At the University of Tokyo, we consider a general liberal arts education to be of great importance in building the foundation of all learning. All new students to the university therefore spend their first two years at the Junior Division of the College of Arts and Sciences. While other universities in Japan began to gradually eliminate their liberal arts programs in the 1990s, we at the College of Arts and Sciences instead chose to make major changes to our curriculum to develop an innovative liberal arts education. In our rapidly changing society, there is growing demand for the intellectual foundation that a general liberal arts education provides and, correspondingly, a growing recognition of the importance of the liberal arts education we provide at Komaba. In order to further advance our liberal arts education, in April 2011 we reorganized our Liberal Arts Education Development Institute and established the Komaba Organization for Educational Excellence.Our Senior Division, committed to the principles of interdisciplinarity and internationalism, is engaged in innovative and boundary-crossing teaching and research with the goal of educating versatile leaders, who can respond to the demands of the contemporary world and make valuable contributions in diverse fields. In 2011, in order to build on such principles and to respond to the rapidly diversifying society and academic fields, we made great changes to our Senior Division, establishing the new Department of Interdisciplinary Sciences and reorganizing the arts and science departments to develop a three-department system.Also at the Komaba campus, our Graduate School of Arts and Sciences builds on the specializations offered in our Senior Division, pioneering new research fields and carrying out innovative research and teaching activities. We aim not only to train highly specialized researchers, but also to develop diverse and creative thinkers who can work on the cutting edges of cross-disciplinary knowledge and discover new problems and new solutions.In this way, our Junior Division, Senior Division, and Graduate School form a continuous pathway of learning that is without parallel elsewhere. Through our education and research activities, we continue to pursue our goal of becoming an open and socially-attuned "Center of Excellence." For further information about the University of Tokyo as a whole, please visit the "Overview of the University of Tokyo" page.
