The context of this paper is the identification of the UK higher education system as the front-runner in terms of both institutional management and quality assurance. Within this context, the paper aims to analyse and examine the policies and the realities of ‘academic management’ and ‘internal quality assurance’, key concepts in pedagogical reform, in respect of UK universities, while searching for implications for the Japanese system.

　 Japanese policy discourse about higher education pedagogy is rooted in a naive belief in the effectiveness of academic management under institutional top management and governance as the mechanism for internally assuring the quality of teaching and learning. However, the results of an analysis and examination of internal quality assurance systems, including academic management procedures, in UK universities, suggest that strengthening the institutional management function is a necessary, but not a sufficient, precondition for substantiating academic quality assurance. This critical analysis of the reality of institutional engagement in quality assurance in UK higher education presents the view that the reality does not go beyond pro forma compliance with externally set guidelines and falls short of impacting teaching and learning processes, bearing ample testimony to the tricky complexities and difficulties involved in guaranteeing quality assurance in respect of university teaching.

　 Compliance with the Japanese national policy of credit hours has become an urgent issue in respect of both the external governance of the higher education system and the internal management of higher education institutions. The same is true for higher education in the United States. Witnessing the steady emergence of online courses and the inconvenient facts about the study time found through student surveys, the need to make an accurate assessment of the amount of time required of students to enable higher education institutions to confer credit hours has been an important issue since the turn of the century.

　 Focusing on the Federal Rule on higher education program integrity issued in 2010, this paper aims to explain how the regulative power of external regulators, such as Federal government or accreditors, is implemented in respect of higher education institutions. For this discussion, the paper tries to identify the significance of the fact that the functions of accrediting bodies have been embraced into the regulative mechanism performed by the Federal government.

　 The issue of strengthening the president’s leadership and centralizing the authority for the governance of higher education institution by putting it in the president’s hands has provoked a great deal of controversy in Japan during the last half century. Recently, the Central Council for Education proposed a draft of a recommendation which would give more authority to presidents in respect of academic matters including the right to approve or veto faculty appointments. In general in advanced countries, university governance is shared between the academic staff, administrators and governing bodies. In particular, the term can be defined as faculty involvement in academic affairs, educational personnel decisions, and the determination of educational policies. To presume that the Council and MEXT would like to change this governance structure is doubtful because there is insufficient evidence to show that centralized authority is effective in managing teaching and learning in higher education.

　 The objectives of this paper are: 1) to clarify the historical context within which strengthening the president’s leadership has long been insisted on as the best way to promote university management; 2) to review the issue of what level and what kind of authority in respect of university management should be centralized under the control of presidents, on the basis of the management theory developed by C. Barnard and H. Simon; 3) to consider the current situation of faculty involvement in university management; and 4) to clarify the problems that need to be solved in order to improve university management.

　 As an important constituent factor in the management of teaching and learning required to carry out educational reforms, the concept of “institutional consensus” in universities has become an increasing focus of attention in recent years. However the concept of “consensus” has rarely been examined on the basis of empirical data.

　 In this paper, “consensus” is operationally defined, using the data from a national survey administered to presidents and deans of Japanese universities, as the extent to which the difference inherent in the concepts of “horizontal variance” and “vertical gap” can be reconciled. “Horizontal variance” represents the standard deviation calculated on the basis of the responses made by university deans, while “vertical gap” is the absolute value of the difference between the responses of presidents and an average of the responses of deans.

　 Multiple linear regression analysis reveals the following points: 1) Institutional consensus varies according to the sector and the size of the institution; 2) institutional consensus has only minimal influence on the president’s level of satisfaction with the institution’s undergraduate education, but emphasis placed by deans on academic management is reflected in a rise in the level of satisfaction; and 3) institutional consensus is not related to what reforms the institution actually carries out.

　 Today, American higher education is paying additional attention to student learning outcomes and graduation rates as measures of student success. This paper discusses the two cases of the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMA) and California State University Long Beach (CSULB), focusing on their evidence-based educational improvement objectives to be achieved by means of strategic-planning-based reviews of degree granting programs and/or academic support programs.

　 Initially, this study explores the procedures of the Academic Quality Assessment and Development (AQAD) program review at UMA. The Office of Institutional Research (IR) contributes to the AQAD review process by providing agreed information to departments. Focusing on the AQAD review process as an example of inquiry-led practice, this study analyzes how effectively each department prepares a self-study report based on topics and questions aimed at guiding faculty members to an understanding of what self-study could ideally achieve.

　 As a diverse, large public university, CSULB is also committed to supporting the success of their students all the way to timely graduation. Advising is one of its essential support services. Thus, CSULB needs to carry out both a degree-granting program review and an academic support program review, both conducted by the Program Assessment and Review Council.

　 Based on the experiences of UMA and CSULB, the author discusses three implications for constructing a framework to support program review and IR functions at universities in Japan. Firstly, a comprehensive approach in terms of introducing “program review” including a degree-granting program and academic support program is needed at any university with a diverse student body as a mechanism supporting educational reform efforts aimed at the realization of student success. Secondly, placing a priority on program review in a manner consistent with the university’s mission or its strategic plan and conducting inquiry-led self-study in line with those prioritized topics are effective measures. Finally, the IR makes an active contribution by providing data or information and developing in-house student surveys for a department or program in the context of responding to those inquiries of their self-study.

　 The role of administrative staff in universities is currently an important issue in higher education policies, one aim of which is to promote educational management in universities. With a view to clarifying a range of issues by utilizing the practical knowledge possessed by administrative staff with deep and long experience in academic administration, this paper examines findings presented in the Handbook for Academic Administration published in 2012. The findings can be summarized as follows:

　 First, although among experienced administrative staff, there is general agreement about the broad level of discretion in academic administration, individually differing views of the profession of academic administration can be discerned. Second, among experienced administrative staff, the factors to be prioritized when making discretionary judgments and taking action can be divided into the following categories: law and rules, limiting conditions, student development, common sense, historical background, cases of different institutions, and educational management. Third, only a few experienced administrative staff think that they should participate in educational management, while most such staff emphasize other areas of academic administration. Participation in educational management would mean that most administrative staff in academic administration would be faced with new tasks.

　 The quality of college education has become a major political issue and considerable interest has been aroused in learning outcomes and university governance. One indispensable prerequisite to addressing this issue from a practical point of view is an empirical analysis of the teaching behavior of faculty and their beliefs or views concerning teaching and learning. This paper sets out to examine the relationship between two sets of beliefs: 1) that concerned with the concepts of teaching and learning, “the range of students as teaching targets” and 2) “adjustment of class teaching behavior” and its relationship to the pattern of daily living.

　 These two sets of beliefs are independent of each other and are liable to change in the event that the person holding the beliefs acquires experience of a managerial position such as being appointed to the position of dean or director. But it is only the belief concerned with the “adjustment of class teaching” that regulates the direction to be followed by the improvement of college education such as an emphasis on systematic teaching practice. The paper also confirms that the belief concerned with the “range of students as teaching targets” is related to class hours and class preparation time, and that the belief concerned with the “adjustment of class teaching” affects the pattern of informal exchanges among faculty members.

　 For improvement of college education to be realized, a transformation of beliefs concerned with teaching and learning is required. The transformation of the belief concerned with the “range of students as teaching targets” is rather easily accomplished because it only requires individual adjustment. But the transformation of the belief concerned with the “adjustment of class teaching” is difficult because it requires mutual adjustments among faculty members who have different sets of beliefs concerned with teaching and research. Furthermore, the structural relationship among beliefs, behaviors and outcomes is complicated and there is no clear evidence linking beliefs or behaviors to class evaluation. There is room for further research in the form of outcome-oriented experimental study in this field.

　 The purpose of this paper is to clarify the reason why it was necessary to establish women’s colleges in China, a country that proudly proclaims its commitment to socialism. By focusing on the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF) and the process by which it established the Administrators’ College of the All-China Women’s Federation, an adult education college (now a regular higher education institution known as China Women’s University) various aspects of the relationship between the national ideology and the establishment of higher education institutions will be clarified and examined. When the open-door reform policy started, the Chinese Communist Party announced a policy of imposing educational requirements on the membership of cadres and of regularizing cadre training. The imposition of educational requirements put women at a disadvantage to men in cadre selection due to their lower educational level in comparison with men. However, the ACWF used the policy of regularizing cadre training as an aid for establishing higher educational institutions for women in order to retrain cadres, cultivate women cadres with expertise in the fields in which ACWF was active and increase job opportunities for women. Just as in capitalist countries, women’s colleges were established in China in an effort to remedy women’s restricted access to higher education. The case of China shows that even in a country dominated by a strong ideology such as Marxism, which emphasizes gender equality, it is not possible to rectify the gap in work opportunities for men and for women without rectifying the educational gap.

　 The purpose of this study is to clarify the way in which policy on research institutes in Japanese universities has developed, and to analyze how the transformation of national universities into national university corporations has impacted on such institutes.

　 Although, at the time when national universities were incorporated, discussions within the Council for Science and Technology had anticipated that ministerial ordinances regulating research institutes would be issued, the legislative processes did not progress as expected, and as a result, the character of research institutes as internal organizations of universities has been strengthened. In actual fact, the reorganization of research institutes has taken place only at individual university level.

　 This paper suggests that a polarization phenomenon, in the form of increases and decreases both in institutional size and budgetary provision, is occurring among research institutes. The acquisition percentage of competitive external research funding is relatively high, and research institutes are becoming exposed to the system of evaluation and corresponding compensation. In the light of anticipated future resource reductions, it is a reasonable presumption that research institutes will require new support structures to be introduced.

　 Professor Kazuyuki Kitamura passed away on December 25, 2013. As one of the major pioneers of higher education studies in Japan, he bequeathed to posterity about fifty books and four hundred articles. Focusing especially on Prof. Kitamura’s passionate commitment to the goals of university education, this paper commemorates his legacy by examining the path of his academic explorations, the major academic achievements represented by his works, and the personal characteristics that formed the foundation of his thinking. In this way, the paper shows various facets of the late professor’s research as a source of inspiration for future generations of students.