From the Window of the Dean's Office | Naoyuki Agawa (Dean of the Faculty of Policy Management)
2007.11.29
"Where is the Dean's Office?" students sometimes ask me. It's true there are no signs to guide you, and even if you reach the entrance, a notice reads, "Authorized Personnel Only Beyond This Point," which probably makes it feel unwelcoming. While it would be a problem if people were coming and going all the time without a reason, I wouldn't mind if you stopped by more casually. After all, the dean is sitting here all by himself.
Even in such a lonely dean's office, there is a window. When I'm tired from work, I stand up and look outside. On a crisp autumn morning, with the vibrant fall foliage as a backdrop, a Twin Liner bus slowly rounds the curve up Tallow Slope. At the bus stop, students get off one after another and cross the road. They climb the stairs, pass in front of the main building, and disperse to various parts of the campus. Around noon, they stop in front of the Media Center, chatting cheerfully. In the evening, the flow of people reverses as students head home. As dusk falls and the campus buildings transform into a castle of light, the figures gradually dwindle, and silence envelops the area. I can observe all these scenes in detail.
You students below probably have no idea that I am watching you. That's why you show me unexpected expressions you wouldn't normally reveal. Someone walking alone, grinning for some reason. Someone whose back looks a little lonely. Someone who climbs the stairs next to the Ω (Omega) Building: Main Lecture Hall 1, sits down on the landing, and remains perfectly still. What could they be thinking? Have they found their own special place in a corner of SFC? Or are they simply taking a nap?
We see the world through various windows. Some windows open up to a vast view, while others show only a small corner of a narrow street. The mathematician Masahiko Fujiwara, during his first winter studying abroad in Michigan, fell into a state of depression and spent his days counting the Volkswagens and Cadillacs entering and exiting the rooftop parking lot visible from his room's window. He writes about this in his book, "Wakaki Sūgakusha no Amerika" (The Young Mathematician's America). Many of the masterpieces of painting, from all ages, are also depictions of the world that the artist discovered through their own window. Behind the Mona Lisa painted by da Vinci, an Italian countryside landscape is frozen in time within the frame, stretching endlessly into the depths of the painting. Vermeer's paintings often feature a window in the upper left corner, from which light streams in. Within the window of the painting, there is another window, and beyond it, on a certain day at a certain time nearly four hundred years ago, a vast sky stretched out.
When you think about it, a university is a place that offers various windows to those who study and conduct research there. A window can sometimes limit one's field of vision and impose a certain perspective, but at the same time, it holds a boundlessly vast world beyond it. And it waits for someone to discover a new world on the other side of that window. To the students and researchers of SFC: what kind of windows will you find on this campus? For the young people who gather here, I hope that SFC itself will be a common window that greatly broadens your horizons—making you all "dōsō" (fellow alumni, or literally "same window"). That is my hope.
(Date Published: 2007/11/29)