A ceremony for the signing of an agreement of cooperation between University College Utrecht (UCU) and Okayama University was held on December 5 in the Dean’s Office at UCU in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. This marks the first cooperative agreement between our university and a university in the Netherlands.

Prof. Dr. James Kennedy, Dean of UCU, participated in the signing ceremony along with Director of Education drs. Fried Keesen and other UCU staff. From Okayama University, Vice-President Masaru Araki (Executive Director of Social Responsibility and International Affairs) attended with Ir. Atsufumi Yokoi (Special Advisor to the President /Senior University Global Administrator (UGA) in charge of international and strategy Affairs); and from the “SixERS” Consortium of Six National Universities in Japan, Senior Coordinator Masahiro Kijima and others attended.

UCU was founded in 1997 as the European continent’s first liberal arts boarding system college. It is affiliated with Utrecht University, a globally top-level research university that was founded in 1636. It is a highly cosmopolitan liberal arts college, with all courses in the three fields of social sciences, the humanities and natural sciences conducted in English, and about 40 percent of the enrollees being exchange students from outside the Netherlands.

The “SixERS” Consortium of Six National Universities in Japan (Chiba University, Niigata University, Kanazawa University, Okayama University, Nagasaki University and Kumamoto University) first made the Netherlands one of its strategic regions for international cooperation, as it was the birthplace of “Dutch Studies,” i.e., Western learning, which was the foundational field of these six national universities. Using the framework of cooperation among the six national universities makes it possible to cover a broad range of academic fields, and they can promote education and research exchanges on an equal footing with top level universities worldwide.

Last year, the consortium concluded Japan’s first memorandum of understanding (MoU, a comprehensive agreement), with EP-Nuffic, an organization in the Netherlands for international cooperation in higher education. It also established a “SixERS” European office in SieboldHuis, a Japan museum in Leiden, the Netherlands. Moreover, by entering an interdepartmental agreement with the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University, Okayama University is proceeding energetically to strengthen its links with the globally top-level universities in that country, which is developing preeminent education and research.


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