Waseda WeeklyWaseda Weekly

Aiji Tanaka, Ph.D.  President, Waseda University 

Dear Graduating Students, Congratulations on your graduation today!

I assume that many of you entered Waseda University in April 2020, right after the COVID-19 pandemic had arrived in Japan.  As a result, you had to take all your classes online in your first year, and even after that, you faced many constraints on your student life at Waseda.

You overcame those difficulties by implementing various kinds of new ideas and practices, such as first holding the Waseda Festival online, then developing a hybrid festival style, and finally returning to the customary in-person event.  In this way, the challenges posed by the pandemic have toughened you, and you are now graduating with newly acquired strengths.  I am sure that you have fostered your “intellectual resilience” by overcoming these hardships over the past four years.  You should feel confident in yourselves regarding this achievement.

At the same time, you should also feel confident in yourselves for acquiring logical thinking and the ability to understand true scholarship.  We are confident that Waseda University has provided you with a superior education and demonstrated a superb level of research.  I am certain that you have learned how to use your own brain to find new solutions to the various problems you faced, much more capably than previous generations.  Therefore, you should take your place in the world at large with firm confidence in what you have learned at Waseda.

However, please DO NOT be overly confident.  When we look at the world, we see that there are many students who are engaged in study under much harder circumstances, such as in Ukraine or Palestine.  While acquiring “intellectual resilience,” you have at the same time gained “flexible sensitivity,” by which I mean the ability to be considerate of people different from yourselves.  At Waseda University, we are proud of our tradition of providing an educational environment where anyone can find her/his place.  Accepting diversity and cherishing inclusion is one of Waseda University’s exceptional characteristics. 

Even after you graduate, please come back to visit your alma mater.  We will show you a Waseda University that will be an ever-more shining alma mater in which you can take rightful pride as graduates.  We in turn will look forward to welcoming you again, ever-more impressive as your lives further unfold. 

Congratulations on your graduation!

Photography: Nanako Ono