Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma to join Tokyo University as a visiting professor

The University of Tokyo has announced that Jack Ma, the co-founder of Alibaba, will be joining the institution as a visiting professor, starting his tenure on Monday. His role will involve advising students, conducting research, and giving seminars on topics such as sustainable agriculture, food production, entrepreneurship, innovation, management, and business startups. Ma’s appointment will initially run until October, but the university has said that his contract is renewable on an annual basis.

The move to join the University of Tokyo as a professor may be seen as a way for Ma to remain out of the spotlight after he criticised the Chinese regulatory system in 2020. His comments were blamed for triggering a regulatory crackdown by Beijing. It is unclear how much time he will spend teaching at the university, but his appointment is expected to draw attention to the university’s entrepreneurship program and attract more students to the school.

Ma has long been passionate about education and has had previous experience as a teacher and professor. In his early career, he worked as an English teacher for several years after graduating from Hangzhou Normal University. Later, he founded Alibaba Group in 1999, which has become one of the world’s largest e-commerce platforms. However, despite his business success, Ma has always retained his passion for education.

In 2014, Ma established the Jack Ma Foundation, which focuses on education, entrepreneurship, philanthropy, women’s leadership, medical support, and environmental protection. Through the foundation, he has supported various educational initiatives, such as providing scholarships to students from underprivileged backgrounds and launching programs to train teachers in rural areas of China.

Ma has previously held a professorship at Hupan University, a business school in China that he co-founded in 2015. The school is named after the apartment building where Ma and other entrepreneurs started Alibaba, and aims to train the next generation of entrepreneurs in China.