In an age of intense global competition, creation of new knowledge, technology and innovation are the key to maintaining a prosperous nation. Additionally, with the aging of the population and decline in birth rate taking place in a lot of the advanced countries, it is becoming ever more necessary to produce quality domestic graduates as well as recruiting high quality human resources aggressively from abroad. Furthermore, rapidly changing and complex society makes for many problems previously not encountered such as global warming and resource shortage which must be solved rapidly.

In these points, universities become vastly more important as “origin of knowledge” and “base of knowledge”, with research universities taking on the responsible roles of attracting top-class personnel who produce advanced knowledge and diverse culture, contributing innovations and solutions.

We strongly argue that Japan must have pre-eminent research universities in the world to survive against international competition. Investing in top level research universities help promote the development of other universities through mobility of human resources and joint researches. It would boost the level of higher education in Japan and thus the national strength.

In recent years, other countries have focused their attention on the promotion of both universities as well as scientific and technological research. We face strong competition from research universities in other regions such as Europe, the United States, China, South Korea and Singapore in advanced research as well as the recruitment of researchers and students from overseas. Many researchers are overwhelmed by their outstanding rate of growth.

Based on an awareness of the situation just described, the RU11 was established in 2009.

Our two main missions are

• Discuss measures for enhancement in order to strengthen research universities.
• Improve cooperation between the research universities and pooling of information.