President LEE Jang Moo and Harvard President Drew Faust had a meeting on August 24 and agreed to extend their partnership. 

Song Ho-keun, a sociology professor at Seoul National University, who accompanied Lee, said, “The meeting between the two school presidents means that Harvard considers SNU its partner in Asia.”

“We have tremendous interest in studies in Asia,” said Harvard University President Drew Faust.

Faust made her comment after Seoul National University president Lee Jang-moo described the international campus the university is planning to build in Siheung - a city near Incheon International Airport.

The first international campus of the state-run university will have English as an official language and provide a higher level of international education not only to domestic students but also to foreigners, including those from China and Japan, according to Lee.

“We would like some help from Harvard University since you must be interested in the Far East due to the large number of students there,” Lee said.

Although Seoul National and the Siheung city government signed a memorandum of understanding for the project in June, this is the first time Lee officially confirmed the site for the international campus. Lee also offered to provide space for Harvard to set up a branch inside Seoul National University’s main campus in western Seoul.

“We completed an international house inside our campus two months ago and are inviting some leading universities to establish branches. We will provide space for the University of Tokyo,” he said. During the visit, Lee offered to donate 400 volumes of reproductions of classical Korean texts dating back to the Joseon Dynasty to Harvard. The original works are currently preserved at the Kyujanggak Royal Library at SNU. The large book donation is the second by the university. The first beneficiary was the Bodleian Library at Oxford University last March.

The presidents noted that there has already been collaborative work between the universities. The late Edward Wagner, for example, taught Korean studies at Harvard for 35 years and worked for five years at Seoul National. There are 60 Harvard graduates at Seoul National University, making Harvard the largest foreign supplier of professors at SNU. Faust said Korea has the third largest contingent of foreign students at Harvard.

September 3, 2009
SNU PR Office