office doors open, and drop job titles. President Jonathan Dorfan is known here simply as ‘Jonathan.’
A particle physicist formerly with Stanford University, Mr. Dorfan calls the institution a “bold response” to perceptions that Japan’s insularity is throttling its global academic competitiveness. “Its aim is to be a truly international university that can aspire to be a global contributor to higher education.” A one-time skeptic, Mr. Dorfan says he now believes OIST Graduate University will succeed. “When Japan decides to do something and commits to it, they’re very thorough.”
In a global economy, the Asian powerhouse’s cloistered academy certainly needs strong medicine. A century and a half after Japan opened to the West, less than 4 percent of its university students and 5 percent of its faculty are foreign, according to the education ministry.
Worse, the number of Japanese students at American colleges has dropped by nearly half since 1997; Chinese, Indian, South Korean, and Taiwanese students now pick up a larger share of American science and engineering doctorates. Young Japanese are increasingly shunning the natural sciences too—the number of graduate students has been falling for nearly a decade.
Japan’s share of global research production, meanwhile, fell from 9.6 percent to 6.8 percent over the decade to 2010, according to Thomson Reuters’ “Global Research Report: Japan,” which blamed that faltering performance on a dearth of international collaborations.
“There is a sense of crisis about Japan’s decline and fall as a power in sending students abroad and attracting academic talent,” says Mark Selden, a senior research associate at Cornell University’s East Asia program and a veteran Japan observer. He says recruiters from some of the top American universities now skip Japan entirely when in Asia. “It’s a sign of the times. There’s no interest.”
Overcoming Inertia
After years of halting responses to this crisis, Japan’s educators have recently been grinding the rusty gears of change. This year the University of Tokyo announced that it will move toward fall enrollment, the first step in a process that many hope will bring the nation’s colleges into sync with the rest of the planet—enhancing the possibility for exchanges and the intake of foreign faculty and overseas students. (Other institutions in Japan begin their academic year in April.)
The government is putting its shoulder behind collaborative projects, notably Campus Asia, which aims to harmonize China’s, Japan’s, and South Korea’s colleges, and ultimately keep more students in the region. Global 30 is another government effort, which seeks to boost the competitiveness of the nation’s universities by hiring more foreign staff and faculty, increasing English-language instruction, and sending students abroad.
Change, however, is likely to arrive slowly. Junichi Hamada, president of the University of Tokyo, admits it will be five years before the institution can begin enrolling students in autumn; many more before other colleges in Japan follow suit. And the government’s responses to Japan’s academic aloofness have been widely criticized as too timid—and too late.
OIST Graduate University attempts to overcome that inertia with a radical approach. Financing comes directly from Japan’s Cabinet Office, bypassing the conservative education ministry. The university’s 17-member board (including 12 foreigners), its budget, and its president, are directly answerable to the prime minister. A thousand miles from the education ministry’s micromanaging, Mr. Dorfan’s team has created what may well be Japan’s most innovative educational experiment.
The university’s campus seems to reflect its Promethean origins. Built on the main island of Japan’s southernmost prefecture and carved out of a subtropical forest on a hill overlooking the South China Sea, it is as picturesque as it is remote. The institute’s striking setting, and the chance to start from scratch, is one of its attractions, says Alexander Mikheyev, an evolutionary biologist and former Harvard University postdoc. “It was a nice place to live, and a chance to run my own show.”
The graduate institution’s resources were another lure for Mr. Mikheyev. “The funding is better than Harvard,” he says, adding that he is paid about 20 percent more than he would be in the United States. “The fact that I don’t have to spend my time writing and applying for grants frees me up for research.”
Keshav M. Dani, a University of California at Berkeley-trained physicist, agrees. “I felt like a poodle jumping through hoops in the U.S. Life here is simpler. They flew me out to Okinawa to design and specify my own lab, then flew me back, and I hadn’t even accepted the job yet.”
That generous financial support comes with high expectations. The institute’s multinational team must pursue one of science’s Holy Grails: genuinely collaborative research. The goal is built into the university’s architecture, designed by California-based Kornberg Associates. Professors share administration staff, lab equipment, and even coffee pots. A single long tunnel through a hill links the entire campus to the outside world. “The structure makes it difficult for people to avoid each other,” explains Mr. Mikheyev
‘This Is Better’
For now at least, it seems to work. “I find myself talking to biologists a lot more than in the U.S,” says Mr. Dani, who experiments on the frontier between theoretical physics and biology, a path that he hopes might deepen understanding of photosynthesis and cell functions. Tatiana Márquez-Lago, an applied mathematician working on biomedical problems, says real collaborative work will take time, but she’s encouraged by what she’s seen. “It would be impossible to do this kind of research in a university with departments.”
Meanwhile, Kenji Doya, an engineer-turned neuroscientist, paces between two labs, one with robots and the other with rats, as he struggles to build adaptive machines, using the lessons of the human-brain chemical serotonin. “Crossing the boundaries at Japanese universities was difficult,” recalls Mr. Doya, a veteran of the University of Tokyo. “Roles are rigidly defined, and that’s not easy to change. This is better.”
His work is precisely the sort of research that the new science institute hopes to encourage, says Mr. Dorfan. “There is an enormous amount of discovery potential at the interface between the primary branches of the sciences. In these overlaps there are possibilities for discovery that we want to tap. You can walk here from a neuroscience lab into a molecular-science lab or into an evolutionary-biology lab by just going through the door.”
But achieving the institute’s goals, one of which is to energize the depressed Okinawan economy and eventually create Palo Alto-style technology parks, will be more difficult than designing an open campus. Apart from a memorandum of understanding with a single Japanese drug company and some outreach to local schools and offices, the university still remains aloof from the local economy and its tiny host town, Onna. Bridging the academic-business gap that is common in Japan will be the institution’s biggest challenge, admits its president, but he adds that there are precedents, citing his alma mater, Stanford. “Palo Alto was a small town, not much bigger than Onna,” Mr. Dorfman says. There was no infrastructure of “culture and academe, and certainly no Silicon Valley.”
Where might business spinoffs come from? Ms. Márquez-Lago’s research could be applied to create personalized medicine. The mechanical engineer Satoshi Mitarai is trying to develop new techniques for monitoring ocean currents that might eventually lead to the development of new measuring instruments with private companies. Mr. Doya’s work may yield commercial breakthroughs in robotics. For now, however, the focus is on research.
The other challenge will be money. Can the institute protect its financing amid an increasingly precarious fiscal environment? Japan’s sovereign debt of roughly $14-trillion, even before the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, has forced the government to put many publicly financed institutions in its cross hairs. Mr. Dorfan insists that the government’s commitment is solid but adds that external money will have to rise by 20 to 30 percent over the next decade.
“I think it should be attractive to private donors outside Japan,” the president says. “We will seek to have buildings and programs named after people, industrial partnerships. We aspire to a scale that is more like an American university. Time will tell how successful we are.”
That 10-year window gives the science and technology institute a chance to put Okinawa, a prefecture known until now primarily for the political tensions caused by its large network of U.S. military bases, on the academic and business map. Somewhere along the line, it also hopes to begin changing Japan’s entire academic mind-set. Says Mr. Dani: “We have the resources, the money, and the location. Now we’re in a fight.”
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