In Lithuania, too, it is high time to introduce Western scientists to the work of financial decision-making and the activities of the most important research centers.
"A research position at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, Illinois, a visiting professorship at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a full professorship at Stony Brook University in New York showed Arima “the zeal for education at American universities … as well as the rigorous evaluation system”. He felt that facilities for physics in Japan were poor by comparison, and that the level of government funding bore little relation to the quality of the work produced.
In 1991, As president of the University of Tokyo, he confronted the minister of education and other politicians about the conditions in his public university, in breach of Japanese conventions of deference. In a further radical act, he invited a panel of overseas scientists to review the buildings and resources of the physics department, which highlighted their deficiencies (see Nature 362, 387; 1993). By the end of his four-year term, he had won funding for new buildings and equipment. Reviews by international scientists soon became standard in Japan.
But his greatest achievements were in university reform, including the strengthening of graduate programmes and corporate sponsorship of research.
Having met resistance from faculty and government officials to the internationalization of Japan’s institutions, he collaborated with politician Omi Kōji from 2001 to set up the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) to create a truly international university in a green field site. The president of the OIST Promotion Corporation that led to the establishment of OIST in 2011 was the Nobel prizewinner and molecular biologist Sydney Brenner. Now helming OIST is Peter Gruss, former president of Germany’s Max Planck Society. More than half of the faculty and students who pursue interdisciplinary PhD programmes at OIST are international, and the language of instruction is English. Arima also promoted scientific cooperation between Japan and China; he held honorary posts at several Chinese universities." [1]
1. Nature 589, 513 (2021)
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