2.Roles of Universities as Educational and Research Institutes

2.1 My findings in the course of turning a national university into an incorporated administrative body

In April 2004, a total of 99 national universities were transformed into incorporated administrative bodies. In Osaka University, a new board of directors was organized anew so that preparations could be made that would allow top-down policies to be implemented quickly. Assuming the Presidency at that time, I aimed to achieve the following four objectives.

(1) Campus that respects individuals and fosters creation of knowledge

Although the incorporation of national universities was originally advanced as a part of the government's "structural reform without sanctuary", I thought that we should not stop at structural reform but take this opportunity to pursue the university's mission of education, research and contribution to society more effectively. Being a place to foster "creation of knowledge", a university should always serve as a base for originating thought and culture. I thought that the accumulation of the free and voluntary activities of individual faculty members in education and research would lead to a university becoming a leading institution in the world.

(2) Exercise of comprehensive competence across the three fields of basic, application and feasibility studies

A university should prove its raison d'être to the world by being a forum for the "exchange of knowledge". The foundation for this effort is freedom of learning. Although a variety of assessment systems have been introduced into universities after their transition to incorporated bodies, they should not interfere with the educational and research activities of faculty members but protect freedom of learning. Today, university employees are extremely busy. It is often said that one reason for this busyness is the time consumed in dealing with assessment systems. It is not accurate to say that the act of incorporating universities gave rise to the assessment systems. After all, national universities should be held accountable for effective use of taxpayer's money. In other words, universities are required to transmit their research results to society.

(3) Establishment of an environment conducive to the exchange of knowledge

Unfortunately, the environments in which faculty members work and graduate and undergraduate students learn in Japan lag far behind those in advanced countries in Europe and America. Therefore, I thought of making use of overhead expenses and the President's discretionary expenses to quickly create a campus filled with a peaceful atmosphere; a campus that provides a relaxing environment in which faculty members and students can enjoy a meal and converse at leisure.

(4) Respect for autonomy of individual organizations

While it is a matter of course that any university-wide organizational reform must be implemented under the leadership of the President, it is necessary to respect the educational and research activities undertaken by individual departments based on the principle of autonomy. What is important is to put an organizational mechanism in place that makes it possible for the accumulated achievements of individual departments to lead to the advancement of the entire university.

This may have struck you as strange. The media have been giving people outside academia the impression that universities today are under the control of centralized authority, and all faculty members are compelled to look in the same direction at the command of the President, and that universities are heavily restrained by their mid-term objectives and plans. Also, many people may be under the impression that universities go to great lengths to seek joint research funds from enterprises or competitive external funds under the pretext of achieving sound university management. However, if such universities were to exist, faculty members would be too exhausted by non-academic activities to provide students with proper education, and would be destined to fall sooner or later, thereby fulfilling the ulterior motive of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Universities should defend, first and foremost, freedom of learning, and the role of being a forum for the exchange of knowledge. Those in universities must face up to today's reform pressure with complete equanimity. I believe that acquisition of joint research funds from enterprises or competitive external funds should come naturally as a result of producing excellent research results, and that production of excellent results is a starting point for collaboration between universities and enterprises.

2.2 Role of universities as organizations for human resource development

When I was President of Osaka University, I compiled a report entitled "Human Resource Development in Universities to Achieve Breakthroughs Ten Years from Now" [1], as a counter report to "Strengthening Development of Advanced Human Resources in Information Communication through Collaboration between Industry, Academia and Government" [2] (hereinafter referred to as the "Keidanren Report"), a proposal for information communication technology policy published by Nippon Keidanren (Japan Business Federation) on June 21, 2005. The Keidanren Report is highly critical of the current situation at universities and states the following.

The Keidanren Report concludes from the above that in order to strengthen the development of top-level human resources in information communication technology, it is essential to develop and execute an appropriate national strategy and to strengthen universities' function for providing practical business education. The report proposes the following action plan:

However, I am tempted to ask whether this proposal is really appropriate for education in universities. This doubt came into my mind the moment I began to read the report. It is true that human resource development in universities must change given the kinds of radical changes occurring in the industrial structure. However, are universities meant to produce graduates who can immediately perform useful jobs in business? Of course, not. Enterprises have traditionally placed emphasis on their proprietary system integration technology, i.e., on the passing on of proprietary know-how. In contrast, universities are expected to teach basic theories and knowledge. This is how university education and enterprise training, which have different goals, have been able to coexist. It has been almost taken for granted that enterprises provide new recruits with technical training that is intended to teach their specific know-how. However, the recent globalization of business and resulting intense competition have curtailed enterprises' reserve capacity to provide their employees with sufficient training. In addition, globalization has made it necessary to place more emphasis on using off-the-shelf or standardized technologies rather than proprietary ones, making the transmission of an enterprise's unique know-how a rather futile exercise. In the end, enterprises are delegating human resource development to universities.

The Keidanren Report appropriately points out that, if highly capable human resources are to be developed, universities and enterprises should complement each other rather than seek to play different roles. However, in doing so, we must never forget that universities should provide students not only with education on immediately useful business practice but also with education that will lead to their growth as researchers or engineers ten or twenty years from now. Inherently, universities are meant to deepen and develop science and technology. Therefore, their primary mission is to undertake education and research to achieve this goal.

Having said that, I have to admit that universities are facing mounting problems. I am sure that all IEICE members are aware of the fact that the electronics, information and communication courses in universities are losing their appeal to students. Given the fact that the twenty-first century is often described as the age of the information revolution, it is ironic that the future of electronics, information and communication, technologies that support this revolution, is not at all bright. As you know, the IEICE has been exerting tremendous efforts to correct this trend, including conducting "Science Classes for Children". Nevertheless, why are we not at all confident that these efforts have yielded useful results? It is robotics that is gaining popularity. Even more so is life science. I can easily tell why. Have we, those engaged in electronics, information and communication, been talking to younger people about our dreams 10, 50 or even 100 years from now? What are our dreams about creating robots that will become the partners of humans, about elucidating brain functions, or about resolving the mystery of evolution? Have we been conveying the joy of learning to younger people?

I believe that one of the reasons for our failure to covey these adequately is our sense of stagnation in the field of electronics, information and communication. This field has deepened and developed over a period of nearly one hundred years. This has narrowed the scope of work individual researchers can tackle and made it difficult for them to draw an overall picture. Another reason is that the fields of electronics, information and communication technologies have become so essential in so many facets of our lives that they are now considered to be somewhat commonplace or mundane, rendering this field less inspiring to younger people. I will talk about recommended mechanisms to drive the development of this field later, but for now I would like to elaborate on how this problem affects human resource development.

Education in graduate courses is primarily "education through research". The intention is to assign to students research topics in the field their mentors are engaged in and help them to acquire problem-solving skills through their own independent research. However, this approach is giving rise to a variety of problems.

(1) Advances in science and technology have resulted in fragmentation of research fields. Thus, if researchers are to conduct research in leading-edge areas, they have to amass broad knowledge on related subjects. Consequently, the more leading-edge a subject chosen for study is, the more students require support from their mentors. This has a significantly adverse impact on their independence and initiative.

(2) It cannot be denied that faculty members have traditionally depended on the work of their students for their own research achievements. If a student is to receive a doctorate in three years, for example, it is necessary to enable him or her to make considerable achievements within a short period of time. This puts pressure on faculty members to assign a topic for which they can foresee concrete research results, typically an improvement-type topic that is easy to solve. The consequent avoidance of challenging topics reduces faculty members' research ability and tends to push research topics assigned to students further away from leading-edge subjects.

(3) Students seeking to study leading-edge subjects cannot afford the time to broaden their knowledge about related subjects, and consequently find that their study has a very limited set of applications. It also has the effect of reducing the size of the circle in which they interact socially and scholastically.

(4) When students are assigned segmented topics, they tend to wait for instructions from their mentors, and lose strong motivation. They also lose sight of how what they have learned can apply in actual business. This could possibly be a cause of why students tend to feel lost about which company or what kind of job they should choose after graduation.

The percentage of students advancing to a master's course has been increasing lately. In Osaka University, nearly 90% of undergraduate students choose to do a master's. It is true that, in spite of this massive movement of students to take a master's course, faculty members have failed to change their traditional mindset and to recognize the need to produce the advanced engineers demanded by industry. A solution to this problem is to aim at producing architects, i.e., human resources who have sufficient knowledge to precisely design systems useful to society and actually implement them, instead of producing researchers who are confined within a specific, narrow technical area. Students should acquire not only basic knowledge on systems themselves but also basic technologies for system design, evaluation and maintenance. On top of that, they should improve their presentation and communication skills in order to enhance their modeling and problem-solving and presentation capabilities. Furthermore, students should acquire what may be called a "human fortitude", the capacity to face a challenge squarely and to assume leadership, i.e., to communicate skillfully in a broad sense.

2.3 Convergence of leading-edge science or technology fields to stimulate innovation

One of the ways to solve the kind of problem I have just mentioned is to try and bring about convergence of several leading-edge science or technology fields. While I was in Osaka University, I initiated a project that aimed at effecting convergence among life science, nanotechnology, robotics and information technology [3]. This project was called "Intellectual Artifacts and Information Systems that Learn from Fluctuations in Living Things." It received funding from the Adjustment Expense for Promotion of Science and Technology of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. The specific name of this expense was "Construction of sites for innovations in areas of convergence of leading-edge technologies". The objective of the project is to promote R&D in areas where leading-edge technologies are converging. Its scope is from the stage of fundamental research with commercial applications to the stage of collaboration between industry and academia. The ultimate goal is to generate leading-edge technologies that will lead to the creation of new industries ten to fifteen years from now, through the development of systems that will foster and develop the next generation of researchers and engineers. This project at Osaka University is a challenging one because it tries to develop robotics and information networking technologies based on an entirely new, hither-to unknown concepts by learning from functions of living things, and to implement these concepts using nanotechnology. You will notice that this project has the following advantages:

(1) Through convergence of leading-edge science or technology fields, we can aim at creating entirely new forms of science and technology, rather than extensions of existing ones.
(2) By inviting enterprises to participate in the project by providing so-called matching funds, we can aim at achieving the long-term goal of fostering industries that will prosper ten years from now.
(3) By involving younger researchers and students, we can introduce new human resource development methods presently nonexistent in conventional education to graduate schools.

This is only one example of attempts to further develop the electronics, information and communication field, but you will see that this type of convergence cannot be achieved successfully by simply seeking the convergence of several science or technology fields alone. It is also important to consider how to involve researchers and engineers in this process of convergence. In a project within a single university, convergence among people can be encouraged by a top-down approach. However, when we consider convergence among people across different universities and enterprises, we begin to see that an important role can be played by engineering societies. I will elaborate on this later.