History and the problem of universities
Structural impediment to reform of universities
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By Kyung Moon Hwang
Early March is customarily when classes reopen at South Korean universities to begin the new school year. In commemoration of this annual rite, it seems fitting to ponder the history of the university system as well as its ongoing challenges.
Actually the history of higher education in Korea is, depending on how one defines it, either remarkably long or surprisingly short. In the late 14th century, the Joseon Kingdom (1392-1910) established an academy for aspirants to government office, where they could study for the state’s civil service examination.
However, this training center, the Seonggyungwan, had a curriculum limited to Confucian ethics and philosophy; it lacked a program to teach the arts, administration, practical sciences and technical specialties, which were taught by other schools. It would be difficult, in other words, to recognize the Seonggyungwan as a university, despite claims by the current Sungkyunkwan University of a history of over 600 years.
As a modern institution, the Seonggyungwan, in fact, began at the turn of the 20th century, when it, along with schools with names like Yonhi, Severance, Sookmyung, Ewha and Bosung were founded to meet the needs of specialized education beyond the secondary level.
In the subsequent period of Japanese colonial rule, these schools, which became the forerunners to well-known universities later, joined the many institutions of higher learning that, much like technical colleges, specialized in fields such as medicine and theology, and women’s education.
There was, however, one recognizable university in the colonial period, Keijo Imperial University in Seoul (“Keijo”), which was established in the mid-1920s. This university, however, was not built to serve as an open-access public institution of higher education, but to cater to the hundreds of thousands of Japanese settlers, as well as to a relatively small number of Koreans.
Following liberation in 1945, this configuration of one university and many specialty colleges developed into the array of universities in South Korea that we know today. The modern university system, then, can be said to mark its 70th anniversary this year.
Under the American occupation, Keijo Imperial University became the basis for the formal establishment of Seoul National University (SNU) in 1946. (This connection to the colonial past is understandably a sensitive topic, so in its official narrative SNU has simply erased this part of its history.)
More troubling than the Japanese connection, however, and for reasons that defy easy understanding, SNU, along with Korea University (the descendant of Bosung College) and Yonsei University (the descendant of Yonhi College and Severance Medical School), somehow became entrenched as the “top three” universities in prestige and power.
So dominant did these three schools become in higher education, and hence also in the education system as a whole, that in popular parlance they collectively took on the English acronym of “SKY” (SNU, Korea, Yonsei) to reflect the heavenly loftiness of their standing.
Unfortunately for South Korean society, they also represented the rigid unfairness and lack of democratic openness of the university system. They became perched atop both official and unofficial rankings that, when married to the university entrance examination system and the hiring practices of governments and corporations, consigned over 90 percent of all aspiring college students to second-class status.
The exclusionary practices and culture centered in these three schools, particularly SNU, were not limited to their admissions process. SNU, for example, chose almost solely from among its own graduates when hiring professors, to a shocking extent given that this was supposed to be a public university.
Not surprisingly, Yonsei and Korea Universities came to view their own practices of hiring mostly their own graduates as a means of protecting themselves from the consequences of SNU’s example. Other universities, then, had no choice but to follow suit, and so on. One is tempted to call this a cycle of abuse.
Abuse is an apt term for the horrible impact of this rigidly hierarchical university system through its perpetuation of the college entrance “examination hell,” which robbed teenagers of a normal life and effectively judged nearly all educated South Koreans on a single moment in their young lives.
Those belonging to the overwhelming majority of the test takers who could not enter one of the designated prestigious universities were thereafter permanently restricted in their life and career possibilities.
The absurdity and abomination of such a system, especially in cultivating a democratic society, has been recognized at least since the 1990s, when astute social commentators began to call for the closing of SNU.
They realized that the edifice of the university hierarchy, along with its attendant abuses and negative effects throughout society, could never be torn down without the elimination of SNU itself. This was a school, after all, that was founded by Japanese colonizers as an exclusionary institution.
The public anxiety surrounding this very broad and systematic problem has only increased with time, but nothing has been done to fundamentally change this order.
Here we encounter the entrenched structural impediment to real reform: Those who have benefitted most from this system, the graduates of the SKY schools, occupy the most powerful and influential positions in South Korean society, including in the realms of politics and law, the state bureaucracy, the press, and yes, education. They would have to awaken to the larger social harm of the system that protects their privileges. This seems unlikely to happen.
Kyung Moon Hwang is associate professor in the Department of History, University of Southern California. He is the author of, “A History of Korea ― An Episodic Narrative” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). The Korean translation was published as 황경문, “맥락으로 읽는 새로운 한국사” (21세기 북스, 2011).