■ Enhancing the research and education environment, promoting everything from the latest learning to "relearning"

As the wave of a rapid decline in the birthrate sweeps across society, universities are also being called upon to make further reforms. In this situation, I believe that my mission as President is to create a system that will enable our university to continue to be a sustainable and attractive university in the future. To achieve this, we need to take an approach that looks ahead 10 or 20 years into the future. Until now, our university's brand image as "urban and stylish" has been our external strength. This means "cheerful and free," and was valuable in terms of clarifying the differences with other universities in the fierce competitive society of the high economic growth period. However, I think that the way young people perceive it today is different from the past, with a particular focus on "light" and "fun." In particular, as the population of university entrance exam generation continues to decline, in order to maintain the university's original values of research, education, and social contribution and continue to be a "university of choice," it is important to build a new Aoyama Aogaku brand that places more emphasis on "seriously learning" than ever before, in addition to "urban and stylish" in the sense of "cheerful and free" that emphasizes diversity. I would like to talk about my current thoughts on research and education efforts to achieve this.

In such an interactive learning environment, the support of high-quality TAs will have a greater educational effect. Furthermore, this will give the faculty in charge of the classes more time to focus on providing higher quality education. TAs are also familiar role models for students. By communicating with TAs through daily classes, students can more easily imagine their future, which is a great help in leading a positive university life. As such, although this is not particularly new, I think it is clear that revitalizing graduate schools is a very meaningful initiative aimed at enriching not only research but also education.

We plan to consider various measures to improve the graduate school, such as improving facilities and equipment and supporting faculty and students. For example, Graduate School of Science and Engineering has already introduced a scholarship system (Graduate School of Science and Engineering Special Grant Scholarship) that provides full or half tuition fees to top-achieving students who advance to graduate school on campus, and this has resulted in an increase in the number of students entering graduate school. In the Faculty of Science College of Science and Engineering, the rate of students advancing to graduate school on campus will be approximately 44% in 2022, and excellent TAs are being produced, creating a virtuous cycle. In order to spread this throughout the university, we believe it is necessary to consider what kind of support system would be effective in fields other than science and engineering, taking into account the characteristics and background of each field.

As a future development, we are considering establishing a small but unique science faculty on Aoyama campus that will be the base for data science education. To achieve this, we need to reach a thorough consensus with the relevant faculties, but we plan to create a data science base with science elements on Aoyama campus, where College of Science and Engineering and School of Social Informatics, and by working together, we hope to develop the two campuses, Aoyama Campus and Sagamihara Campus, while creating a synergistic effect. We also hope that a certain stoic attitude toward research and education, which is representative of the science field, will have a positive impact on the university as "sincere learning". As a result, our university has tended to be dominated by the brand image of humanities and social sciences, but in the future, we hope to increase awareness of the development of diverse science fields, which will lead to the acquisition of a new applicant base.

■ A university-wide system to support students

In order to advance research and education reforms, it is also important to consider how to create an internal system to realize them. Starting in 2022, our university will formulate and publish a sustainability report (medium- to long-term plan), and will establish a system that allows each faculty and graduate school to refer to each other's mid- to long-term plans. As a result, it has become possible to share new discoveries and issues about what concerns and issues each faculty has. Furthermore, it has become possible to refer to the efforts of other faculties to advance reforms in one's own faculty, to cooperate with other faculties, and to absorb the issues of each faculty and make them a university-wide effort. For example, with regard to international programs such as "dual degrees" and "overseas internships" that are independently promoted by faculties, it seems that it will be possible to separate the scope of issues that can be promoted by the faculty alone from those that must be addressed by the entire university. In addition, it will be possible to share the concerns of multiple faculties in the humanities and social sciences about how to incorporate learning in the science field. Now that these issues that need to be addressed have been made visible, we will work to further revitalize the university by promoting open communication within the university in various operational decision-making processes. We believe that accumulating such steady processes is essential to building the foundation for the new Aogaku brand.

The "social collaboration" initiative being promoted by our university is also based on the spirit of "salt of the earth, light of the world." In order to promote social collaboration, our university established a new Social Collaboration Promotion Organization and Social Cooperation Division in 2022. A wide range of fields that go beyond research and education, such as the development of service learning as a regular subject (The Aoyama Standard Subject), volunteer activity support, collaboration with local governments, and industry-government-academia collaboration, can be said to be practices within the framework of "social collaboration." In addition, the "relearning" initiative introduced earlier, and the activities of each athletic club can also be said to be activities that connect with society broadly. For example, the question is raised as to why universities must work on promoting sports. At our university, we hope that many students will acquire advanced skills that will be difficult to replace with AI in the future through their athletic activities and improving their athletic performance, and that they will position it as a second major for their studies in their respective faculties and work toward achieving both academic and athletic excellence. These are also applicable to various research fields and are valuable and effective seeds for social collaboration. For example, in recent years, we have launched the Aoyama Gakuin University Sports and Health Innovation Consortium, and have begun initiatives such as training sports instructors and building communities through sports as part of the CAS (Community Activator with Sports) Project. In this way, we hope to make the Aoyama and Sagamihara campuses active in opening their doors to society as a starting point for research and education, and also as a starting point for building communities. Through such social collaboration, letting local people know about our university's education, research, and other initiatives will lead to the revitalization of the university and will also be an irreplaceable form of true public relations.