Extraordinary nature of lecture series on cancer studies at the University of Tokyo

When I was in charge of promotion of global education at the University of Tokyo between 2015 and 2017, I attended a lot of international conferences on higher education, where I heard the voices that interdisciplinary classes and courses are necessary at the graduate-level programs in order to cultivate students who can solve the complicated global issues, including pandemic, environmental protection, social inequality and so on. At the same time, however, I also heard the claims that developing and maintaining interdisciplinary classes and courses are extremely difficult no matter where these classes and courses are developed, mainly because most of the faculty members, who received disciplinary training as professional scholar and are members of particular discipline ’s academic association, are more sensitive to the evaluation from peer group of the same discipline whenever they apply for the research grant or academic position in the university/research institute. In a word, ‘it’s extremely easier said than done’ when it comes to the promotion of inter disciplinary studies. The case of University of Tokyo is no exception.
Source: Japanese Journal of Clinical Oncology - Category: Cancer & Oncology Source Type: research