While some elements of the future are unpredictable, others are predictable with a high level of precision. One example is demographics. Since 2010, the population of Japan has been constantly decreasing. The government statistics show that the population will dip below 100 million by 2050 and the ratio of elderly persons will approach 40%. The decrease in the working-age population will shrink the domestic market, squeeze tax revenues, and make economic growth difficult. The increase in social security costs from the growing number of older people, coupled with the inversion of the population pyramid from the declining birth rate, will adversely affect the sustainability of the social security system. This is unavoidable if we cannot dramatically increase the birthrate to reverse the natural decrease in population, bring in labor from abroad, or create innovation to solve these issues.

We need to sufficiently prepare for both the predictable and unpredictable. With regards to the unpredictable, we need to be ready to meet any exigency. To be prepared, diversity in research and education is essential. In particular, future generations will be living in a society that will be dependent on jobs, modes of communication and transportation and infrastructure that do not exist today. We need to seriously re-examine what we communicate to our young people. With regards to the predictable or unavoidable, we need to have a sense of crisis, recognize it for what it is, and expeditiously but not haphazardly consider and implement concrete preemptive measures.

We may do well to remember what Alan Kay—the celebrated American computer scientist known as the father of the personal computer—once said. When asked to predict the future of his research, he said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." This mindset that maintains "if we can proactively envision our ideal future and if we can create such a future, we can at least partially predict the future" is superb. Of course, this will not enable us to predict all future events or avoid inevitable future scenarios. But, Kay implies that we can endeavor to put up a challenge to unpredictable and predictable futures that may be intractable.

This brings us to the question of what is the "ideal future" that our university should seek. When we reflect upon our university's origins and history, I think we can envision our future as "a perfectly comprehensive university." Our university was established as a new concept university based on the principles of "transdisciplinarity" and "open to the global society." As for "transdisciplinarity," in my annual policy statement of 2016, I stated the following:

"The ultimate significance of "transdisciplinary research" that I presented here is the creation of new academic disciplines. This does not imply new disciplines strictly within one of the categories of basic, applied, or socially-contributive research. Many existing disciplines have been in fact formed from repeated series of fusion, integration, and disintegration of established academic/research fields. For example, physics was born out of the ancient discipline of philosophy that aimed to understand nature and was advanced by tackling the fields of astronomy and mechanics. In fact, in the 17th century, Newton tried to explain all systems in the universe by applying mathematical principles. Physics has come a long way since then while experiencing a number of paradigm shifts. At the center of this transition was the university. We are hoping to proactively redefine our university as the birthplace of new academic disciplines and fields."

As opposed to a college with a single faculty and graduate school, a university generally has faculties and graduate schools in a variety of disciplines to carry out a broad range of education and research activities. In that respect, our university covers a wide breadth in disciplines that is rarely matched, including the humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, engineering, agriculture, and medicine, as well as physical education, art, and library and information science. At many other universities, however, there is a high boundary between faculties or graduate schools, and the various disciplines are simply operating independently within a single university. In contrast, since our founding, our university has adopted a system not seen in other Japanese universities: we separated our education and research organizations which allows for the active promotion of multi-disciplinary and transdisciplinary education and research. Our aspirations for the future should be to become a "Perfectly Comprehensive University" the creates new academic disciplines through transdisciplinary collaboration.

Strengthening research capability for the future

Our university has a strong record in generating new academic disciplines, such as cybernics, kansei, behavioral and brain science, human biology, integrative sleep medicine, empowerment informatics and humanics. To make transdisciplinary collaboration even more fruitful, two conditions are necessary. The first is the long-term accumulation of a broad range of basic research that thoroughly explores all aspects of humanity, society, nature and the environment. There are no inessential disciplines when preparing for a VUCA future. Our university must maintain the diversity of our academic fields. In so doing, we will also be able to further our transborder strategy with our global university partners, research institutes in Tsukuba Science City and private companies. Our Campus-in-Campus and Campus-with-Campus initiatives are perfect mechanisms to enhance the diversity of our disciplines and to strengthen the quality of our research.

The second is excellence in transdisciplinary collaboration among individual researchers. This requires strengthening our university's research capability across generations. To facilitate this, we will improve and expand our International Tenure Track System and International Education and Research Laboratory Program, which have both produced outstanding research and contributed to international brain circulation. We will also continue our Research Circulation System, which categorizes research centers into four levels (R1 for world-class centers, R2 for leading national centers, R3 for centers for intensive development, and R4 for centers for development). All centers are assessed every five years for reorganization or disbandment, and are provided assistance based on their level. R1 research centers that have delivered particularly exceptional research results will be provided with support in such areas as recruitment of international scientists and internationalization of their administrative staff through our newly established Organization for Development of Global Research Centers.

In parallel with our efforts to enhance the diversity and excellence of our research, we hope to promote a university-wide incubator mechanism to create new research and scientific disciplines.

The Academic Preparative Center system, which we established to promote research incubation when our university was selected for the Program for Promoting the Enhancement of Research Universities, has helped pioneer new research fields. These include the Research Center for West Asian Civilization, which is Japan's foremost center on West Asia and has continuously been successful in obtaining Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas; the Microbiology Research Center for Sustainability, whose researcher represents the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas and which has been selected for JST's ERATO program; and the Tomonaga Center for the History of the Universe, which continues the research of Nobel laureate Dr. Shinichiro Tomonaga. We hope to use this system to enable transdisciplinary collaboration on an unprecedented level befitting a perfectly comprehensive university. For example, the integration of knowledge from computational sciences, advanced metrics, behavioral and brain science, medicine, and information engineering may foster a new field that will elucidate human sensibility and emotions. The amalgamation of the humanities, social sciences, human science, Internet of Human (IoH), sleep science, sports and art may inspire a new field that will explain the mechanism by which emotions translate into social actions. These new disciplines will certainly provide the impetus for developing novel solutions to the diverse and complex global issues we face today.

Education reform for the future

Our society is rapidly changing. In the U.S., there has been much discussion regarding the prediction that 65% of children who entered primary school in 2011 will, by the time they graduate from college, have jobs that do not exist today. Less than 10% of households owned a smartphone ten years ago. Moreover, iPhones and Android phones did not exist 13 years ago. Today, most people own a smartphone. By the time today's primary school students graduate from college, we can expect that the occupations and modes of communication that do not exist today will be mainstream. What is considered common sense or ethical may even change.

In an age when globalization and digital transformation are advancing at a rate that defies imagination, we must be able to discern which occupations truly require people to carry out and execute. In such a world, the current mainstream models of education that emphasize the simple conveying of knowledge from teacher to students are limited in terms of their ability to adequately nurture students. Active learning and problem/project-based learning (PBL) are gaining attention as complementary models of education. The common strand of both modes of learning is the paradigm shift from "teaching (by the teacher)" to "learning (by the student)." The current mainstream paradigm for teaching—which has been successful in traditional coursework—is characterized by the conveyance of knowledge by teachers through an aggregation of subjects. On the other hand, the paradigm for learning is old and well-established in Japanese graduate research. As faculty members are well aware, graduate students select a topic that has not yet been thoroughly investigated, collect the knowledge and information necessary to research the topic, set and test hypotheses in a repeated process until conclusions can be drawn, and finally publish or disseminate their findings in writing or through other media. During this process, a faculty supervisor will play the role of facilitator by giving advice during each step, with an understanding of each student's characteristics and academic strengths and by referring the student to appropriate sources of information (literature and researchers).

It is essential for institutions of higher education to undergo a paradigm shift from "teaching" to "learning" in order to prepare the next generation of leaders a for VUCA world. In doing so, the knowhow we have accumulated from Japanese-style graduate education can be maximized to fortify this paradigm of "learning." At present, Japanese undergraduate students cap their bachelor's study with their graduate thesis. By allowing them to experience proactive learning from their first year, however, they will become more proactive and self-motivated throughout their tenure at the university. Take in mind, for example, a student of nursing. The student can hold discussions with faculty members specializing in social science, policy studies, and psychology while gaining knowledge regarding nursing and nursing technology. The student could also undertake an internship in rehabilitation. This student would then have the option of becoming not only a nursing care practitioner, but also a policymaker, administrator of nursing policy (government or politics), or a developer of nursing technology. Or think of a student interested in the origins of elementary particles. The student can study the birth of space and matter with faculty members specializing in mathematics, physics and chemistry, hold discussions with experts, heighten their theoretical skills, and study advanced measurement techniques through internships at research facilities around the world. It is the holistic competency of faculty members that will steer this tutorial system beyond the limitations inherent in the currently established methods of teaching.

A similar paradigm shift is also needed in graduate education. To this end, we have high expectations for our Full Double Mentor and Reverse Mentor Systems, which we introduced into our Ph.D. Program in Humanics that was selected by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports and Science and Technology's (MEXT) Doctoral Program for World-leading Innovative & Smart Education Program (WISE). If these systems work well, they can be introduced in various other fields, creating opportunities for the self-motivated research activities of students that may lead to the establishment of new transdisciplinary fields. Reorganizing all graduate schools into one school will enable more flexible use of double and reverse mentor systems across all graduate programs, and also lay the groundwork for developing outstanding talents with both depth and breadth.

In a comprehensive dialogue with MEXT, the goal to maintain the current size of our undergraduate student body by increasing the ratio of our international students to 5% by AY2028, and then to 10% during the Fifth Mid-term Goals and Mid-term Plans period was acknowledged. As for our graduate school study body, international students already comprise over 20% of admission capacity. We plan to increase the combined ratio of our international and continuing education students to 25% by increasing their admission capacity, while taking into consideration the nature of each academic discipline. We also aim to increase admission capacity by pioneering new fields and reinforcing our research capabilities. This will require immediate deployment of the measures that I have mentioned in the past. That is, we need to reform our recruitment and selection practices to bring in excellent international students.

To this end, we will establish a unit for collaboration among our departments in charge of education, student affairs and international affairs. It is also imperative that we enhance our Japanese language and Japanese studies programs so that international students can take advantage of the full range of our courses and be better prepared for employment in Japan. For this, we must promote reform of our Center for Education of Global Communication (CEGLOC).

Future collaboration with society

Our university ranks number three in Japan, after the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University, with regards to the number of university spin-outs and ventures. We have taken advantage of the loosing of some regulations for national universities by buying stock options. We have already executive a part of our plans to create and manage a venture ecosystem. The cycle we envision for the venture ecosystem is as follows:

 (1) Entrepreneurship education for faculty members, undergraduate students, and graduate students;
→(2) Establishment of university spin-out, venture business;
→(3) Growth of the business through spin-out fundraising;
→(4) Profits from expansion of the business;
→(5) Return of funding to the university (donations, securities, joint research expenses).
The reinvesting of funds from (5) back into the cycle (1- 4) will accelerate the flow.

Participants in step (1) include not only our faculty members, undergraduate and graduate students, but also many scientists, researchers and engineers affiliated with other institutes in Tsukuba Science City. We will further expand this open entrepreneurship education program and provide support for step (2). In doing so, we should maximize being located in Tsukuba Science City. The city itself is already a platform for running proof-of-concept testing. With the support of Ibaraki Prefecture and Tsukuba City, we should transform Tsukuba Science City into a mecca of innovation that is open to the process of trial and error, and where we can move beyond proof-of-concept testing to engage in social deployment.

In terms of step (3), our university's spin-outs have raised roughly ¥5 billion in both FY 2018 and FY 2019. We hope to further increase the amount to accelerate the circular flow of the entire ecosystem. This will require raising funds overseas as well as in Japan. The value of venture capital investments in the U.S. amounts to more than ¥9 trillion, compared to less than ¥200 billion in Japan (1/50 of the U.S.). For this reason, we established offices at the Laboratory for Intellectual Innovation (LII) in Silicon Valley, where there are many clusters of startup support organizations, large companies, and venture capital (VC) firms, and at the Cambridge Innovation Center (Cambridge Mass. area). These offices work to build networks with local firms and funding organizations, and to explore the needs of overseas markets. Faculty members, undergraduate and graduate students who have received entrepreneurship education are dispatched to these offices, which assist them in the practical tasks of identifying the needs of overseas markets and obtaining investment from international and VC firms. We are also considering using our existing overseas education and research offices (12 offices). Furthermore, we will promote collaboration with innovative cities around the world and universities active in these cities—for example with the city of Grenoble and Université Grenoble Alpes, and the city of Bochum and Ruhr University Bochum. To support these efforts, we envision establishing a unit for collaboration among departments for research, industry-university partnerships, and international affairs.

To ensure more education and research flexibility, securing donations and other additional funds, as well as active management of these funds, is necessary. To achieve this, we must take the opportunity of the university's upcoming 50th/151st anniversary since its establishment and its original founding, respectively, to strengthen ties with our stakeholders in Japan and abroad. While steadily increasing seeds-driven industry-university research that is rooted in basic research, we must also develop needs-driven industry-university research that addresses the challenges facing businesses. We should also consider the question of how we can increase corporate investments in and donations for basic research. We will do well to reflect on the situation in the U.S., which has a long-established culture of donation. In the U.S., which has exceptional industry-university joint research, the focus of research is not only on Edison-type research (research with sole essential purpose of addressing a specific problem). Rather, Bohr-type research in pursuit of basic scientific principles, and Pasteur-type research in pursuit of basic scientific principles while addressing actual, specific problems are also considered equally important. Even under these circumstances, universities in the U.S. can attract large amounts of donations. The ranking of articles published by top schools in the U.S. or U.K. by citation and author type is first papers that are industry-university co-authored; second, international co-authored papers; third, domestically co-authored papers; fourth, papers co-authored within a university; and lastly single-authored papers. Our university, along with the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University, is one of few Japanese universities whose article's follow the same citation ranking order. Similar to patents, the high number of citations for industry-university co-authored papers can be considered an indicator that the research provided successful solutions to social needs. Measures to increase investments and donations from such a perspective is needed.

The University of Tsukuba Hospital, as the only advance treatment hospital in the prefecture, has the mission to practice advanced medicine and develop leading-edge medical technology, as well as to serve the regional community. Proton cancer therapy and other advanced medicine are state of the art treatment that meet societal needs while forming a solid foundation for hospital financial management. Such medical advances must be steadfastly promoted. The Tsukuba Clinical Research & Development Organization (T-CReDO) was established as an organization for translating the results of basic and applied research for clinical use. Young clinicians are indispensable for adding vigor to the hospital. The key to their training is to enhance their diagnostic and clinical capabilities as well as their research abilities.

Our university's laboratory schools are leading centers of advanced pedagogy research (for primary and secondary education), teacher education and international education in Japan. They are also primary centers for promoting inclusive education. In our comprehensive dialogue with MEXT, a directive was set to strengthen collaboration among our university's laboratory schools and their counterparts at nearby national universities and to enhance their overall functionality by addressing education and school administration as a collective whole. We must promote independent management reform and play a guiding role for other schools affiliated with national universities, while maintaining the distinctive features of each of our laboratory schools.

Management contributing to the future of the university

Compared with leading universities in Japan, the age structure of our scientists and researchers is top-heavy. To increase the diversity of our disciplines and promote excellence, we need to actively and systematically recruit young scientists who can excel globally. During the period of the Third Mid-term Goals and Mid-term Plan, we strategically allotted human resource points amounting to 200 assistant professorships to advance the recruitment of young faculty members, as well as women and international faculty members. This has enabled us to recruit the faculty members we need for our common foundation data science/information courses of which every student has to earn 4 credits (equivalent to 4 courses). These points were also used to establish our Center for Artificial Intelligence Research and to promote other new research fields, including next-generation smart city research. From the Fourth Mid-term Goals and Mid-term Plan period, we will introduce a strategic system of human resource point circulation. This will allow us to vigorously, and on a large scale, recruit young faculty members who can excel globally, further bolstering our university's strengths in a wide range of fields as we look to the future.

We need to review the current state of our diverse administrative staff if we are to support them in fulfilling their potential. Specifically, we need to enhance their functions and capabilities by securing and nurturing generalist staff members for university management, expert staff members, and specialist URAs and industry-university partnership coordinators in accordance with their respective potential.

Also, it will be essential to diversify our financial resources. We cannot expect an increase in management expense grants at a time when national social security costs are rising. Acquiring external funding will remain important. We will also need to consider ways in which to leverage existing assets, particularly land (including our Tokyo Campus). Tuition is another matter requiring consideration. The standard tuition at national university corporations is set by MEXT; current regulations stipulate that each national university can raise or lower this amount by 20% at most at its own discretion. We need to consider tuition carefully by considering costs and benefits from various angles, including the cost differential of educating adult students and international students if their numbers will increase with the decrease in the population of 18-year-olds; cost differential of each disciplinary field; financial support for outstanding students; and the expansion of our kaigai musha shugyo program which supports our students' independent international study and fieldwork.

We plan to establish the Office of University Management Promotion (provisional title) as an independent department reporting directly to the President. The mission of this office will be to realize sustainable, constructive university management to strengthen the foundation of the university using a PDCA cycle. The Office will create mid- to long-term, vision-oriented university management strategy (Plan), advise and instruct the various departments executing the concrete programs of the strategy (Do), review the progress of the plan (Check), and improve our university management strategy and plans (Act). Our expectations are for the office to become a collaboration of faculty members and administrative staff that will engage in marketing, customer relationship management, financial analysis, and dissemination of university information, as well as evidence-based decision-making and optimization of resource allocation through centralized management and information analysis.

Aspiring toward Our Desired Future

Our university will ceaselessly work toward our desired future. At the same time, we must respond to unpredictable events: for example, stopping the spread of COVID-19. Our university is forced to make difficult choices. I would like to thank all our faculty members and administrative staff for your understanding. At the same time, I sincerely ask for your continued cooperation.

This academic year, all graduate schools have been restructured into degree programs. By fully utilizing this system, we must further enhance our unique system of education that transcends the boundaries between academic disciplines, between internal university organizations, between institutions, between the university and society, and between national borders to nurture transborder talent. At the same time, the newly established Office of Management for Teaching and Learning and the Office of Design for Teaching and Learning will play a central role in assessing and enhancing the effectiveness of our switch to degree programs.

The spread of COVID-19 has forced us to make substantial changes, for instance, in the allocation of courses. We look forward to ideas from faculty members and administrative staff in overcoming the current difficulties, including the active use of our system for providing online classes.

Our application for becoming a Designated National University Corporation will be assessed from early to mid-summer. This is an initiative by MEXT to designate national universities that can compete globally outside the framework of the domestic environment of higher education. The goal is to raise the standard of research and education of Japanese national universities. Universities which receive this designation will be permitted to invest in businesses that use the results of their research. This will expedite our efforts to significantly diversify our financial resources.

It is important to think and act from a broad perspective to develop innovation. Much of the discussions at last year's Tsukuba Conference was centered on the idea that Society 5.0 will help realize the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, whose ultimate aim is world peace. At the same time, its aim is that "no one will be left behind" in achieving those goals. Society 5.0 is a vision for a digitally-transformed future society. In much of the world, innovation is often thought of as the creation of new technology. But, the word "innovation" essentially means to create new value from new ideas to bring about social change. We must also acknowledge that many persons who should benefit from innovations are excluded from receiving their benefits. Inclusion is to embrace all persons. This concept gained attention in the U.S. in the field of special-needs education. In Japan, it is also used in the instance of including special-needs children in regular classes.

The etymology of "inclusion" originates in France where the social and economic gaps of the unemployed, disabled and other persons outside the traditional range was called "social exclusion." Inclusion is not easy to achieve. For example, even if a new device is created through innovation in science and technology, it would be useless if there is no power to run it or if the user cannot use it. The concept of inclusion, which originated in the field of education, is now used in organizational and social contexts. While the word "diversity" is used in the sense of talent variety, "inclusion" goes beyond that to recognize individual mindsets, experiences and capacities and to make the best use of these. Inclusion further leads to wide-ranging innovation (inclusive innovation). Inclusive innovation is achieved not only by the societal adoption of inclusive attitudes, but also by the mutual interaction and blending of different types of science and technology. To this end, it is necessary not only to promote innovation in science and technology, but also to fully consider organizational, economic and financial market systems.

To further leverage national university corporations and promote the social benefits of their education and research outcomes—in other words, to promote university innovation—we may need to have similar kinds of consideration, discussions, and transformation. We must strive unceasingly to build the future we desire.

The concepts underlying our application to become a Designated National University Corporation are—regardless of the results of the application—essential for realizing the future our university, and should be shared with all faculty members and administrative staff as we move forward together.