Message from Deans
Faculty of Policy Management
Facing the real world beyond the field of academic disciplines
“Thinking about policy” — the Faculty of Policy Management is dedicated to education and research designed to facilitate thinking about policy since its establishment 30 years ago. The discipline of “thinking about policy” is to address challenges that exist in the real world require constant change as the order of society itself changes and values that were once seen as a matter of course are dynamically transforming. Existing solutions are not always compatible with many of the issues we now face in our society, which demand new ways of thinking.
Issues that exist in our society are transboundary in nature. Only through a scholarship that engages with interdisciplinary domains can we develop the ability to think about policy. In the past, academia primarily emphasized a deep inquiry into the subject. Of course, it is necessary to explore things deeply. However, this will not suffice even for the question of identifying a particular issue. The issue that we are focusing on now may not have been the real issue in the first place; to think about policy is to face the real world.
Show More
Faculty of Environment and Information Studies
Leading the way in uncertain times
More than 30 years have passed since the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies was founded in 1990. The Faculty has had the Internet as its infrastructure since its establishment, and this has been a driving force in the development and spread of Internet technology. But not even our forerunners could have imagined that, 30 years on, we would be living in an age where almost every person has a small computer (smartphone) to hand, and that information would instantly travel around the world via SNS.
COVID-19, which swept the world starting at the end of 2019, has drastically changed our everyday lives. The environment around us has undergone rapid changes in recent years, making predictions difficult and raising uncertainties for the future, thus bringing about a situation which has come to be referred to as VUCA (an acronym derived from the words volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity). We are currently living in the age of VUCA. While global environmental problems such as drastic global warming and a decrease in biodiversity cast a dark shadow over our future, emerging technologies may enable us to do things we had never even imagined.
Show More