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The story
Criticism has poured in on social media over the name of the new faculty the University of Tokyo announced it will launch in fall 2027: the “Value Creation Faculty” (UTokyo College of Design). On 5ch’s News Express+ board too, discussion centered on how the term “value creation” happens to overlap with the origin of Soka Gakkai’s name, along with a general unease that the name seems to belittle the university’s existing faculties. More than the substance of the new faculty, the debate focused on the naming choice itself — with comparisons to existing interdisciplinary faculties like Keio SFC’s “Faculty of Policy Management,” and concerns it might mass-produce unspecialized jacks-of-all-trades lacking real expertise.
Negative reactions are piling up on social media over the University of Tokyo’s new “Value Creation Faculty” (UTokyo College of Design), set to launch in fall 2027. Criticism of the name — like “so the other faculties don’t create value?” — has spread alongside broader questions about enrollment-quota cuts at existing faculties.
On X and elsewhere, critical posts about the “Value Creation Faculty” name piled up one after another: “Does that mean the other faculties don’t create value?”, “It’s hollow,” “People are going to think it’s a scam.”
Posts pointing out that “value creation” overlaps with the origin of Soka Gakkai’s name were also prominent.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Looking back, ditching buruma was the real turning point.
To pump up their 'internationalization score' in the university rankings.
That's literally all the current UTokyo board can think of.
What's the university called?
Yeah, basically: if you don't learn and understand the fundamentals you never become an expert — so it's a faculty that mass-produces jacks-of-all-trades who master nothing.
Those who seriously grind all the way through to graduation go on to work at the forefront of the country.
UTokyo's flaw is that dropouts, or people who scrape by with a pity thesis, turn out completely useless (lol).
Which makes Waseda — where dropping out actually raises your status — the weird one lol
No matter how much you study, you can't beat AI anymore. AI can already get into UTokyo. People who just studied their whole lives are obsolete now.
Even if the conclusion ends up being 'we failed to create any value,' that's still one result of academic inquiry.
Bet they'll create value that only recognizes monotheism.
AI is like a hundred million times better than some socially awkward UTokyo grind who just memorized stuff for exams.
It's miraculously working out, honestly. Bureaucrats skillfully dodge pressure imposed by the US and others, keep reckless idiot politicians in check with scandal leverage, and control profit-chasing private companies with a mix of carrot and stick so they don't self-destruct.
They handle all this so smoothly it doesn't even stand out.
If even one of those failed, Japan would probably collapse on the spot. You're just enjoying the benefits of that and freely posting on 5ch, is all lol
That's just intellectual property collection, isn't it lol
Well, if only there were an award given to universities for writing good entrance exam questions. The only good thing about UTokyo is its entrance exams.
No more Nobel Prizes coming out of there, probably.
UTokyo's Nobel Prizes are basically just the payoff of being able to pour national budget into a field.
UTokyo's cutline is brutal — you basically need 900 out of 1000 on the Common Test just to be in range. Even as someone who went through Science I back in the old Center Test era and ended up in Information Science, I think that's excessive.
The second-stage exam has meatier content, but it's actually easier than the Common Test.
producing lawyers, politicians, diplomats, and the like.
Huh? The lectures themselves will just become election-canvassing sessions.
The traditional one-character faculties — Letters, Science, Law, Medicine — have a certain beauty to them.
Engineering, Agriculture, Pharmacy are one-character too.
Economics, Education — fine, still okay.
But once you hit four characters, it starts smelling like a bottom-tier, 'F-rank' school. (F-rank = slang for the lowest tier of universities, essentially open admission)
It's not solid at all.
It's just a business model: round up people who can only speak English and sell them under the UTokyo brand.
UTokyo has always taken pride in its College of Arts and Sciences, so this is probably in that lineage.
The fact that they deliberately went with 'Value Creation' instead of something like 'Systems Science' is probably because they're aiming for a humanities-science fusion.
People used to flock to it because working for the country came with a lot of sweet perks down the line, including cushy post-retirement placements (amakudari). But those perks have steadily gotten stripped away, so now it's only sketchy types who go for it.
They could just… raise the salary.
Background and key points of this discussion
The word “value creation” traces back to the educational theory of “value-creating pedagogy” proposed by Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, Soka Gakkai’s first president — there is no organizational connection between UTokyo’s new faculty and Soka Gakkai. The “overlapping origin” flagged in the thread simply means the two happen to share the same term from educational philosophy by coincidence; it doesn’t mean UTokyo modeled itself on Soka Gakkai, and this point is easy to misread. Nor is this the first time a new interdisciplinary faculty has sparked debate — ever since Keio University’s SFC (Faculty of Policy Management and Faculty of Environment and Information Studies) opened in 1990, arguments for and against this style of education that spans existing academic fields have recurred. What actually divided opinion in the thread was less the rightness of the name itself than whether an educational model that trades away specialization for cross-disciplinary generalists can really hold up in the real world. The details of the faculty’s curriculum were not yet public at the time of reporting, and it’s worth reading the criticism with that in mind, since much of it is speculation based only on the name and the announcement itself.
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Newsplus) thread “[UTokyo] Criticism piles up over new ‘Value Creation Faculty’ … ‘So other faculties don’t create value?’ ‘Hollow name’ ‘Overlaps with the origin of Soka Gakkai’s name’“.
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