It’s now up to Kim to prove decision right

Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim was the first Asian-American to head one of the eight Ivy League schools. He was also the first Korean-American awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2003. Yet U.S. President Barack Obama’s nomination for Kim to head the World Bank Friday will mean much more than adding just another first to the name of this Korean-born educator-cum-health expert.

If Kim wins the approval of the World Bank’s board of directors in mid-April, he will not only be the first non-white president of the world’s biggest development institution in its 66-year-long history, but also one who is neither an economist nor diplomat. Little wonder the global media are calling him Obama’s ``surprise card.”

It is a superb choice for several reasons. By picking the 52-year-old, one-and-a-half-generation Korean immigrant, Obama will be able to subdue criticism from emerging countries about the U.S. monopoly on the World Bank presidency. The selection of the global health expert with proven ability and experience also meets the call of changing times, which needs not political cronies but real development experts at the top of the World Bank.

We, along with most Koreans, welcome and support the U.S. leader’s decision. This is neither because Kim is an ethnic Korean (Kim Yong is his Korean name) nor even because he has a distinguished resume of Ivy League degrees and careers at global organizations.

More than anything else, we think he has the passion and ability to deliver what the world’s poorer countries most direly need to get out of their perennial poverty ― proper education and health care.

Kim has demonstrated his mettle and energy in easing public health threats from tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS in developing countries in Africa and Latin America. This should explain why Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs withdrew his candidacy for the World Bank presidency, saying, ``I congratulate the administration for nominating a world-class development leader for this position.” Obama summed all this up best when he said, ``It’s time for a development professional to lead the world’s largest development agency.”

Now it’s up to Kim to prove Washington’s decision right. His assumption of the World Bank presidency is all but assured, given the long tradition and the roles the United States and Europe play in the process. It would be far better for Kim to persuade skeptics, including his potential competitors from Nigeria and Colombia, on why they should give him a chance and why a lack of economic and political careers shouldn’t pose many obstacles to his performance.

All this may force him to go back to ― at least mentally ― to the days of serving in Rwanda and Haiti with his bare feet covered with mud. The handling of the World Bank’s bureaucratic machine may be far harder than administering a university.

We are certain Kim will overcome new challenges before him, as he has done successfully in the United States and on global stages since moving to America at the age of 5. Given the World Bank’s other name is the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, few other nations in the world has rebuilt and developed itself in the past half century or so better than Korea.

Koreans might well take pride in having one more person of the same ethnicity, following U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in one of the world’s most important posts.

The latest good news from across the Pacific should also serve as an occasion for Koreans to vow to grow up as better global citizens, who serve and contribute, financially and otherwise, to less privileged people on this planet.