The Future in 30 Years and What to Learn | Tomoki Kamo, Dean of the Faculty of Policy Management
June 10, 2025
"What will you learn at SFC now, thinking about the future 30 years from now?" This is the final assignment for the course Policy Management.
Policy Management is a required course for the faculty, co-taught by the dean and several faculty colleagues. For the past four years, I have had the opportunity to teach this course. The Faculty of Environment and Information Studies has a similar course called Environmental Information Studies.
One of the objectives I have envisioned for this course is for students to grasp the breadth of SFC's academic fields, including Policy Management, and to become aware of academic disciplines that lie outside their own interests. To this end, this course has asked colleagues who served as editorial supervisors for each volume of the book series "Opening Up Policy Management" and those who contributed essays to convey the excitement of SFC to the students by introducing the volumes and explaining the essays they wrote.
Another objective is for students to experience SFC's academic diversity firsthand by deepening their interactions with classmates from different fields of interest. Therefore, this course has strived to provide students who have clear research interests before even enrolling an opportunity to question whether their research is truly important, while for students who wish to take their time to carefully explore their research interests, it offers a chance to find peers to explore with.
The "policy" in Policy Management is a broad concept that encompasses not only government choices but also the management of corporations and NGOs and individual beliefs. The human choices that create and drive these "policies" are "comprehensive." Thus, Policy Management has placed human choice at the core of its education and research. This is why the academic fields offered by SFC and Policy Management are so diverse. The Policy Management course has sought to show that for students to better enjoy their lives at such an SFC, the idea of "multiplying" multiple research fields is essential.
To date, the Policy Management course has required students to present their thoughts on "What will you learn at SFC now, thinking about the future 30 years from now?" on the final day. Students divide into groups of six or seven, spend several weeks considering the assignment, and prepare a response as a group. Then, on the final day of the course, a few selected teams give their presentations. Students are able to learn what their classmates are thinking.
A period of "30 years" must be difficult for students to imagine. It was for me, too. But I still want them to think about it. The "30 years" that I know, at least, was a time when the perception of order was turned 180 degrees. Over the course of 30 years, the international community's perception of democracy and authoritarianism, as well as the outlook for the future international order, has changed dramatically. It was a shift from optimism about the "rise of democracy and retreat of authoritarianism" to caution about the "rise of authoritarianism and retreat of democracy." Considering the current international situation and the evolution of technology, the direction of change is even more uncertain. The future does not seem to lie on a simple extension of the present. That is precisely why I believe we must prepare for this "30-year" period.
The other day, the Policy Management course held its final lecture, and the students reported on "What will you learn at SFC now, thinking about the future 30 years from now?" (Policy Management is a course offered in the first half of the spring semester). I will not introduce the specific content of the reports here, but the students' creativity is diverse and tough. Their sensitivity to generative AI is extremely high. Taking it as a given, they are thinking about how to discover their own (human) value. Their approach is that if they cannot predict the future, they will present the world they want to create and think about what to learn from there. From now on, SFC faculty will be driven by such students and will be required to imagine new ideals for a new era that surpass those of SFC's founding.