INTERVIEW At 94, Korea's oldest university president is still planning for future

By Jung Da-hyun

• Published Oct 7, 2026 7:00 AM KST

Lee Gil-ya's decades of experience shapes Gachon's 'move-first' approach to AI era

At an age when most people have long stepped away from professional life, Lee Gil-ya is still thinking about what comes next.

The 94-year-old president of Gachon University is Korea’s longest-serving university president. Lee took over the management of Kyungwon University in 1998 and became its president in 2000, later overseeing the integration of four institutions that culminated in the launch of Gachon University in 2012. She has since led the integrated university for nearly 14 years — an unusually long tenure in Korea, where university presidents typically serve relatively short terms.

She attributes her forward-looking approach to decades spent building hospitals and educational institutions, where successes and failures alike taught her to recognize change early and act quickly — an approach now shaping Gachon University’s push to stay ahead in the artificial intelligence (AI) era.

“Hardship itself is a kind of success. It becomes the foundation for success,” Lee said in a recent interview with The Korea Times, stressing that failures and setbacks are experiences people need to go through in order to grow.

That belief in learning through experience has also shaped Lee’s approach to running Gachon University, where she has repeatedly pushed the institution to move early when she sees signs of major change.

Her focus on emerging technology predates today’s AI boom. Decades ago, Lee was already investing in technologies that had yet to become commonplace, an approach she later carried into the university.

Lee’s interest in emerging technology dates back to the early 1980s, when she began exploring ways to computerize operations at Gil Medical Center. She assembled a team of doctors, nurses and other staff and sent them abroad to study emerging systems at a time when hospital computerization was still largely unfamiliar in Korea.

By 1987, the hospital had computerized its operations, linking different stages of patient care and reducing its reliance on phone calls and paper records.

The experience convinced Lee early on that computers would eventually transform industries far beyond health care.

When she turned her attention to higher education in the early 2000s, she saw another opening. Established universities had an enormous head start in many conventional academic fields, she recalled, but the emerging digital era offered a rare chance to begin from roughly the same starting line.

“If computers and the internet were just beginning, Seoul National University was starting then and so were we,” Lee recalled thinking at the time. “I thought we could catch up.”

That thinking led to the establishment of a software college in 2002. Gachon later opened an undergraduate AI department in 2020, ahead of many of its peers, and expanded into other emerging industries, including semiconductors, batteries and biologics.

“We try to move first,” Lee said. “Others may talk about creating programs in AI, batteries or biologics in the future, but we have already done it.”

The university was recently selected for a government initiative supporting AI-focused universities, backed by more than two decades of investment in software and AI education and a track record that already includes AI graduates.

The university is now seeking to take AI beyond technology-related departments. Under its “AX-Gachon” strategy, the university plans to integrate AI education across more than 60 majors, while recruiting faculty who specialize in applying the technology to individual disciplines.

The university is also expanding its AI infrastructure, with plans for an AI Tower, a generative AI-powered library and high-performance computing facilities.

Lee believes the shift could eventually make the traditional closed-book exam a thing of the past.

Five years from now, she envisions students walking into examinations with laptops, in an environment where the ability to use information and AI effectively matters more than memorizing it.

Experience forged through hardship

For Lee, the drive to keep moving forward is rooted in a broader belief that experience — including hardship and failure — becomes more valuable when it is put to use.

“I believe people who have accumulated knowledge, experience and gone through a lot of hardship have to give something back,” she said. “Hardship itself is a kind of success. It becomes the foundation for success.”

That philosophy has also shaped her approach to Gachon University.

When Lee assessed the institution in its earlier years, she saw financial difficulties and limited recognition, but also strong faculty, a medical school and a location that gave it room to grow.

She began setting goals that initially struck some inside the university as unrealistic and repeatedly pushed faculty and administrators to work toward them.

“If someone keeps dreaming, keeps saying it and keeps telling people, ‘Let’s go there,’ people eventually begin to move in that direction,” Lee said.

Beyond its push into AI and emerging technologies, Gachon has made internationalization another key part of its growth strategy, expanding both its overseas partnerships and support for a growing international student population.

The university currently enrolls 4,232 international undergraduates and 1,720 international graduate students. It has also established a dedicated college for international students, providing academic programs and support designed to help them adapt to life and study in Korea.

Gachon’s global network has expanded to 286 universities across 38 countries. The university has also introduced programs to give more Korean students opportunities to study and gain experience abroad, including the establishment of the Gachon Global Center in Hawaii in 2012.

Lee said the university’s transformation has depended on more than leadership from the top. Restructuring departments, recruiting faculty and moving into new fields require faculty and staff to share the vision and turn it into action.

“No matter what I think we should do, I can’t make it happen without the support of the people around me,” she said. “I can’t create a department by myself.”

That support, Lee said, has strengthened over time as initiatives once seen as difficult or unrealistic began to deliver results, building greater trust in the university’s willingness to take on new challenges.

Yet for all her focus on AI and emerging technologies, Lee’s advice to younger generations is decidedly less technical. She urges them to take on challenges — and, above all, not to shy away from failure.

“I tell young people to dream earnestly and challenge themselves passionately,” she said. “And I want to tell them to fail.”

Lee could not point to a single failure that shaped her most. Instead, she said decades spent building medical and educational institutions had brought countless setbacks, forcing her to solve problems, learn from them and try again.

“Do many things and fail many times,” Lee said. “If you eat everything you want to eat, play whenever you want to play and sleep as much as you want to sleep, you can’t accomplish anything.”