Foreign Professor to Head UTokyo’s New Faculty; Set to Open in 2027

The Yomiuri Shimbun

1:00 JST, April 6, 2025

The University of Tokyo appointed one of its foreign professors as head of the new five-year “College of Design” program that will start in autumn 2027, the university announced Friday.

Prof. Miles Pennington of the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies is scheduled to become head of the new faculty. It is the first time since the university’s establishment in 1877 that a foreign national has been named the head of a faculty. Pennington completed his studies at the United Kingdom’s Royal College of Art and has worked as a professor at the University of Tokyo since 2017. His expertise is in design thinking.

The university aims to have students from overseas fill about half of the 100 spots available per year in the course, and to create a place of learning for a diverse range of young people, including Japanese students.

The new faculty would be UTokyo’s 11th, and the first new one since the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences opened its doors in 1958. According to the university, the name “College of Design” encompasses the meaning of a place that envisions a path toward the transformation of social systems.

The new faculty’s entrance period will be in autumn as is common at universities in the United States and Europe, and students will be selected through admission methods different from UTokyo’s current entrance examinations. The five-year program will consist of four years of undergraduate and one year of graduate study, and students will be able to acquire bachelor’s and master’s degree. First-year students will live in dormitories, where their time spent eating together and sleeping under the same roof will deepen their understanding of different cultures.

All lessons will be conducted in English. The new faculty will be unique in that students will be able to choose their own topics of study, irrespective of whether the courses are in the humanities or sciences fields. The university hopes that the program will nurture future leaders and skilled human resources capable of solving problems that are difficult to tackle in a conventional, vertically divided academic structure, such as climate change, biodiversity and the digitalization of society. In addition to tapping into the ranks of its own professors, the university will actively seek out top-class researchers from Japan and abroad to teach in the program.

The establishment of a new faculty comes at a time when UTokyo trails leading overseas universities in becoming more internationalized and in the diversity of its student population. International students currently account for 2% of the university’s undergraduate students, and only about 20% of students and teaching staff are women.

UTokyo hopes appointing a non-Japanese as head of the “College of Design” will showcase the university’s diversity to students in Japan and overseas, and help to attract excellent students to the university.