Selected Speeches
Dr. Chungserved as the President of SNU from 2002 to 2006. These are selected speeches during his presidency.
Keynote Address at the 7th Hokkaido-SNU Joint Symposium (July 8, 2004)
HIT: 9832
Keynote Address
by President Chung Un-Chan
at the 7th Hokkaido-SNU Joint Symposium
Sapporo, Japan
8 July 2004
Thank you and Good Morning:
May I begin by saying that it is a great honor to be here today, to take part in the 7th Joint Symposium between our two universities
Since the beginning of the wonderful relationship between our two institutions, which began nearly a decade ago, we have successfully held six joint symposiums alternately in Sapporo and in Seoul. This year we are delighted and honored to attend the 2004 joint symposium in Hokkaido.
I believe that all of you here will agree that our two universities? collaboration over the past decade has been founded on mutual respect and the desire to broaden and deepen scholarly exchange in between our two academic communities. It is my firm belief that our achievements thus far could not have been realized without the vision and leadership shown by each and every individual scholar involved in our joint effort to promote collaboration in between our two universities. I know President Nakamura will agree with me that official agreements only go so far; it takes commitment and investment of time and effort on the part of every participant to make joint ventures such as ours a success.
I also believe that our two universities are well attuned to the challenges that we face in this century: in this fast-changing world environment, no single university, no matter how well-endowed or how big, can by itself seek to address the challenge of being at the forefront of research and innovation.
It is my firm conviction that we must collaborate across academic and national boundaries if we are to remain successful in the years to come. In this respect, I am encouraged by the fact that Hokkaido University and Seoul National University have worked together over the past decade to add value and promote greater efficiency in our joint research projects. I look forward to even closer partnership as we go ahead together toward the future.
I understand that my assignment for this morning is to introduce to you some of the core challenges facing higher education in Korea today. So, without further ado, please allow me now to outline what I see as the principal tasks facing Korean universities in general and, in particular, my own institution, Seoul National University.
Let me begin by tracing, in very large brushstrokes, the growth of university education in Korea from the early post-Korean War years. In the immediate aftermath of the war, in the early 1950s, the primary challenge facing Korean universities-- some twenty or so two- and four-year colleges ? was to produce a new generation of educated workforce capable of staffing the public and private sectors that had been decimated by the war. The emphasis was placed on simply educating a generation beyond the high school level, to a degree sufficient to understand complexities of ?modernity? as the concept was understood at the time.
The search for modernity meant stressing, among other subjects, the learning of foreign languages, especially the English language, so that the best students could go abroad to pursue further specialized study. And because the study of the law, economics and finance, as well as science and engineering were deemed essential to Korea?s development and modernization, these subjects naturally received the greatest investments and attracted the best students.
The 1950s was a period of great intellectual tumult and dynamism, in which scholarly energies, long suppressed by the 36 years of Japanese occupation as well as distorted by the immediate post-liberation confusion, saw a great flowering against the backdrop of increasing westernization and opening to the outside world.
The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a continuation in the expansion of higher education institutions as the college-age population grew at unprecedented rates-- this a function of the post-Korean War ?baby boom?, and also fueled by demand from business and industry as Korea?s economic development began to accelerate after 1962, the year marking the start of Korea?s successive Five-Year Development Plans. By the end of the decade, a university education was not an option, but a minimal requirement for young people to be considered for jobs with a future.
With the realization that its only dependable resource was its human capital, the Korean government invested heavily in the education sector, at times as high as nearly 30 percent of the annual budget. Such high levels of government spending on education proved further stimulus for the growth of universities, as existing institutions were joined by new ranks of two- and four-year institutions.
By 1965, for instance, there were already 162 colleges and universities, with over 140,000 enrolled students. The numbers become more remarkable in the 1980s: by 1985, Korea had 262 colleges and universities with nearly 1.5 million enrolled students. As of now, there are 361 colleges and universities in Korea, with a total enrolled student population of 2.8 million.
This explosive growth in terms of the numbers of institutions of higher learning, however, has not been matched in qualitative terms. It seems to me that it would have been unrealistic to expect corresponding growth in both quantitative and qualitative terms. In fact, I see the first fifty years of higher education in Korea after the war as a period of rapid growth and expansion, a period in which higher education became available to anyone in Korea who wished to seek further study beyond the secondary level. In the past, university education was only for the best and the brightest, and those who could afford university education. Today, I would say that the opportunities available to young people are nearly limitless.
The challenge of higher education today, therefore, is no longer one of access. Rather, it has much more to do with making sure that higher education remains as vital and relevant to the education of young minds today as it was in previous decades.
In an age dominated by the flood of information and knowledge available on the web and other electronic media, an age where young people are literally bombarded by new information twenty-four hours of the day through television, mobile phones, PDAs, as well as a veritable explosion of new information delivery sources in the print media, universities today must redouble their efforts to engage young minds, to use innovative new teaching methods and tools, and to enrich the contents of what is being taught to a new generation of future leaders.
Thus, it is my view that if the past fifty years of higher education in Korea was understandably geared to providing greater and greater access to colleges and universities for our young people, the next fifty years will have to stress the qualitative aspects of higher education.
We must focus on producing future generations of not just ?well educated? individuals capable of competing on home ground, but ?extremely well educated as well as specialized? individuals who can compete easily on the world stage. We can do no less in this increasingly inter-dependent and globalized environment of the twenty-first century.
But how to achieve this goal?
At my own university, my colleagues and I have sought an answer through three fundamental steps: first, structural reforms; second, greater diversity; third, greater internationalization.
The first challenge, that of structural reforms, has been the hardest. It has involved long hours of study and debate as to what to keep and what to change. As is true of all universities everywhere, Seoul National University is a very special community of intellectuals who see themselves of keepers of tradition and learning. Often, this has meant resistance to change, even as my colleagues understood the need to change.
Gradually, however, we have been able to reach consensus on the need to transform how our faculties and departments operate, and how we work together to provide the best education for our students. Without going into too much detail, in the very near future, Seoul National University undergraduate students will be taught in a very different fashion, one that will increase their capacity to later specialize and excel in their chosen fields of concentration.
We have also reduced the number of new entrants by about 17 percent. This was a major step, but one which my colleagues and I feel is absolutely essential to raise the faculty-student ratio, and to make sure each student receives more attention from his or her professors.
Another effort in this direction is to fold redundant courses and streamline departmental boundaries. This will take more time, but it is imperative if we are to introduce new courses, promote inter-disciplinary collaboration, and create more innovative ways of teaching. If we succeed in this effort, we will free up more time for our faculty to pursue new research and also raise efficiency in terms of how we teach our students.
I am a firm believer in the notion that diversity is the essence of creativity. For too long, Seoul National University has had a tradition of selecting only those students with the best marks on the college entrance examinations. My colleagues and I have decided that we need to look more broadly at what sorts of students make for a truly vibrant student body. We have, as a result, instituted new entrance guidelines that select for not only the best entrance exam scores, but also for greater regional balance and diversity of background in our new students. It is our hope that this new mix of students from diverse backgrounds will lead to more creative energies on our campus.
This idea of introducing greater diversity naturally leads to the changes we are seeking to make in our faculty. Whereas in previous years virtually all of Seoul National University?s faculty members were Seoul National graduates, we today give preference to non-SNU graduates when we hire new faculty. We are also giving preference to women faculty members. Over the past several years, we have been encouraged by how our faculty is gradually evolving to a more open, more diverse community of scholars, and it is my hope that we will continue to evolve in this direction.
Last but not least, the third pillar of our evolution as Korea?s premier institution of higher learning is our thrust toward greater internationalization. My colleagues and I are in full agreement on the need to make Seoul National University a place where students from all countries around the globe can come to pursue higher education. At the same time, we are working very hard to create more and more avenues for Korean students to go abroad to study. Expanding international collaboration in research is another key objective.
All of these efforts ultimately increase the diversity and creativity of our student body and faculty, and it is our hope that greater internationalization will promote greater innovation and dynamism on our campus.
In order to promote greater openness and internationalization for our university, I have in the past twelve months, traveled to Southeast Asia, North and South America, and to Europe, not to mention Japan and China, in order to establish new links with partner universities in these regions.
This year, we will welcome over one thousand foreign undergraduate and graduate students to our campus, and we will be sending more than a hundred of our students overseas for one semester or more on formal exchange with partner universities. We plan to increase these numbers much more dramatically in the years ahead.
In a nutshell, what I have described above are the challenges that face our university. They are, I suspect, similar to any university that seeks to stay at the forefront of teaching and research. There are many other less fundamental challenges for universities that I have not mentioned: relations with the surrounding community, governmental relations that can at times be rocky, relations with peer institutions that must be maintained in a balanced fashion, just to name a few.
One very important factor to the success of any university, and one that I did not specifically mention, is the challenge of finding the funds to fuel future growth toward excellence. And this regard, it should be remembered that universities cannot achieve world status without large infusions of money needed to fund ground-breaking research, and offer the best education to its people. I believe that nations and societies must make firm commitments to their premier institutions of higher learning, and do so in the belief that investing in the progress of top institutions of higher learning is the best guarantee for the future of the society and nation.
In closing, may I state once again that my colleagues and I are delighted and honored to be here at Hokkaido University with our Japanese colleagues. We have many challenges in common, and I hope the discussion over the next two days will lead to new ideas and approaches to resolving our common challenges together in partnership. Please let me express my sincere appreciation to President Nakamura, Vice President Nakamura, and everyone at Hokkaido University for the meticulous preparation for this year?s joint seminar.
Thank you very much. (Arigato gozaimashita).
by President Chung Un-Chan
at the 7th Hokkaido-SNU Joint Symposium
Sapporo, Japan
8 July 2004
The Challenges Facing Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century:
The Case of Seoul National University
Thank you and Good Morning:
May I begin by saying that it is a great honor to be here today, to take part in the 7th Joint Symposium between our two universities
Since the beginning of the wonderful relationship between our two institutions, which began nearly a decade ago, we have successfully held six joint symposiums alternately in Sapporo and in Seoul. This year we are delighted and honored to attend the 2004 joint symposium in Hokkaido.
I believe that all of you here will agree that our two universities? collaboration over the past decade has been founded on mutual respect and the desire to broaden and deepen scholarly exchange in between our two academic communities. It is my firm belief that our achievements thus far could not have been realized without the vision and leadership shown by each and every individual scholar involved in our joint effort to promote collaboration in between our two universities. I know President Nakamura will agree with me that official agreements only go so far; it takes commitment and investment of time and effort on the part of every participant to make joint ventures such as ours a success.
I also believe that our two universities are well attuned to the challenges that we face in this century: in this fast-changing world environment, no single university, no matter how well-endowed or how big, can by itself seek to address the challenge of being at the forefront of research and innovation.
It is my firm conviction that we must collaborate across academic and national boundaries if we are to remain successful in the years to come. In this respect, I am encouraged by the fact that Hokkaido University and Seoul National University have worked together over the past decade to add value and promote greater efficiency in our joint research projects. I look forward to even closer partnership as we go ahead together toward the future.
I understand that my assignment for this morning is to introduce to you some of the core challenges facing higher education in Korea today. So, without further ado, please allow me now to outline what I see as the principal tasks facing Korean universities in general and, in particular, my own institution, Seoul National University.
Let me begin by tracing, in very large brushstrokes, the growth of university education in Korea from the early post-Korean War years. In the immediate aftermath of the war, in the early 1950s, the primary challenge facing Korean universities-- some twenty or so two- and four-year colleges ? was to produce a new generation of educated workforce capable of staffing the public and private sectors that had been decimated by the war. The emphasis was placed on simply educating a generation beyond the high school level, to a degree sufficient to understand complexities of ?modernity? as the concept was understood at the time.
The search for modernity meant stressing, among other subjects, the learning of foreign languages, especially the English language, so that the best students could go abroad to pursue further specialized study. And because the study of the law, economics and finance, as well as science and engineering were deemed essential to Korea?s development and modernization, these subjects naturally received the greatest investments and attracted the best students.
The 1950s was a period of great intellectual tumult and dynamism, in which scholarly energies, long suppressed by the 36 years of Japanese occupation as well as distorted by the immediate post-liberation confusion, saw a great flowering against the backdrop of increasing westernization and opening to the outside world.
The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a continuation in the expansion of higher education institutions as the college-age population grew at unprecedented rates-- this a function of the post-Korean War ?baby boom?, and also fueled by demand from business and industry as Korea?s economic development began to accelerate after 1962, the year marking the start of Korea?s successive Five-Year Development Plans. By the end of the decade, a university education was not an option, but a minimal requirement for young people to be considered for jobs with a future.
With the realization that its only dependable resource was its human capital, the Korean government invested heavily in the education sector, at times as high as nearly 30 percent of the annual budget. Such high levels of government spending on education proved further stimulus for the growth of universities, as existing institutions were joined by new ranks of two- and four-year institutions.
By 1965, for instance, there were already 162 colleges and universities, with over 140,000 enrolled students. The numbers become more remarkable in the 1980s: by 1985, Korea had 262 colleges and universities with nearly 1.5 million enrolled students. As of now, there are 361 colleges and universities in Korea, with a total enrolled student population of 2.8 million.
This explosive growth in terms of the numbers of institutions of higher learning, however, has not been matched in qualitative terms. It seems to me that it would have been unrealistic to expect corresponding growth in both quantitative and qualitative terms. In fact, I see the first fifty years of higher education in Korea after the war as a period of rapid growth and expansion, a period in which higher education became available to anyone in Korea who wished to seek further study beyond the secondary level. In the past, university education was only for the best and the brightest, and those who could afford university education. Today, I would say that the opportunities available to young people are nearly limitless.
The challenge of higher education today, therefore, is no longer one of access. Rather, it has much more to do with making sure that higher education remains as vital and relevant to the education of young minds today as it was in previous decades.
In an age dominated by the flood of information and knowledge available on the web and other electronic media, an age where young people are literally bombarded by new information twenty-four hours of the day through television, mobile phones, PDAs, as well as a veritable explosion of new information delivery sources in the print media, universities today must redouble their efforts to engage young minds, to use innovative new teaching methods and tools, and to enrich the contents of what is being taught to a new generation of future leaders.
Thus, it is my view that if the past fifty years of higher education in Korea was understandably geared to providing greater and greater access to colleges and universities for our young people, the next fifty years will have to stress the qualitative aspects of higher education.
We must focus on producing future generations of not just ?well educated? individuals capable of competing on home ground, but ?extremely well educated as well as specialized? individuals who can compete easily on the world stage. We can do no less in this increasingly inter-dependent and globalized environment of the twenty-first century.
But how to achieve this goal?
At my own university, my colleagues and I have sought an answer through three fundamental steps: first, structural reforms; second, greater diversity; third, greater internationalization.
The first challenge, that of structural reforms, has been the hardest. It has involved long hours of study and debate as to what to keep and what to change. As is true of all universities everywhere, Seoul National University is a very special community of intellectuals who see themselves of keepers of tradition and learning. Often, this has meant resistance to change, even as my colleagues understood the need to change.
Gradually, however, we have been able to reach consensus on the need to transform how our faculties and departments operate, and how we work together to provide the best education for our students. Without going into too much detail, in the very near future, Seoul National University undergraduate students will be taught in a very different fashion, one that will increase their capacity to later specialize and excel in their chosen fields of concentration.
We have also reduced the number of new entrants by about 17 percent. This was a major step, but one which my colleagues and I feel is absolutely essential to raise the faculty-student ratio, and to make sure each student receives more attention from his or her professors.
Another effort in this direction is to fold redundant courses and streamline departmental boundaries. This will take more time, but it is imperative if we are to introduce new courses, promote inter-disciplinary collaboration, and create more innovative ways of teaching. If we succeed in this effort, we will free up more time for our faculty to pursue new research and also raise efficiency in terms of how we teach our students.
I am a firm believer in the notion that diversity is the essence of creativity. For too long, Seoul National University has had a tradition of selecting only those students with the best marks on the college entrance examinations. My colleagues and I have decided that we need to look more broadly at what sorts of students make for a truly vibrant student body. We have, as a result, instituted new entrance guidelines that select for not only the best entrance exam scores, but also for greater regional balance and diversity of background in our new students. It is our hope that this new mix of students from diverse backgrounds will lead to more creative energies on our campus.
This idea of introducing greater diversity naturally leads to the changes we are seeking to make in our faculty. Whereas in previous years virtually all of Seoul National University?s faculty members were Seoul National graduates, we today give preference to non-SNU graduates when we hire new faculty. We are also giving preference to women faculty members. Over the past several years, we have been encouraged by how our faculty is gradually evolving to a more open, more diverse community of scholars, and it is my hope that we will continue to evolve in this direction.
Last but not least, the third pillar of our evolution as Korea?s premier institution of higher learning is our thrust toward greater internationalization. My colleagues and I are in full agreement on the need to make Seoul National University a place where students from all countries around the globe can come to pursue higher education. At the same time, we are working very hard to create more and more avenues for Korean students to go abroad to study. Expanding international collaboration in research is another key objective.
All of these efforts ultimately increase the diversity and creativity of our student body and faculty, and it is our hope that greater internationalization will promote greater innovation and dynamism on our campus.
In order to promote greater openness and internationalization for our university, I have in the past twelve months, traveled to Southeast Asia, North and South America, and to Europe, not to mention Japan and China, in order to establish new links with partner universities in these regions.
This year, we will welcome over one thousand foreign undergraduate and graduate students to our campus, and we will be sending more than a hundred of our students overseas for one semester or more on formal exchange with partner universities. We plan to increase these numbers much more dramatically in the years ahead.
In a nutshell, what I have described above are the challenges that face our university. They are, I suspect, similar to any university that seeks to stay at the forefront of teaching and research. There are many other less fundamental challenges for universities that I have not mentioned: relations with the surrounding community, governmental relations that can at times be rocky, relations with peer institutions that must be maintained in a balanced fashion, just to name a few.
One very important factor to the success of any university, and one that I did not specifically mention, is the challenge of finding the funds to fuel future growth toward excellence. And this regard, it should be remembered that universities cannot achieve world status without large infusions of money needed to fund ground-breaking research, and offer the best education to its people. I believe that nations and societies must make firm commitments to their premier institutions of higher learning, and do so in the belief that investing in the progress of top institutions of higher learning is the best guarantee for the future of the society and nation.
In closing, may I state once again that my colleagues and I are delighted and honored to be here at Hokkaido University with our Japanese colleagues. We have many challenges in common, and I hope the discussion over the next two days will lead to new ideas and approaches to resolving our common challenges together in partnership. Please let me express my sincere appreciation to President Nakamura, Vice President Nakamura, and everyone at Hokkaido University for the meticulous preparation for this year?s joint seminar.
Thank you very much. (Arigato gozaimashita).