R&D policy and social contribution in Japanese higher education

Abstract

The Japanese academics have high recognition of themselves as the researchers rather than the teachers. This kind of climate developed in the national research universities including Teikoku Daigaku in the prewar time and even in the postwar time; it has extended to almost all academics not only in the research universities but also in the non-research universities. This fact was testified clearly in the CAP survey conducted in 2007, in which the Japanese academics’ research orientation belonged to the German type. A climate of academics in Japan is different from the counterparts in the USA as shown in the CAP survey, in which the American academics are oriented to research and teaching with a weight of half and half. Given the Japanese academic climate involved in research orientation, the national government offers in recent years the research grants to academics as the category of researcher on the basis of “selection and concentration principle” to the extent that only distinguished researchers in research productivity can be selected. Accordingly, Kakusa Shakai, or the social difference between the institutions with high productivity and those with low productivity, seems to be increasingly extending recently. The question that how the Japanese government disseminates research outputs to make these outputs be more socially utilized is likely to be not answered adequately for many years because there are few meta-evaluations to assess policy’s usefulness. However, such meta-evaluation of policy is expected to be done strictly since 2002 when it was introduced in the context that government policy’s contribution to society was functioned substantially.