Comparative Study of the Discourse of University Rankings in Japan and Australia

This paper explores the discourse of neo-liberalism appearing on university websites, in order to understand how it impacts universities of various standings in Japan and Australia in terms of their positive image making and strategies in attracting future students. Following Fairclough's（1992, 2005）definition of discourse, a representation of an aspect of the world including physical, social and cognitive phenomena particularly in reference to the intensions behind such a representation, this pilot study investigates where and how 'university rankings' appear in the promotional text of chosen university websites. Specifically, the following four questions are explored from a comparative perspective between Japanese and Australian universities. 1）Where are the references to the world university rankings found in the chosen university websites, 2）How differently university rankings are referred to between a top university and a mid-range university 3）What discourse co-occurs in the text where the rankings appear, and 4）What do they imply? Four universities, J1（Kyoto University, one of Japanese's top universities）A1（University of Melbourne, one of Australia's top universities）, J2（Kochi University of Technology, a middle ranked Japanese university）, and A2（a middle ranked Australian University）are chosen and all their promotional texts where university rankings appear are collected and compared. It becomes clear that in both Australian universities, promotional texts containing university rankings are predominantly discourses of neo-liberalism, however, those of J1 in particular, illuminate incoherent discourses between neo-liberalism and moral conservatism. The paper discusses its implications.