[KS] IUC programs

[Gari Keith Ledyard]

	Like others I've been taking in the postings on learning Korean.
I agree with just about everything John Duncan and Ross King have been
saying.  I too studied Korean at the Army Language School (later and still
now DLI), graduating in May 1954.  I felt highly challenged by a
completely new and strange language.  A few of the teachers were very
good, some were hopeless incompetents, but most were average and wished
they had some other job that paid as well.  The program emphasized
military stuff too much; weeks and months were wasted on leaning the
Korean for things like "75mm recoilless rifle" and mouthing stilted Korean
dialogues with lines like, "Follow that man in the black overcoat."  At
the end I spoke better than the top two thirds of the class, but that
wasn't saying much.  Such spoken Korean as I did learn was learned in
Korea after graduating by developing friends in tea rooms and sharing
their Korean lives to the extent possible for a low ranking GI.  Even at
that, I never learned to speak Korean really well, at least to my own
satisfaction.  But I did bond with Korea through that experience.
	My experience at Columbia, which is comparable to UCLA in the high
proportion of heritage students in the Korean language classes, is exactly
the same as John Duncan's.
	Speaking of studying Russian, it made me recall the quality of the
spoken Korean that has been achieved by students in the universities and
specialist schools in the Soviet Union/Russia.  I've heard five or six
graduates from those programs and they were all impressive indeed.  If
they are typical, then I can only conclude that we should study Russian
programs in Korean and learn their lessons.
	Back in the 80s and early 90s I tried to talk up in Korea the
Inter-University Committee (IUC) approach to graduate level special
language programs in Korea, but found no one who seriously thought it
could happen.  The fact is, there is a sovereignty problem there.  The
Taibei and Tokyo/Kyoto centers are organized, funded, and run by
committees of senior professors in the Chinese and Japanese programs in
the U.S., with the approval and cooperation of their respective
universities.  They decide what to teach and how, who to hire, who to
fire, textbooks and syllabus issues, salaries, and everything else.  For
some reason, in Japan and Taiwan you can do this without people feeling
that their national honor is threatened.  When I explained the IUC concept
to Korean officials and educators, I was universally told that any
teaching program in Korea must be under the oversight of the Ministry of
Education.  I'm not sure how that position is formulated legally, but
believe me, it is formulated.  And obviously, no American IUC committee
will accept any "outside" (in this case, inside!) authority over its
academic program.  I was told, by people who were sympathetic to the IUC
approach and aware of its success in China and Taiwan, that the only way
to establish a program with the IUC advantages is to work in cooperation
with an established Korean educational institution under MOE oversight.
But it doesn't seem that American program directors are ready for that.
But surely there must be some way to get this thing done.  Why should
American graduate students in Chinese and Japanese studies be able to
polish their language skills culturally rich, real Chinese and Japanese
environments, but students in Korean studies not be able to do this?

Gari Ledyard