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By Andrei Lankov
The year 1946 was marked by many firsts in Korean history. The newly independent country (or two emerging countries) was busily acquiring the attributes of nationhood, from road police to a customs service, from an army to a health-care system. One of the major achievements of that year was the near simultaneous establishment of two universities, one in Seoul and the other in Pyongyang. Kim Il-sung University (KISU) and Seoul National University came into existence.
According to the official North Korean version, the founding of Kim Il-sung University was made possible by a large-scale campaign of voluntary donations. Farmers allegedly sacrificed their rice in order to bring a university into being, allowing for the collection of the huge sum of 100 million won, roughly equal to the entire 1946 budget of the North Korean Department of Education, a precursor to the Ministry of Education. These figures might be exaggerated, but it seems that there were indeed many contributions.
Such enthusiasm was easy to understand. Liberation produced much optimism and the new university was an important symbol of the emerging state. The propaganda insisted that, unlike schools of an earlier era, it would be open to the children of workers and farmers.
Indeed, the "correct" social background was among the major admission criteria, but it was also stipulated that children of the 'revolutionaries and independence fighters' would also have privileged access to this institution. Needless to say, the 'revolutionaries and independence fighters' were the people who ran the country, so this rule, as nice as might it look, actually entrenched the privileges of the emerging elite.
From the very beginning the University was named after Kim Il-sung, obviously as a part of an effort to promote his image as the major independence fighter.
The University structure was more or less an exact copy of the Soviet model. It consisted of faculties including "cathedras" (initially, this Greek-Korean word was used in transcriptions, was soon replaced by the Sino-Korean 'kangjwa'). The "cathedras" were similar to the 'departments' or 'centers' in the Western system.
In 1946, Kim Il Sung University included faculties of engineering, agriculture, medicine, physics, literature, railway engineering, and law. The next year the structure was slightly changed and some faculties were renamed (for example, the Faculty of Literature became the Faculty of History and Literature) and a Faculty of Chemistry was established as well.
According to a tradition that originated after the 1917 Communist revolution, Soviet universities never had a medical department. Medical doctors had to be trained by separate colleges (no, I do not know why). Hence, Kim Il-sung University was re-organized to conform to this model. It lost its medical department, which was transformed into a separate institution.
When the University was founded, it had 68 professors and 1600 students, but the following year it had more than doubled to 166 professors and 3,813 students.
The most difficult problem facing the university's founders was the shortage of qualified personnel. According to a contemporary estimate, on the eve of Liberation in 1945 there were merely 30-40 university graduates in all of North Korea. Pyongyang had two small junior colleges (a college of medicine and an industrial college), and some teachers who had worked there were employed by the new institution. But this was by no means enough.
Many professors were invited from the USSR and China. For example, Paik Il, a graduate of the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute who had been employed as a college teacher in what was then Soviet Central Asia, was appointed vice-president of KISU in late 1946. There were up to a dozen Soviet Koreans in the initial faculty.
Others came from China and Japan. Professor Yim Kk-je, for example, was teaching physics in the Manchurian city of Harbin when in early 1946 he was approached by Seoul colleagues who offered him a job in soon-to-be-established Seoul National University. He initially accepted the offer, but once in Korea, Professor Yim decided to move to the North (presumably because of his political views).
The major source of necessary personnel was from South Korea. Korean intellectuals of the era tended to be left-leaning and rejected Syngman Rhee's government. Their move to the North was an act of protest. From 1946 to 1948, about twenty newly appointed professors of Kim Il Sung University came from the South, usually giving up prestigious jobs in major Seoul schools. Taking into account the scarcity of educated people, twenty was a high number.
Many of those starry-eyed idealists became victims of the Great Purge in the mid-1950s: their long-standing connections with the Communist leaders of the South made them vulnerable when their patrons ended up on the losing side in a power struggle and were sent to prison or shot. Others survived and worked at Kim Il Sung University until the end of their lives.
In 1949, the University acquired a new building on the outskirts of Pyongyang. But soon it had to leave the capital: the Korean War presented university leaders with an unusual challenge they handled quite well.
