Tokyo Institute of Technology and Tokyo Medical and Dental University have merged to form the Institute of Science Tokyo.

The idea is that the merger for “medical-engineering collaboration” will generate synergies of their respective strengths and competitive edges and transform the new institution into a world-leading comprehensive university in science.

The merger marks the beginning of an ambitious, large-scale “experiment” in university management.

Despite their prominent research capabilities that stand out in Japan, both universities have been struggling financially due to a confluence of factors including cuts in government subsidies for operational costs.

Both institutions have devoted considerable efforts to obtaining external funding and raised tuition fees to secure the necessary financial resources.

Japanese universities lag behind their Western and Asian rivals in research capability indicators. Low researcher mobility and financial scale disparities have been cited as reasons for their low rankings.

To enhance the research capabilities of Japanese universities, the government needs to distribute adequate funding to cover foundational expenses across a wide range of universities and research fields.

However, citing fiscal strains, the government has been refusing to increase funding for universities and instead encouraging them to expand the scales of their operations and improve administrative efficiency through collaborations and mergers. This merger is also part of this trend.

The new university will exceed Hokkaido University in ordinary revenue and will be the seventh largest national university corporation.

The aim of the marriage between the two renowned universities is not just about scale and efficiency.

The strategic move has also been driven to become a serious candidate to be selected as a “university for international research excellence” under the government’s special funding program that provides hundreds of billions of yen annually to each designated institution.

The goal of this bid is to enhance research facilities and attract excellent researchers from both domestic and international sources.

However, the universities selected for the program are required to achieve a 3-percent business growth annually.

They are also mandated to set up a “management policy council,” where members appointed with the approval of the education minister decide on budgets and other management matters, imposing constraints on university operations.

The new university will focus on basic research, solving social issues and industry-academia collaboration as the three main pillars of its research programs.

Promoting basic research is crucial for the mid- to long-term development. Attention must be paid to the importance of ensuring the university does not focus only on research areas prioritized by the government or that can quickly yield results.

Mere expansion in size does not automatically result in synergistic effects of the merger. It is crucial that the faculty and students at both universities deepen their understanding of each other’s cultures and perspectives through interactions based on mutual respect.

The new university should be keen to increase opportunities for students from different fields to share classrooms and for researchers with different specialties to tackle the same themes.

In society in the future, there will be a growing number of problems that cannot be solved by knowledge from only the sciences or humanities alone. An environment that allows a diverse group of people to engage in research in a free-minded manner is essential.

It is also vital to broaden the perspectives of students and faculty by seeking support from Hitotsubashi University and Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, with which Tokyo Institute of Technology and Tokyo Medical and Dental University have formed a union of four universities in Tokyo.

The four have joined efforts to offer cross-disciplinary courses and integrated studies.

Increasing the ratio of women and foreigners among students and faculty members to enrich campus diversity is another strategic imperative for the new university.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Oct. 6