KAIST President Draws Another Donation From US
By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) said Monday that it has received a $2.5 million donation from a U.S. entrepreneur thanks partly to his personal relationship with the schools' president Suh Nam-pyo.
The donation from Neil Pappalardo, founder of Meditech, a medical software firm in Massachusetts, is the latest contribution from Suh's friends and acquaintances from the United States. In September, Park Byiung-jun, a Korean-American businessman who has been a long-time friend to Suh, gave $10 million to KAIST.
The new president has received mixed reactions for his strong reform efforts on the school's tenure and scholarship system this year. The association of professors has criticized him for being ignorant of Korean academic culture, while outsiders have generally lauded him as a man of insight and willingness.
KAIST said Pappalardo promised to annualize his donation. He is also providing $4 million for MIT and $2 million for high schools in the Boston area every year, it said.
``KAIST has enough potential to become a world-class science and engineering school,'' Pappalardo was quoted as saying in a press release from the school. ``I want to continuously help KAIST to achieve its dream.''
KAIST said that the money will be used to establish a medical research center.
Pappalardo graduated from MIT where Suh had been a professor of mechanical engineering before he was appointed as the KAIST president. KAIST invited him to be an advisor last year, the school said. He also received an honorary Ph.D. degree in February.
Suh left for the United States shortly after the Korean War when he was a teenager. He became a professor at MIT at the age of 36, and served as head of department of mechanical engineering there for 10 years since 1991.
While using his personal influence to draw donations from within and outside of Korea, Suh shocked the academic circle in September by rejecting tenure requests of 15 KAIST professors out of 35 applicants.
The rejection was a highly unusual decision for a Korean university where professors are usually granted a lifetime job according to their length of service in their schools. Until last year, no KAIST professor had been rejected for tenure since the school's inauguration in 1971.