Japan: still foreign after all these years

[Harold F. Schiffman]

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i24/24a04701.htm
>>From the issue dated February 16, 2007


Still Foreign After All These Years
Japanese universities continue to feel unwelcoming to many outsiders

By DAVID MCNEILL, Tokyo

One way of taking the educational pulse of Japan is to visit the School of
International Liberal Studies here at Waseda University. Higher education
seems cosmopolitan and vibrant at the school, with a faculty that is 30
percent foreign drawn from a dozen nationalities offering a diverse
curriculum taught in English to students who must spend a year abroad to
graduate. And the dean is British. As a fluent speaker of Japanese who was
the most senior academic on the staff, Paul Snowden was the natural choice
for the job. But his appointment as dean last year, the highest position
reached by a non-Japanese at Waseda, the country's top private university,
was considered so unusual that he compared it to the first moonwalk. "For
Waseda the smashing of this glass ceiling might be seen as a pretty huge
step," he told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

Indeed, Waseda's embrace of foreigners is still much more the exception
than the rule in Japan. Few Japanese universities have been as ready to
take the hammer to tradition. While some parts of society are slowly
opening up the number of permanent foreign residents recently passed two
million, or 1.57 percent of the total population universities in this
Asian superpower remain strikingly homogenous and isolated from the
globalizing trend in higher education. According to the Ministry of
Education, just 5,652 of the 158,770 professors employed in Japanese
higher education are foreigners on full-time contracts, mostly at private
universities. Most of those foreigners work as low-level English-language
teachers on short-term contracts. And although Japan has finally reached
its target, set in 1984, of enrolling 100,000 foreign students every year,
the bulk of them are from China and South Korea. That means the rest of
the world sends fewer than 20,000 students to Japanese campuses each year.
In contrast, Japan sends nearly 40,000 students a year to the United
States alone.

Many academics and administrators here agree that Japan's insular
higher-education system would benefit enormously by opening up to the rest
of the world. They cite such problems as the sluggish adoption of new
course-management technologies like Blackboard's, the lack of creative
thinking in departments and classrooms, and a shortage of programs for
older students. Critics add that most Japanese universities are not
competitive internationally: Just three Japanese institutions made the
top-100 list in the 2006 rankings of the Times Higher Education
Supplement, in London. "Japanese universities are not doing well, and one
reason is because the education students are getting is homogenous," says
Bruce Stronach, an American who, as president of Yokohama City University,
is probably the highest-placed foreigner in Japanese academe. "They're not
getting a diversity of views the ability to argue and discuss and that
sort of Socratic give-and-take with their colleagues." Bern Mulvey, an
American who is dean of Miyazaki International College, which runs one of
the handful of continuing-education programs on the large southern island
of Kyushu, says that when he raised the idea of starting such programs
among his colleagues, he was greeted with astonishment.

"They'd never heard of it until I explained it to them," he says. "Finding
solutions in universities often involves listening to the faculty members
from Romania or Nicaragua or other places who have new ideas. In Japan
those voices would not be heard." The education ministry appears to agree
with such criticism, increasingly sprinkling the buzzword
"internationalization" in documents on university reform, and proclaiming,
at least officially, that more foreign academic talent is welcome here.
Japan's top campus administrators are reading from the same page.

"Universities have to internationalize for the sake of diversity," says
Hiroshi Komiyama, president of the elite University of Tokyo which employs
just 250 foreign nationals among its 5,000 faculty members.  "People who
are part of the same culture and language can no longer really develop
intellectually." His own university's poor record of hiring foreigners is
largely the result of external forces, he explains. "A lot of this is not
our fault,"  he says. "National public universities were banned from
employing foreigners full time until the 1990s because employees were
classed as civil servants." Those rules were only recently relaxed.

Underlying Tensions

Pull back the curtain, however, and major obstacles to reform emerge.
Except at a handful of prestigious academic citadels, say professors,
university administrators keep foreigners on a very short leash, hiring
them only on contracts lasting three years or less, and dictating what
they can teach. Faculty positions in Japan are still rarely advertised
outside the country, unless universities are looking for foreign-language
instructors. And the few job advertisements that are posted
internationally often demand that highly qualified applicants agree to
spend much of their time correcting the English-language papers of
Japanese colleagues, say foreign professors. Many foreign academics here
say they have been discriminated against:  snubbed in corridors, passed
over for promotion in favor of Japanese colleagues, and worse.

"I was at a university where female faculty members would get off the
elevator and take the stairs," says Mr. Mulvey, of Miyazaki. "They said
they didn't want to be alone with a foreigner because you didn't know what
was going to happen." Negative feelings among foreigners can run deep. At
a recent conference on education issues here, foreign professors compared
themselves to lab animals. "When they have been sufficiently abused or
have mastered the maze, it is time to bring in a 'fresh specimen,'" one
said. Some have sued their employers for discrimination. Several
institutions, including the prestigious private Ritsumeikan University,
are dealing with disputes involving foreign instructors. Nonetheless, a
growing number of foreign professors are climbing the slippery academic
pole in Japan. Foreigners now run research projects, departments, and even
universities, evidence for Mr. Snowden, of Waseda, that the system is
changing.

Still, he says, his own promotion to dean has put him under special
scrutiny. "I've really got to perform well," he says. "Otherwise there
will be this excessive interpretation of a foreigner having done badly,
and never electing another one." Mr. Snowden, who is knowledgeable about
teaching English as a second language and has written about comparative
linguistics and culture, joined Waseda as a part-time instructor in 1980.
Like many successful foreign academics in Japan, he questions whether
non-Japanese have always made the commitment needed to build university
careers here. Linda Grove, a former dean of liberal arts at Tokyo's
Jesuit-run Sophia University, which has the highest percentage of
non-Japanese staff of any university in the country over 50 percent argues
that language has been a huge problem.

"It was very difficult for Japanese universities to take on people who
couldn't attend meetings or read documents," she says. "I don't think it
was because they didn't want foreigners. It was worrying that they could
cope." Sophia's school of liberal arts is one of the few in Japan that
offer an entire curriculum in English and have a campus that boasts a fair
number of non-Asian faces. In the corridors here, English is heard as
commonly as Japanese, and doors have nameplates for professors from all
over the world. In contrast, most university campuses in Japan are still
strikingly monocultural. The faculty at the University of Tokyo for
example, looks much as it did two decades ago.

"Many Japanese students have never even talked to somebody from outside
the country," says Igo Takahiro, a first-year student. "It would obviously
be better for our education if we had more opportunities to learn what
foreigners think and exchange ideas with them. I think most of my friends
would agree." Some academics believe that Sophia could serve as a model of
the "internationalized" university, with its mix of teaching styles and
polyglot community of Chinese, Koreans, Americans, and Europeans. Few
Japanese students, however, speak and read English well enough to be able
to function in such an environment. Tom Gill, an associate professor in
the department of international studies at Meiji Gakuin University, says
his department would like to hire more foreign academics but cannot:
"Finding a guy who has a specialty other than Japanese is not easy." Many
universities argue that hiring more non-Japanese simply increases the
workload for current staff members. Such claims infuriate equality
campaigners. "Yes, poor Japanese-language skills are an issue," says Mr.
Mulvey, who is a fluent Japanese speaker and reader. "However, this really
is beside the point. The real problem is that Sophia University and the
few places like it are exceptions. The vast majority of universities in
this country will not hire or even consider foreigners for tenured
positions, regardless of language level, publication record, and teaching
ability."

The "embarrassingly" low number of tenured foreign professors in Japan
bears that out, says Mr. Mulvey. The education ministry cannot even say
how many foreigners are tenured, arguing that tenure is a matter for each
institution to take up. "We don't know how many Japanese are tenured,
either," says a ministry spokesman. While the government does run a few
programs intended to recruit foreign academics, the spokesman notes that
"we cannot order universities to hire more foreigners." For some, this
response proves that the government is not serious about
internationalizing higher education or discouraging discrimination. "This
is an intensely political issue," says Debito Arudou, a naturalized
Japanese citizen and lecturer who says universities are "systemically
denying" tenure to non-Japanese academics through the use of employment
term limits.

'System of Apartheid'

Ivan P. Hall, one of Japanese academe's fiercest critics and author of
Cartels of the Mind: Japan's Intellectual Closed Shop, a 1997 book that
argues that Japan has put up institutional barriers to outsiders in the
media, academic, and legal sectors, says the lowly position of most
foreign academics in Japan is by design. "The ministry knows universities
discriminate against foreigners and so it lies about these statistics," he
says. "Every time you try to nail this thing down it is like jelly."
Japanese universities, he says, have a long record of banishing gaijin,
foreigners, to the academic sidelines. The record, he says, can be read
only as a determination "conscious and politically motivated"  not to open
up to foreign scholars. It is a system of apartheid that keeps most gaijin
"disenfranchised and disposable." University administrators say it is
difficult to find qualified foreigners, but that they are trying. "If they
can work the same as a Japanese person, and if they are comfortable with
the language, we hire the foreigner," says Takuya Honda, a professor in
the School of Knowledge Science at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science
and Technology.

Administrators also reject the idea that the government forces them away
from such hires, and that there are any systematic efforts to keep out
foreign academics. "I have no idea what the Ministry of Education thinks,"
says Mr. Komiyama, president of the University of Tokyo. "We don't consult
with them when we want to hire more people from abroad." Mr. Snowden, dean
of international studies at Waseda, acknowledges that some of the hiring
criteria can be tough to meet. "Japanese universities are wary of
committing themselves to people who claim they might stay but who take off
after a few years," he says. "I was told when I became full time that I
must stay 10 years or 'we're not interested.' Foreigners sometimes don't
stay around for very long."

Rhetoric vs. Reality

Government rhetoric often seems least convincing in universities outside
the big cities, where a multicultural dawn looks far off indeed. The
school of humanities at Hokkai Gakuen University, in Sapporo, for example,
employs just one tenured professor among its 36 foreign academics despite
its efforts to build a Sophia-style humanities program. Now the university
is in a dispute with a foreign instructor who says he was passed over in
favor of a Japanese colleague. "It's a bit uncomfortable, but management
said all foreign teachers should be on one-year contracts," says Toshikazu
Kuwabara, dean of the school.  The university introduced the measure, he
says, because it has had "problems" with foreigners, including sexual
harassment of students and difficulty in getting along with one another in
campus housing. "We've had to put them into separate apartments, and that
kind of thing is difficult to arrange," the dean says. Four of the
instructors speak very little Japanese, he adds, "even after 10 years."

The issue of the treatment of foreign faculty members recently became
quite public, and acrimonious, at Akita International University, in
northern Japan. Promoted as one of the new "internationalized" campuses,
the university had agreed to retain about a dozen foreign lecturers after
the local prefecture took over the campus from the Minnesota State
Colleges and Universities system in 2003.

The instructors, some of whom have been living in the area for a decade
and a half, say they were led to believe that their contracts would be
extended, but were stunned when told at a meeting last July that they
would not have jobs as of this March.

Instead, the university told them, their positions would be advertised
internationally, in an attempt to recruit the strongest candidates. Some
of the instructors were replaced by other foreign academics, but those who
were let go find it ironic that, after years of hearing complaints that
foreign instructors don't understand Japan and are too transient, a
university would dismiss academics with deep roots in the community. They
also note that the new president of the university, Mineo Nakajima, is on
the prime minister's education-reform council.

"The idea universities are internationalizing is ridiculous," says one of
the instructors, Mark Cunningham, who taught English. "They want the
distinguished-visitor model rather than someone who disrupts the status
quo. It is not a two-way exchange."

Akita administrators deny that nationality was a factor in the dismissals.
"We employ more foreigners than anywhere else in Japan, in exactly the
same position as Japanese," says a vice president, Gregory Clark, who is
Australian. "The teachers knew their contracts were likely to be
terminated. We rescued these people from unemployment for three years." He
adds, correctly, that limited contracts for all university professors
Japanese included  are a growing fact of life in most countries.

Recent government-led changes in Japan's higher-education system  the most
sweeping in more than 100 years  have many academics here wondering
whether the result will be the long-promised wave of foreign professors or
simply worse working conditions for everyone.

Three years ago, in an effort to force national universities to become
more independent and more creative, the government made them independent
agencies. As a result, university employees lost their civil-service
status, which had effectively given them tenure for life.

The overhaul, which followed changes in university employment rules in the
late 1990s, has also strengthened the power of university heads. The
Education Ministry apparently hopes that will energize the faculty, by
allowing administrators to bring in the best talent rather than leaving
hiring decisions in the hands of department heads, who have traditionally
preferred hiring their own graduate students.

But the abolition of job security could also pull up the drawbridge behind
the smaller number of tenured foreigners, while politicizing hiring and
discouraging faculty dissension among newer, younger arrivals.

After 100 years of controversy over the status of foreign academics, say
some observers, the ministry might at last produce a level playing field
by dragging everyone down to the same tenuous status.

http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 53, Issue 24, Page A47

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