The Grand Narrative

(Photo by Jeremy Chae. The sign reads “We split up…” )

Introduction: Another Failed Hub 

Is it possible to have such a thing as a Korean Studies hub? California certainly appears to be one, but the state’s huge budget crisis is forcing university administrators to take a hard look at all programs offered, and in fact Korean Studies programs are so limited and unpopular that they’re going to be the first to be cut. Soon, it may be impossible to study even the language in Los Angeles, even though it has the largest population of Koreans outside of Asia.

(Illustration by Aquarius-Campo)

This post isn’t about the cuts; the field of Korea Studies is always going to be overshadowed by Chinese and Japanese Studies anyway (and those fields are going to be feeling the pinch in California too). But the cuts have naturally created quite a stir in the already very small Korea Studies community worldwide, and reading this comment left by Scott Burgeson in that thread has made me realise that the failure to create a hub is not so much on a par with Korea’s abysmal efforts to create various hubs at home, more it’s because of a complete lack of interest in the first place. That lack of interest says a lot about the sort of education that most Koreans value, and also the ultimately self-defeating ways that they choose to present themselves to the world. I’ll discuss the first of those in part one here, and the second in part two, using Scott’s comment as a framework.

Education and Status in Korea

( “Form over Substance” by mlakner)

Scott’s comment is a reply to this part of a comment by Gari Ledyard, a professor of Korean Studies at Columbia University in New York: 

Many people in Korea and in the overseas Korean communities tend to see the existence of Korean Studies in the universities of the world as a validation of their worth and importance, but give little attention to the work we produce.

And here is part of Scott’s reply to that:

As an independent critic unaffiliated with any academic institutions myself, I have also found Prof. Ledyard’s statement above to be true, albeit with slightly different implications as far as my own work is concerned. In my dealings with Korea-based foundations here in Seoul over the years, both public and private, there seems to be little recognition that Western critics covering Korean culture also deserve some support, be it through language-study grants or publication assistance. If you are a critic (or even scholar) but are not with a graduate program somewhere or do not have an advanced degree, you simply are not taken seriously by grant-giving foundations here.

And later:

I feel this is a short-sighted strategy and when you get right down to it, is not really based on lack of financial resources on the part of Korea-based foundations, but is simply based on some sort of irrational or status-linked prejudice that because you do not have an advanced degree behind your name, you are simply not useful as a tool that can be used in the cause of “validating the worth and importance” of Korean international prestige in the way that only institutions of higher learning apparently can (yes, this last statement is meant to be sarcastic).

Scott has made a similar point in a different context here. As he is no doubt fully aware, these dogmatic, outdated associations of “worth and importance” with institutions of higher learning are unfortunately also held by most ordinary Koreans too. It can have positives, like the concerns of university students being taken much more seriously by the public than their Western counterparts, not an insignificant factor behind their large role in the democratization movement in the mid-1980s. But I’ve had the misfortune of learning of the negatives for myself from job interviewers, who have literally laughed in my face upon learning that the MA I was then studying was done online.

( “Jerry, the Inconsiderate Asshole Elephant” by Kevin Lacamera)

But while reading my resume for the first time in the interview room is dammed inconsiderate, especially as it meant I’d completely wasted the 150,000 to 200,000 won I’d spent taking the KTX from Busan and staying overnight for the interview, it’s hardly only in Korea that interviewers that do things like that. So too, is a general disdain for online degrees, even if those interviews did predate Korea’s fake degree scandals (see here and here for more on those). But I’d argue that the style of resumes that Korean employers demand today demonstrate that they’ll still feel the same way about non-traditional qualifications fifteen years from now, even though most of the rest of the world has already moved on.

Koreas’ Lack of Political Correctness

Remember the first resume you wrote after graduating? Mine barely filled half a page. But then an older and wiser friend showed me how to do a ”skills-based” resume, and later some interviewers in New Zealand did indeed ask about and seemed to be impressed by what I’d supposedly learned as president of the environmental group at university, even though all I seem to remember of that time myself was taking advantage of my position to impress naive freshmen. But Korean resumes? They’re forms. Not only do they require things like your D.O.B. and your photo, which as far as I know are illegal for employers to demand in Western countries, but they only have space for the barest of details of your academic history, work experience and TOEIC score and so forth.

(Swiped from here. Hope Michael doesn’t mind.)

Requiring personal details is bad enough in itself. Having said that, when I first came to Korea in 2000, I just thought of it as part and parcel of Korea’s lack of political correctness, in many ways quite refreshing after spending a long time in any Western country. But the longer I stayed here, the more I realised that I’d been confusing a lack of political correctness with basic discrimination.

For sure, there are benefits to providing personal details. For instance, if an employer is after a recent graduate for a position, and would never hire, say, a 30-something instead, then a great deal of time and effort is saved by both the employer and the 30-something by this information being required on the resume (the note at the top of the first resume in the picture reads “나이 너무 많음”, or “too old”). That’s common sense, and rather than being a justification of Korean-style resumes from a Korean (not that it would be diminished if it was), actually I think I first read it in the British The Economist magazine, libertarian to a fault.

But then consider an interview from the The Guardian Daily podcast I heard maybe six months ago, of I think some British senior civil servant responding to criticisms of recent legislation banning discrimination against homosexuals by landlords and religion-based adoption agencies. Some landlords, for instance, were loudly arguing that being forced to accept homosexuals as tenants went against their own morals and/or religious beliefs, to which the interviewee rightly pointed out that nobody would ever publicly consider refusing, say, Black or Indian tenants on similar grounds today, precisely because legislation preventing that was put in place twenty years ago.

Ergo, anti-discrimination legislation, when enforced, does ultimately have effects on the way people think. And so long as it remains legally and socially permissible for Koreans to judge a person’s (and especially a woman’s) suitability for a job based on their appearance and age, then most Koreans are going to have little reason not to.

Status Rather than Genuine Learning

I possibly digress with that last point; the main message I’m trying to get across is that, for Korean employers, all that is important is what you look like, how old you are, where you went to university, and where you have worked previously. This isn’t just a guess either, albeit a reasonable one: Korean friends have confirmed it. Not to put too fine a point on it, nothing else you’ve done in your life means shit.

Note that I said “where” you went to university rather than what you studied there. It’s difficult not to be reminded that this is yet another Korean case where appearances matter more than reality, a consistent theme throughout this blog. I like to use quotes from the 1992 novel Rising Sun to illustrate these, as it was written back when East Asia and especially Japan seemed to be taking over economic dominance of the world, especially after the financial crises of the US in the 1980s (see here and here if those are news), and so it is full of facts and figures that appear alarming to the Western reader, but don’t hold up to objective analysis. For this case, one that came to mind was a scene where main character Lieutenant Peter Smith is surprised to learn that the city which has the most PhD-holders per square kilometre is not Boston, as he guessed, but in fact Seoul. He was suitably impressed. But he would be less so if he knew that 16 years later, Korea has yet to ever appear on a “Top 100″ list of world universities, based on any criteria.

( “Plagiarism” by AMICHAELMURRAY)

In the original draft of this post, I had begun writing a great deal about how this boils down to the status of Korean universities in Korea, and of academics in general, considerably outweighs the minimal amount of learning by students and genuine original research done in and by them, but then I realised that I was merely repeating what I’d already said in my earlier series on Korean education here and here.  Rather than merely rehashing that then, let me focus in this post on one symptom of that: plagiarism. Consider what one of Gord’s students had to say about it, (very leniently) punished for plagiarising an essay by being forced to write an essay about, well, plagiarism:

 …some of the content in the essay was depressing. Especially her comments about how rampant plagiarism is in other classes, and especially her previous major, a science-related major. She described a nightmarish scene of lab reports handed down over many waves of students, identical (verbatim), and the profs, she said, “just don’t care.” And then you end up with totally incompetent juniors or seniors who are leaving school because they have no idea what they’re supposed to know or understand before graduating.

That’s simply no way to fuel creativity, inventiveness, and professionalism. It’s the way to build up a profoundly unstable set of industries, stuck either buying or (yet again) copying technologies from others. You end up having to fake results (Hwang Woo-Suk) or steal them (Go San), but it’s not just that. You end up with people pretty much unequipped to argue about issues, or to pull apart any misrepresentations of the facts that are presented with even a modicum of sophistication or abstraction. You end up with an easily manipulated polity, a society that doesn’t know what it thinks. You end up with endless kneejerk reactions, with dysfunctional democracy, and with a chronic case of anomie.

You can hear similar stories from virtually any ESL teacher working in a Korean university. In short, plagiarism is endemic to Korean academia, and diminishes claims that an education at a prestigious Korean university says anything more about a job applicant than an ability to pass the largely multiple-choice test required to enter that university. But again, like resumes, it is true that the system does have some good points, Wikipedia, for one, saying: 

The great virtue of facts-based testing is its objectivity. Though harsh, the system is believed to be fair and impartial. The use of nonobjective criteria such as essays, personal recommendations, and the recognition of success in extracurricular activities or personal recommendations from teachers and others could open up all sorts of opportunities for corruption. In a society where social connections are extremely important, connections rather than merit might determine entry into a good university. Students who survive the numbing regimen of examinations under the modern system are at least universally acknowledged to have deserved their educational success. Top graduates who have assumed positions of responsibility in government and business have lent, through their talents, legitimacy to the whole system.

Seoul National University Veritas lux mea (Latin: The truth is my light) 진리는 나의 빛

Korea University Liberty, Justice, and Truth 자유·정의·진리

Yonsei University The truth will set you free. (John 8:32) 진리가 너희를 자유케 하리라 (요한복음 8:32)

But still, that is not what universities are for. And on top of what Gord says, let me paraphrase Daniel Pinchbeck in the end to his short story “Dropping Out” in this book:

For one history class, I read the works to Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist. Bordiey wrote about the concept of “culture capital” - how cultural experiences acted as a boundary between the elites and the lower classes. I saw how the high price [of entrance to prestigious Korean universities] was a prime example of “culture capital.” The purpose of [those universities] is not education so much as it is a way of signifying one’s membership in a certain class. A degree [from one of those universities] is an indoctrination in high expectations, not hard actualities. I still maintain a sharp awareness of how the machinery of privilege works, how certain universities create an elite that reinforces itself through school connections, and the alumni’s shared, smug belief in their own entitlement.

Pinchbeck was writing about Ivy League schools in the US, but you can see that the Korean education system fits like a glove to the passage, one of its supposed strengths being the nurturing of elites that both expect their high status and are uncritically granted it by average Koreans, regardless of their actual skills for running government or business.

But despite all these negatives, readily apparent to anyone who has spent some time in Korea, the Korean education system is still routinely held up as a model by most Western observers, and the linking of valuable commentary on Korea only to those of status that is a reflection of that system in turn accounts for a great deal of misrepresentation of Korea overseas. I’ll discuss that in part two.

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