Photo/Illutration The Red Gate of the University of Tokyo in the capital’s Bunkyo Ward (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

The University of Tokyo will establish its first new faculty in nearly 70 years to significantly increase foreign student enrollment.

In its April 4 announcement, the prestigious institution commonly known as Todai said the College of Design will be headed by Miles Pennington, a professor of emerging design and informatics at the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies.

A British national, Pennington will become the first non-Japanese to head a Todai faculty.

The faculty will open in September 2027 to match the start of school years at most Western universities. The other Todai faculties begin their year in April.

Students will be able to obtain their master’s degree in the combined five-year program.

Unlike the current written entrance exams, students will be selected on the basis of written documents and interviews.

Successful entrants will be informed in March, giving Japanese students the next six months to improve their foreign language skills.

Todai will announce a more detailed outline of the new faculty in July.

Each class will have up to 100 students, with half coming from overseas. All first-year students will live in a dorm in Tokyo.

There will be no division between liberal arts and the natural sciences and students will be able to choose their own research theme, with possibilities ranging from climate change, energy and the food crisis.

The staff of the new faculty will be selected from both within Japan and overseas.

The last time Todai established a new faculty was in 1958 when the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences opened.

At an April 4 news conference, university President Teruo Fujii explained that students in their fourth year will be permitted to experience learning away from the campus through corporate internship, study abroad, volunteer work or entrepreneurship.

Fujii said the aim of that fourth-year experience would be to go beyond traditional academic boundaries to allow the students to think and put ideas into action, for example, as a citizen, user and direct involvement in the issue at hand.

Non-Japanese currently make up only about 3 percent of Todai’s student body. The institution has set goals for ratios of foreign students of at least 30 percent for undergraduate faculties and at least 40 percent for graduate schools by 2049. It has also set a goal of foreign nationals filling at least 30 percent of research posts.

“We want to create an international learning environment in Tokyo to produce game changers for the next generation,” Fujii said. 

(This article was written by Shinya Maeda and Fumio Masutani.)

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