Nagahiro Minato, 27th President
Today, Kyoto University is proud to award master's degrees to 98 students, professional master's degrees to five students, and doctoral degrees to 208 students. Of these graduates, 155 are from overseas. Let me begin by offering my sincere congratulations to all of you on your accomplishments.
With today's ceremony, Kyoto University will have awarded a cumulative total of 90,539 master's degrees, 2,529 professional master's degrees, 2,766 juris doctor degrees, and 48,182 doctoral degrees. On behalf of the University's faculty and staff, I would like to extend my congratulations to each and every one of you on receiving your degrees.
You spent a significant portion of your time as graduate students amid the Covid-19 pandemic, with severe restrictions placed on your research. Despite all this, however, you pressed on and brought your projects to completion, receiving your graduate and doctoral degrees today. I would like to sincerely commend and congratulate each and every one of you on reaching this tremendous milestone. You are now officially holders of Kyoto University graduate degrees. At the same time, you are about to embark on a new journey, either within or outside of the academic world. The conferral of your degrees today is therefore both an ending point and a starting point.
The "graduate school" as it is known today is a department centered on educational curricula leading to academic degrees. It originated in the late 19th-century United States at Johns Hopkins University. In the 20th century, crucial leadership roles in various spheres of society, including politics and the economy as well as academia, were increasingly assumed by those who had received advanced professional education at highly competitive graduate schools. An academic degree thus became an essential prerequisite for entry into the elite ranks. At the root of this trend, it is said, was the notion held by the intellectual elite that they had survived fierce competition by virtue of their own efforts and abilities — that is, a meritocratic assumption. Harvard University Professor Michael Sandel, however, raises a concern about this notion. He writes in his 2020 book The Tyranny of Merit that it seems to have become excessive and pervasive among the American elite, causing a lack of empathy with the majority of citizens and a diminished sense of commitment to public welfare and possibly exacerbating social divisions.
Turning now to the situation at home, Japan has traditionally had a smaller percentage of graduate degree holders than the United States and Europe. Recognizing this as an issue, the Japanese government in the 1990s instituted a policy of encouraging universities to shift their organizational focus from undergraduate to graduate operations. The country's major national universities followed this policy and completed their reform by 2000. At Kyoto University, this resulted in a near-two-fold increase in graduate school enrollment between 1995 and 2020 — from about 5,800 master's and doctoral students to 9,500 master's, doctoral, and professional-degree students. This was followed by a corresponding rise in the number of master's and doctoral degree recipients. Even with these changes, however, the number of graduate degree holders in Japan remains significantly lower than that in any of the other OECD-member countries. According to a document released in March 2022 by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry at its 4th Mirai Jinzai Kaigi (future human capital convention), the numbers of master's and doctoral degree holders per million in Japan are only 23 percent and 43 percent of those in the United States, respectively, and 37 percent and 41 percent of those in neighboring South Korea. The same document also shows that 67 percent of business managers in the United States have graduate degrees, whereas only 15 percent of their Japanese counterparts do. The possible reasons cited for these lower percentages in Japan include limited scholarship opportunities and continuously low industrial employment of advanced degree holders. Behind these issues is probably the country's underdeveloped social environment for properly ensuring suitable employment and opportunities for success in diverse sectors for those with advanced professional education and graduate degrees.
Under these circumstances, what is expected of you as someone who has just earned a graduate degree? In the aforementioned book, Professor Sandel writes: "[We] are most fully human when we contribute to the common good and earn the esteem of our fellow citizens for the contributions we make. According to this tradition, the fundamental human need is to be needed by those with whom we share a common life," an idea he describes as "contributive justice".
According to this view, true "merit" would be the ability to serve the common good out of genuine empathy with fellow citizens, utilizing the academic knowledge and scientific literacy acquired through the highest level of education. While the "tyranny of merit" — a phenomenon pervasive among today's American elite as defined by Professor Sandel — may not exist here in Japan, I do agree with him on this point. Similarly, Professors Andrew Scott and Lynda Gratton of London Business School write in their The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity that our value depends not so much on the extent of our knowledge as on what we do with that knowledge. What also strikes me as true is this idea that even the intellectual elite cannot expect to be valued by society without acting in ways inspiring appreciation and respect.
I therefore believe that, as degree holders you should actively create your own opportunities through your actions with the goal of contributing to various spheres of society the best of the advanced professional knowledge and academic literacy you have worked so hard and so long to acquire.
In the meantime, there are certain qualities that I believe are expected of degree holders of all disciplines. Particularly important among these is readiness to creatively tackle difficult challenges by drawing on a broadly educated mind, accurate knowledge and skills, and the ability to conduct research in a logical manner. Humanity is today faced with a myriad of grave challenges, including climate change, massive natural disasters, pandemics, wars, global population and food problems, relative poverty and other forms of social inequality, and aging populations and declining birthrates in developed countries. All these problems are extremely complicated and fraught with uncertainty, each involving a wide range of interests that need to be considered when making related decisions.
Dr Jerome Ravetz, a philosopher of science and associate fellow at the University of Oxford, describes these issues as belonging to the realm of "post-normal science" and requiring "sciences of safety, health and environment, plus ethics" for their solutions. He also states that these phenomena, being highly uncertain in nature, are beyond the capabilities of artificial intelligence, despite the technology — which relies on available big data and ultra-high-performance computing — having evolved at a remarkable pace over the recent years.
Another thing that AI is thought to be incapable of handling is "tacit knowledge", a concept first presented by Michael Polanyi, a polymath from Hungary. Today, tacit knowledge is often described as the type of experiential knowledge that cannot be put into words and thus cannot be programmed. Polanyi's "tacit knowledge", however, is the process by which people subconsciously connect multiple elements to create meaning. In other words, it is a process of knowledge acquisition rather than the "knowledge that cannot be put into words" itself. Max Weber might call it an "idea" that occurs to us, or inspiration. In his famous lecture for university students, "Science as a Vocation", Weber stated, "...in a factory or in a laboratory...some idea has to occur to someone's mind, and it has to be a correct idea, if one is to accomplish anything worthwhile. And such intuition cannot be forced. It has nothing to do with any cold calculation. Certainly calculation is also an indispensable prerequisite*." He then continued, "Normally such an 'idea' is prepared only on the soil of very hard work, but certainly this is not always the case**."
Based on these statements, I would describe the "tacit knowledge that cannot be put into words" as a process of generating knowledge by combining and integrating diverse elements while being passionately engaged in work and experience — a process fundamental to the emergence of new insights, concepts, and scientific discoveries.
You have all spent a tremendous amount of time training yourselves in your respective academic disciplines. I assume that the coming years will test not just your acquired knowledge but also the power of your tacit knowledge from your training. Having tacit knowledge means that you not only know what but also know how, which is a source of creation. As you embark on a new journey into the world of either research or practice, may you make full use of your accumulated academic knowledge and well-cultivated tacit knowledge as you boldly tackle whatever challenges come your way in your new places of work. I also hope that the work you do as members of the true intellectual elite will earn you unwavering approval and respect from society and help elevate the status of graduate degree holders in Japan.
Once again, let me offer my sincere congratulations to each and every one of you on your accomplishments.
(* and **: From HH Gerth and C Wright Mills [translated and edited], From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New York: Oxford University Press, 1946. The original speech in Japanese used quotes from the Japanese translation by Kunio Odaka, Shokugyo to shite no Gakumon, Iwanami Bunko, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1980.)