Naturally, you can see Mt. Fuji from the University of Shizuoka. On days when the weather is fair and the air is clear, you can even see the unique profiles of Mt. Daimugen and Mt. Shomugen in the distance as you go down the slope from the monument in front of the Lecture Hall. These are mountains with an elevation of about 2,300 m, located at the far southern end of the Southern Alps. They are known for their expert hiking routes.

What is the proper role of a university? In secondary education like high school, the learning objective is for students to develop the ability to do what they've been taught. In Japan, university education has become increasingly "universalized," with 58% of students going on to university. Under such conditions, the objective of the university—I believe—is for students to gain the ability to sort out problems, consider methods to respond to or solve those problems, conduct studies and research using those methods, and then express their own opinions. Sharing the created/accumulated knowledge with diverse people through dialog is also an important social contribution.

Recently, there has been a major improvement in the performance of artificial intelligence (AI), and people are focusing on how it can be used to contribute to society. However, the mechanism of AI hasn't really been communicated in a way that is understandable to non-specialists. It is symbolic that Professor Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto in Canada, one of the inventors of ChatGPT, has mentioned scientist and novelist as occupations that will be taken over by AI. Even in Silicon Valley, a region of California in the U.S.A. which has led the world in areas like computers and AI, it is recognized that an extremely diverse range of human resources have played their respective roles. Beyond achieving goals as planned, I want us to be a university that develops human resources capable of more flexible thinking—a university that people feel glad to have attended.