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| Kang Sung-mo | Baik Sung-gi | Park Sung-joo | Yu Jin |
Suh Nam-pyo's early resignation leaves bad precedent
By Na Jeong-ju
The board of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), the country's top technology school, will hold a meeting on Jan. 31 to elect its new president who will succeed Suh Nam-pyo, school officials said Monday.
Currently four candidates are contending for the job. They are Kang Sung-mo, former chancellor of the University of California, Merced; Baik Sung-gi, former president of Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH); and Park Sung-joo and Yu Jin, both KAIST professors.
The school's 15 board members, including Suh, will vote, and a candidate who receives a majority of the votes will become the new president.
He will be sworn in on March 4 after getting endorsement from the education minister.
Suh tendered his resignation in October last year amid a conflict with the board's Chairman Oh Myung, a former science minister, as well as the council of KAIST professors. Suh was serving a second four-year term as KAIST chief that was supposed to end in July 2014.
The new president will be given a four-year term that will end in March 2017.
Attention is now being drawn to whether a KAIST professor will be elected to the post for the first time. Some observers say the new president should be chosen between Park and Yu to clear up all the mess from the ugly power struggle between the president and some faculty members and prevent similar problems in the future.
Others say a figure from outside ― Kang or Baik ― should lead KAIST to continue Suh's reform programs.
The council is now playing a key role in the election. The KAIST professors picked their colleagues Park and Yu as candidates for the next president and recommended them to the board.
Their deep involvement in the election, however, is raising concerns that the state-run school will be swayed by only a handful of "political" professors who have resisted Suh's reforms.
During a news conference in October, Suh expressed his hope that a competent scholar who is respected worldwide and has excellent leadership, not a political figure, will lead the school.
Suh's early resignation leaves another bad precedent in the school's history. Suh's predecessor, Robert Laughlin, a Stanford University professor who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1998, also couldn't finish his given term and quit early amid a struggle with the professors' council.
Kang is one of the most outstanding scholars of Korean origin in the United States.
The 68-year-old served as the chancellor of the UC Merced between 2007 and 2011. He was the first department head of foreign origin at the electrical and computer engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Baik, 64, a POSTECH professor, served as president of his own school from 2007 to 2011.
Park, 63, and Yu, 63, are working as professors at KAIST since 1980 and 1982, respectively. Except for Kang, the other three candidates graduated from the same high school and university ― Kyunggi High School in Seoul and Seoul National University.
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