Why are one-third of faculty members non-Japanese?

Fostering internationally minded citizens requires an environment in which people of diverse nationalities and cultural backgrounds can interact and learn together with a view to cultivating flexible value outlooks. Moreover, world-class education can only be achieved where faculty　members are gathered from all over the world.

It is for this reason that ICU seeks to have a diverse cross-section of nationalities and cultures in its faculty body. A global open application process has been used to recruit full-time faculty members ever since the university was founded, and today one-third of the university's full-time faculty members have nationalities other than Japanese. This proportion of foreign faculty members is high even by international standards.

Moreover, as many as 90 percent of ICU's Japanese faculty members have education and research experience outside Japan. Around 60 percent of the faculty earned their doctoral degrees at foreign universities.

This diversity generates many crossovers between individual and scholarly "nationalities," such as a Bulgarian faculty working on the Tale of Genji, a Hungarian faculty teaching Japanese history, and a Japanese faculty teaching American literature in English. Such an environment promises many encounters with new and unfamiliar ideas and values.