[KS] Korean Studies in Oxford

[jrpking]

Dear Brother Anthony: 

Nobody else seems to have risen to your call for ???outrage??? about this, ???if indeed it is the case that a refusal from the Korean side to continue to provide funding is to blame.??? I think the jury is still out on the latter point, but will go ahead and risk some more outrage with the following comments.

I had the pleasure of starting my career as a lecturer in 1990 at SOAS, University of London, where I was able to observe first-hand some of the hurly-burly of the early days of Korean Studies programs in Great Britain until 1994. Without meaning any disrespect to our colleagues at either Oxford or the Korea Foundation, I recall how shocked, amazed and disappointed all of us at SOAS were in 1992 or so when the newly-appointed president (Lew Hyuck-in, if memory serves) of the newly-launched Korea Foundation, announced a major gift to Oxford to establish a program and lectureship there in Korean Studies. 

I say ???shocked??? because it seemed painfully obvious to us then at SOAS that England was a very small country, with very meager resources for anything at all in its universities ??? let alone something as exotic (for the English) as Korean Studies ??? and above all with an extremely low level of interest in and extremely little historical experience with, Korea and Koreans. This meant, for example, that student numbers at SOAS were always incredibly low in Korean Studies, at least in the early 1990s. What 17-year old Briton in his or her right mind would choose already at that age (as one had to) to take a degree course in Korean Studies? 

At that time, SOAS already had 5 full-time appointments in Korean Studies (myself, Jaehoon Yeon, Martina Deuchler, Youngsook Pak, Keith Howard) as well as other researchers for whom Korea was more than a sideline. It was very well positioned in terms of institutional history and resources (human and otherwise) to become _the_ major center for Korean Studies for all of western Europe in a relatively short time, if only some funding could have been obtained at the right time. At the time, the University of Newcastle was running a program in Korean Studies, too, along with Sheffield University. Newcastle???s program folded some years ago (I don???t recall anybody lamenting its passing).

It was clear enough to anybody who knew the situation in England at the time that England simply was not big enough ??? that there simply was not enough interest or indigenous funding commitment ??? to support more than one or two serious programs in Korean Studies at most. And it was also pretty clear to all of us that a) Oxford as an institution had no genuine long-term interest in Korea or Korean Studies, and b) if it really _did_ have such a genuine commitment to the study of Korea at the institutional level, it was very well placed to find the means to do it right. It was precisely at that juncture that the Korea Foundation and its new president, acting more on ???myeongmun daehak??? impulse than good prior information gathering (and apparently oblivious to any other factors) dumped a rather large sum of money on Oxford and then continued to fund it. To what extent the program has been run there with Oxford-internal resources, I do not know, but I would be surprised if there was anything like ???matching funds??? coming from the Oxford end.

It is indeed unfortunate when any Korean Studies program folds, and especially when it does so despite the very hard work and commitment of our colleagues running it. But if I were the Korea Foundation looking around the world at the past achievements and future prospects of Korean Studies programs in relation to its all-too-inadequate budget and in the light of the unprecedented (and growing) clamor for Korean Studies in parts of the world a lot less expensive than England and a lot more genuinely interested in Korea than England, I???d be looking back at my investment in Oxford in the early 1990s and wishing I had invested that particular chunk of change in SOAS.



--
Ross King
Associate Professor of Korean, University of British Columbia
and 
Dean, Korean Language Village, Concordia Language Villages