From The Korea Times:
Korean universities are teaming up with famous overseas universities to speed up their globalization.
Yonsei University will cooperate academically with Columbia University, one of the Ivy League universities in the United States.
The university's business school announced a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Columbia University on Thursday for collaboration on research and case studies and organizing joint lectures.
That's good news, but it's such a preliminary step. I hope that there will be more out-of-the box thinking, rather than just hoping "famous overseas universities," combined with infamous Korean hubris and hullaballoo, will be the magic pill that will help Korean ones. This kind of thinking makes me a bit nervous:
Based on our cooperation with Columbia, Yonsei could become a center of business education in East Asia,'' said Kim Tae-hyun, dean of Yonsei School of Business.
I don't believe merely having academic and faculty exchanges with Columbia alone will do this; it will take a deep commitment to overhauling the very things that have prevented Korea's academic institutions to rise along with the nation's economic fortunes.
Interestingly enough, on the Columbia Business School's website, there is only mention (albeit before the fact) of the Dean's intention to discuss "academic exchange initiatives" as part of his tour of several other countries, including stops in Singapore, Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, and Seoul.
Since the article mentions the Dean meeting representatives from Hong Kong for the same purpose, one would assume that he signed a MoU there as well? And given Hong Kong's much longer experience in international business, and given China's increasing international business appeal, along with the sharp drop in foreign investment in Korea and that country's loss of two major foreign research centers, one wonders if a mere MoU truly points to anything like Yonsei becoming "a center for business education in Asia."
I've been saying for a long time that the wages of hostility to foreigners and foreign business will be them simply up and moving to China, or somewhere else where they're actually really wanted. And I think it's finally starting to happen.
Anti-foreigner sentiment in education drove my US History class out of legality, which was the most concrete manifestation for me of my personal experience with anti-American, anti-Japanese, and anti-foreigner sentiment coming together (yeah, I still take it personally).
Newspapers and magazines talk about "slavery to the United States" in terms of the Free Trade Agreement, the media and government make it difficult for foreign companies to make money here, and it's hard to say who has the worse image in the media here – foreign English teachers or American GI's.
Check out what the Christian Science Monitor has to say about these issues. If the even-handed CSM is talking already talking about this – perhaps it's something worth paying attention to?
And back to the issue of exchanges, as a case in point, both the private high school I quit first, and the Korean boarding school I quit the most recently quit wanted me to create a sister relationship with Phillips Academy Andover, where I am an alumnus, and, they assumed (erroneously) I might have some sway.
In both cases, the key question for me was "what is Andover going to get out of it?" which was a question neither school could really give me. They just wanted a plaque on the wall. I sent out a couple emails, but never really made much of an effort past that, since I wasn't really able to answer any questions the schools had for me – for me, it wasn't an issue worth pursuing, nor embarrassing myself over.
In the end, it seemed pretty arrogant to expect a school as respected as that – that's why they were being approached, right? – to perhaps open its doors to Korean students, make administrative room for them, perhaps cut some kind of reduced tuition breaks, but not have anything thought out what exactly our own school wanted, and what our school could offer in return. And they certainly weren't going to spend any money on anything.
They wanted a plaque and bragging rights to attract more, better students.
I'm not saying that this is all Yonsei wants in this case, but I don't see much thinking outside of the "what can we get" and the PR box on this one. Thinking in terms of long-term, ground-up reforms along with the benefits that exchange and interaction with the outside world will bring would be better than just talking about how the relationship is going to make us the "best," or "center" or "hub" of something.
That would be a lot better than the Dean of Yonsei's Business School talking in terms of "centers" and hubs again, even as the business environment here is definitely taking a turn for the worse, after merely signing an MoU with an American Ivy League school.
I do hope Yonsei and other schools can improve their international standing, but from personal experience and observation, the road to international academic recognition is paved with MoU's, sister school relationships, and other pieces of meaningless paper and programs that only benefit a few students, rather than the school, and by extension, the nation.
