Trust Is New Key Word for University Education
By Kang Shin-who, Oh Young-jin
Staff reporters
Colleges and universities play a pivotal role as breeding grounds for next generation leaders.
It was these college-educated ``industrial warriors" that led Korea on its nation-building path from the devastating 1950-1953 Korean War, building factories and ships, laying down a network of roads and drawing up future plans. Their blood, sweat and tears paid off, the proof being the Korea we now know.
Korea stands at a crossroads ― being stuck in the status quo or staging another takeoff. Thus the need for a new education model in colleges and universities is greater than ever.
"We can't deny that we have cut corners and taken short cuts in our heady development," Park Chul, president of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS), said during a recent interview with The Korea Times.
"Now is the time for us to take a step back and look at ourselves in perspective in order to come up with a new blueprint for our future," Park said.
One of the highlights for this new blueprint should be how to address new needs that fit a mature Korea both economically and politically, into college education.
"I believe one of the key pillars to this new Korea is trust ― between its members and when dealing with other countries," said Park, who has been elected for a second four-year term at the school.
He takes the trust-based society as the best model that can pull and push Korea ahead not just for Koreans but also for other members of the global community.
"For that purpose, changes should start at colleges and universities, teaching young people about trust and honesty. This will trickle down through generations and genders to spread through every nook and cranny of society," he said.
Park said that he is conducting this experiment with HUFS.
"The HUFS family ― alumni and students ― had a reputation of being overly individualistic," he said, attributing this to a number of factors, including the characteristic of its role of producing foreign language specialists.
"That worked well when Korea was developing," he said. "Now, our stage is no longer Korea but the entire world. This change requires us to have a sense of mission, something close to altruism."
As Park is trying to bring a new atmosphere to the campus, his school is changing fast. It is no longer a school producing just language specialists but has also launched science and engineering departments.
Also under consideration is the opening of a medical school, either by taking over an existing one or merging with a big hospital, said the HUFS leader. Time and again, it has been proven that a medical school is pivotal to the growth of a university overall. One example is Sungkyunkwan University that has shown a meteoric rise in college standings after opening such a school.
With science and engineering departments under its wing, Park said that his school's goal for education has changed. "A HUFS man we envision is one who can use language skills to promote other skills and knowledge globally," he said.
Asked how he defines his personality ― Don Quixote or Prince Hamlet through Turgenev's human nature formula, Park, a professor who has completed the Spanish to Korean translation of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's book, said, "One thing that is certain is I am not a Hamlet."