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What can we learn from the Japanese?

For the first time in history an agreement of cooperation between Gdansk University of Technology (GUT) and a Japanese university was signed by the rectors of both institutions on Monday, 22nd September. The plans are extensive: joint scientific research projects, the exchange of information regarding organisation and education as well as mutual access to research publications and teaching programmes. The rectors intend to also exchange scientists, academic teachers and students.

With approximately only a thousand students, Gdansk?s new academic partner, the University of Aizu, is not large, but its specialist area of research is very similar to that of the Polish University of Technology. 'Today we signed an agreement, tomorrow we start work on the project', declared Shigeaki Tsunoyama, the Rector of Aizu University, during the official ceremony in the Gdansk school's Senate Hall. Two hours later he was already on his way back to Japan to attend to other important business concerning his university.

The rectors of the Gdansk and Aizu universities have promised that soon teams will be formed to coordinate work on a detailed action plan for the next few years. On the side of the Gdansk University of Technology this task has been undertaken by the Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics (ETI).

'If we wish the Gdansk University of Technology to become more international, we need to increase the number of undergraduate courses conducted in English,' explains Dr Krzysztof Goczyła, the dean of the ETI faculty who will oversee this school's cooperation with Japan. 'I believe that this will add impetus to the exchange of academic staff, and also of students. Active cooperation with various foreign academic institutions is a strategic objective of my recently started term in office.'

The Rector of Gdansk University of Technology would very much like Polish-Japanese student exchange scholarships to be financed on the basis of international government agreements. 'In Europe this has been practiced for many years, for instance in the form of the Socrates Programme, now we have an opportunity to transfer this model to Asia,' says Prof. Henryk Krawczyk, Rector of Gdansk University of Technology.

Up to now Gdansk University of Technology has not had the chance to collaborate with Japanese universities, but this does not mean that it has had no experience concerning education and learning in the Far East. Dr Krzysztof Wilde, a former dean of the GUT Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering who spent over six years at Tokyo University, willingly extols the outstanding university planning abilities of the Japanese. He had travelled there to prepare a doctorate thesis and then spent another three and a half years as an academic teacher.

'They are amazingly well disciplined with regard to the purpose and method of work,' says Dr Wilde. 'At the university everyone knows what they have to do; a postgraduate student receives a very detailed and precise research programme; three years of studies can be planned in advanced, quite literally down to the day or even hour. Someone arriving at Tokyo University has basically a hundred percent guaranteed chance of success, provided of course that person sticks to the rules.'

Dr Wilde also praises the Japanese system of awarding scholarships. The money a Japanese postgraduate student can receive is – modestly but nevertheless – sufficient to maintain a family of three. Moreover, he insists that the Japanese language is not at all that difficult for a Pole to learn. 'In a relatively short space of time one can learn enough conversational Japanese to get by in the Land of the Rising Sun.'

The technical universities of Gdansk and Aizo have signed the agreement for a period of five years with the possibility of it later being extended.