[KS] Vulnerabilities of Korean Studies

Clark, Donald dclark at trinity.edu
Fri Apr 25 12:03:48 EDT 2008


Dear All,
     	Following Gari Ledyard's comment, and thinking about the North
American advisory group to the Korea Foundation, I want to add an
additional point.     	
	In my experience the Korea Foundation has ignored the potential
that exists on liberal arts campuses across America, for the
"Koreanization" of existing Asian Studies curricula.  Here are thousands
of bright undergraduates who will go on to graduate school and careers
teaching anthropology, history, political science, etc. etc., who should
be encouraged to use Korea in their future teaching.  They may not have
much to do with the Kyujanggak, ever, but they can turn students on to
Korea across this country, if they themselves have some exposure to it.
      The Korea Foundation appears to know nothing about this potential
pool of scholar-teachers and their potential effect raising awareness
about Korea in American higher education.  The fact that most of these
potential teachers are "non-heritage" represents in my opinion the
future viability of "Korean Studies," not as a balkanized special
interest that is easy to cut in hard times, but as an essential
component of the Asian Studies, or even disciplinary, curriculum.
      "China and India" are sucking all the oxygen out of undergraduate
resources for education about Asia.  In my service with the liberal arts
consortium primarily concerned with teaching about Asia (
www.asianetwork.org ) I have found much enthusiasm for Korea and
spreading the word about Korea in the 170+ member colleges that range
from Macalester to Eckerd to Redlands to Bard.  "The field," however, is
mesmerized by the great centers that produce numbers of specialists who
appear indifferent to the possibilities for the development of Korean
Studies in the wide world of undergraduate education--meaning classroom
teaching of smart students (directly, not by teaching assistants),
guiding them to study Korea, to study abroad in Korea, and to make
Korean themes the subjects of their senior theses in history,
anthropology, and the like.
      If "Korean Studies" is to outlive the wave of heritage students
and become a permanent part of American education, it should pay more
attention to the millions of students who attend liberal arts colleges
and would be enchanted by Korea if only there were someone to open the
window for them. 
Don Clark 

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<<------------ KoreanStudies mailing list DIGEST ------------>>
 

Today's Topics:

   1. Re: korean studies at the university of california in
      jeopardy (Ross King)
   2. Re: korean studies at the university of california in
      jeopardy (Matthew Shapiro)
   3. Invitation to a conference on the future Nordpolitik of South
      Korea (Bernhard Seliger)
   4.  korean studies at the university of california in jeopardy
      (gkl1 at columbia.edu)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:41:54 -0700 (PDT)
From: Ross King <jrpking at interchange.ubc.ca>
Subject: Re: [KS] korean studies at the university of california in
	jeopardy
To: Ruediger Frank <ruediger.frank at univie.ac.at>,	Korean Studies
	Discussion List <koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws>,	Korean Studies
Discussion
	List <koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws>
Message-ID:
	<16541918.21451209055314457.JavaMail.myubc2 at brahms.my.ubc.ca>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Thanks to all who have weighed in so far on this. 

Rudiger Frank's comments are well taken. When he says this, though: 

"East Asian Studies are harder to attack than Korean Studies"

I am struck by the extent to which this particular discussion in
general, and the broader issue of Korean Studies support in general,
ignores or downplays the crucial importance AND utter vulnerability and
abject neglect of Korean language programs. 

What is getting cut everywhere (or at least, what is easiest to cut
everywhere) are part-time, soft money, short contract Korean language
teachers. 

How paradoxical that at the moment in Korean history when (South) Korea
has more money than ever, and the popularity of Korean language studies
has grown so much as to start attracting, for the first time ever,
significant numbers of non-heritage learners to our programs, 

a) the new LMB regime has clawed back 10% of the Korea Foundation's
budget for grandiose 'super canal' and 'English language immersion'
schemes, 

b) other South Korean 'language promotion agencies' that support Korean
have turned their collective backs on North America, even as their
budgets increase (the 'Sejong Institutes' scheme, a copycat of the PRC's
'Confucius Institutes'), 

c) UBC this year turned away 80 non-heritage learners of Korean because
of a lack of budget for Korean language teachers (the original message
from UC-Berkeley was that it may well savage its K lg program; what's
happening at other schools?), 

d) even North American colleagues on the Korea Foundation's advisory
board routinely leave language programs out of discussions on strategic
planning for the future. 

The first thing that gets cut in hard times is not just Korean Studies,
but Korean _language_ teachers and programs, but there are good
arguments to suggest that they should be the first place to START
investing, and that those investments should take a more aggressive and
long-term perspective. 

Cheers,



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




------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:05:17 -0700 (PDT)
From: Matthew Shapiro <karimunjawa at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [KS] korean studies at the university of california in
	jeopardy
To: Korean Studies Discussion List <koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws>
Message-ID: <80577.75787.qm at web36607.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

Dear all, 

I have little to say about the financial issues
discussed in the previous emails. I would like to
address some of the comments made by Rob Oppenheim,
who commented on Korean studies with a focus on
technology. Granted, funding for technology transfer
incubators, etc. is much different than standard
departmental funding in Korean studies, the need to
focus on Korea's technological advancements is
paramount. This is a not-so-new but relatively
understudied dimension to Korea's political economy.
Sharing Korea-related funding with business projects
may not be appropriate, but such projects themselves
represent Korea's current development trajectory and
must be studied carefully. (In the last 10-15 years,
Korea and Taiwan have replaced France and the UK as
the 4th and 5th most-patenting countries in the world,
based on USPTO patent grants. No other countries have
experienced such changes in this same period, and
there is no indication that it will change in the near
future.)

Best regards,

Matt Shapiro
USC now, Illinois Institute of Technology in the fall

.
.
.
.


 
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------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:50:47 +0000 (GMT)
From: Bernhard Seliger <bjseliger at yahoo.de>
Subject: [KS] Invitation to a conference on the future Nordpolitik of
	South	Korea
To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
Message-ID: <416343.19216.qm at web26304.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

?Invitation to a conference on the future Nordpolitik of South Korea
?
The Nordpolitik of the new government and the perspectives of
educational programmes for unification are the focus of a conference of
the Institute for Peace Affairs (IPA) and Hanns Seidel Foundation Korea
in April 2008. 
?
Date: April 29, 2008, 16.00 ? 19.00
Place: Sejong-Hotel Seoul
?
1. Opening
?
Opening Speech: Hyun Kyung-Dae (President IPA)
Greeting: Dr. Bernhard Seliger (HSS)
Keynote Speech: Song Yong-Dae (former Vice Minister in the Ministry of
Unification)
?
Moderator: ????? Chon Jeong-Hwan (Adjunct Professor, Korean Defense
University)
?
2. First Session ?The Nordpolitik of the Lee Myung-Bak administration
and perspectives for inter-Korean relations?
?
Presenter: ??????? Seo Chae-Jin (KINU)
Discussion: ????? Chae Seong-Ho (Prof., Chungang-University)
??????????????????????? Ko Yoo-Hwang (Prof., Dongkuk-University)
?
3. Second Session ?State and development of unification education?
?
Presenter: ??????? Han Man-Kil (KEDI)
Discussion:?????? Chong Dong-Seob (KFTA)
Chong Yong-Min (Association for Peace, Reconciliation and unification
education)
?
All interested persons are invited! Conference language is Korean
without translation. 

?
Dr. Bernhard Seliger
Hanns Seidel Stiftung?- Seoul Office
Room 501,?Soo Young?Bldg., 64-1, Hannam 1 Dong, Yongsan-gu
Seoul, Republic of Korea
Tel.+ 82 2 790 5344
Fax. + 82 2 790 5346
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Message: 4
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:35:39 -0400
From: gkl1 at columbia.edu
Subject: [KS]  korean studies at the university of california in
	jeopardy
To: Korean Studies List <koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws>
Message-ID: <20080424203539.8qs450c1s0g8k4wo at cubmail.cc.columbia.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain;	charset=ISO-8859-1;	DelSp="Yes";
	format="flowed"

It?s sad to read these postings on the situation in Berkeley, but as  
one of the few
people in Korean Studies to have graduated from the EALC department  
(then called the
Department of Oriental Languages) for all three of my degrees, I must  
say that I agree
with everything, whether negative or positive, that has been said. I  
can think of few
East Asian Studies departments less worthy of sympathy and support in  
the situation
Berkeley?s department now faces.
     When I was there things were different. I arrived in the Spring  
semester of 1956. In
those times Korean Studies hardly existed in the U.S. Suh Doo-Soo was  
teaching Korean
language and literature at the University of Washington, and Edward  
Wagner was getting
things started in language and history at Harvard. Hawaii a program  
atarting up, and Columbia had language
courses but no professor. But that was about it. The people in  
Berkeley were all in the
Chinese or Japanese field, except for one, Michael Rogers, then the  
youngest, who worked
in Korean as well. Since I wanted to work in the pre-modern centuries  
and be able to read
Korean source materials, I studied Classical Chinese and modern  
Japanese to supplement my
Korean, learned in the Army Language School. All three of my theses at  
Berkeley were,
with the approval and encouragement of the faculty, on Korean subjects  
using Korean
sources. I can?t think of any  better training for I what I actually  
have done for the
last half century. I love everything about those years and will never  
forget those
wonderful professors, who were also inspired human beings.
     But it wasn?t Korean Studies. I had created my own Korean Studies  
program, but it
left Berkeley with me. Mike Rogers was a brilliant scholar, a very  
good man, and he came to be a close friend as well. But he
wasn?t a developer. He did establish the language program now  
threatened, and he offered
a course in Korean culture, but neither he nor any of the chairs of  
the department after
I left (1963) ever got beyond that, while other departments around the  
country, including
the one in which I served at Columbia, were developing programs and  
attracting students.
The state of the field now, though not perfect, is healthy and getting  
better all the
time. But at Berkeley, studied inattention, shameful indifference, and  
incompetent
administration was what you have had over most of the years since the  
80s. And it?s not as if Korean Studies was the only
thing that suffered. A good number of scholars of China and Japan have  
arrived at
Berkeley over the years, and not a few of them later left, discouraged  
or disappointed,
for other programs or careers.
     The truth is, as Mark Peterson and others have suggested, that  
the management and
administration of that department has been without imagination or  
energy, and in some
cases irresponsible and incompetent. None of the chairs ever gave much  
thought to Korea;
some of them none at all. When Mike Rogers died a few years ago, not a  
single one of his
EALC professorial colleagues showed up at his memorial service. In the  
entire world of
Berkeley academe, two Korean language teachers, Claire You (who runs  
the program) and the
long-serving teacher Kay Richards, and David Keightley, a professor of  
Ancient Chinese
history in the History department, were there. James Bosson, a former  
Berkeley Mongolist
(another of Mike?s languages) was the only academic from outside the  
campus besides
myself. As a Berkeley BA, MA, and PhD, I felt deeply ashamed.

     Of the many pertinent comments made in the postings in regard to  
Korean Studies
generally, those by Ruediger Frank made a special point for me: the  
need to have the
support of one?s colleagues in the Chinese, Japanese, (and if you're  
really on top of things, Vietnamese--talk about a
struggling specialty!) fields. The biggest change for me at Columbia  
was the 1980s, when
the wave of Korean-Americans (my first Hallyu) began to flood the  
classrooms for
language study. At 10 credit-points per year (a full third of the  
student?s tuition) they
contributed a whopping amount of tuition credits for the department,  
and made the
administrators sit up and notice. But most importantly, those  
enrollments made the professors in the
Chinese and Japanese fields notice, and gave me an argument that they  
listened to. The
Korea Foundation grants and endowments of the early 90s were big, but  
that tuition income
made colleagues take heed and notice what Korea was doing. In recent
years,
our professors in the Chinese and Japanese fields have been visiting  
Korea, and for those
that I have talked with, it has been a real eye-opener. Since the  
early 90s Columbia has
added four tenure-line appointments and greatly expanded the language  
program. Other
universities have done better than that, including the real Korean  
Studies gem at the
University of California, the program at UCLA. (Given Berkeley?s utter  
failure to make
any use of the Asami Collection of Korean manuscripts, that fabulous  
resource should be
transferred immediately to Los Angeles.)
     Beyond practical support, Chinese and Japanese studies are  
important contexts for
Korean studies. East Asia is greater than the sum of its parts, and  
Korea is now a big
part and has always been an important part. There is a tendency for  
Korea emphasizers to
see Korea all alone, and somehow in academe a victim of China and  
Japan all over again.
This solipsism is not good. Many people in Korea and in the overseas  
Korean communities
tend to see the existence of Korean Studies in the universities of the  
world as a
validation of their worth and importance, but give little attention to  
the work we produce.
     For many younger overseas Koreans, the presence on campus of a  
Korean language
program and serious people specializing in Korea reinforces their  
identity and gives them
an added consciousness of Korea?s importance. That?s fine, but Korean  
studies has to be
about more than identity. Much as I?m grateful for Christine Hong?s  
cri de coeur, I sense
between the lines of her plea to us a feeling that the loss of the  
Korean language
program would be a blow to her own identity over there in the English  
department. I do
not at all look down upon such a sentiment, but I do suggest that a  
good deal of Korea?s
financial support for our Korean Studies is driven by an urge simply  
to get the attention
of the world. We still have some way to go to achieve the maturity and  
breadth that the Chinese and Japanese programs have attained. It's not  
that we don't have many fine scholars, but that the general quality is  
still uneven and the total field is not fully fleshed out.
     I have no desire to see Korea ignored, quite the contrary, but  
the substance of
Korean Studies is important. It?s our job to understand Korea and to  
spread understanding
and appreciation of its role in the world, in all planes, be they  
economic or political,
or in history, culture or the arts. So Korean Studies programs must  
exist and grow. The
heart and soul of any Korean Studies program is the Korean language,  
but as Ross King
insists, it is always the most vulnerable part. Invariably its  
teachers collect some
of the lowest salaries in the university, and professors of various  
fields in language
and culture departments collect salaries well below the level of those  
in the social
sciences, who are out-earned by those in the physical sciences. Forget  
about salaries in
the law, medical, and business schools; the Schwarneggars of the world  
don?t touch them
much. In this context, the situation in Berkeley is one that hits us  
all. Though Berkeley itself may be undeserving of rescue, as some of  
us have pointed out, it still is not good that any Korean Studies  
program--even Berkeley's very minor minor, is under attack.

Gari Ledyard
King Sejong Professor Emeritus of Korean Studies
Columbia University in the City of New York


Quoting Ruediger Frank <ruediger.frank at univie.ac.at>:


[Hide Quoted Text]
Dear all,

no matter what the merits of a specific program, I guess we all  agree
in our
unhappiness about the closing down of Korean Studies at  Berkeley, or  
at any other
university.

I'd like, however, to highlight what Dr. Peterson has mentioned in   
his statement - the
fact that KS stands alone once the going gets  tough, and inevitably  
suffers most if
compared to Chinese or  Japanese Studies (CS or JS). In Europe, we  
have (had) quite
similar  problems, which prompted the Korea Foundation to ask Jay  
Lewis of  Oxford (or
was it the other way round?) to organize a workshop on  the future of  
Korean Studies on
our continent. A number of scholars  including myself have  
participated in this
workshop, tried to  formulate ideas from their various perspectives,  
and then presented
the results at the 2007 biannual conference of the Association for   
Korean Studies in
Europe (AKSE) in Dourdan/Paris. These were the  single contributions:

1) 'Proposals to Secure a Critical Mass of Professorial Positions in   
Korean Studies at
Strategic Universities in Europe'
by Marion Eggert, Ruhr-Unversit?t, Bochum, Germany
2) '(The?) Future for Korean Studies: Finding ways to Cooperate with   
East Asian Studies
and Social Sciences and Avoid Marginalization or  How to Organize  
Interdisciplinarity'
by Ruediger Frank, University of Vienna
3) 'Proposals for Fostering Future Generations of Korean Studies   
Scholars: The Role of
the Korea Foundation Fellowship Programs'
by Carl J. Saxer, Copenhagen Business School
4) 'Proposals to Use Libraries and Museums to the Full to Support  and  
Disseminate
Korean Studies Throughout Europe'
by Beth McKillop, Keeper, Asian Department Victoria and Albert Museum,
London

Jay has ever since, as far as I understand, communicated the results   
at a number of
occasions. The full text of the papers presented at  the 2006 meeting  
can be found here
(http://www.akse.uni-kiel.de/upload_files/2006_06_Oxford%20Papers%20on%2
0KS%20Future.pdf). If that link doesn't work, send me a personal message
(ruediger.frank at univie.ac.at) and I forward the file to you. I also hope
Jay reads this and adds his own comments as well as an updated version
of our discussions on  
the
matter.

I dealt with the issue of cooperation. My own experience at   
Humboldt-University, where
the flourishing program in Korean Studies  - the only one in Germany
with two
professorships and a strong focus  on contemporary affairs - was  
closed for a number of
reasons that  still freak me out, has taught me that support from CS  
and JS is  crucial
for the survival of KS. The much more positive experience  now in  
Vienna where JS and CS
are among my closest partners  demonstrates that even the success of  
KS can be strongly
enhanced  with support by CS and JS. On a side note, I can also tell  
you that  selfish,
uncooperative and unprofessional behavior by KS will of  course not be  
of much help in
such a relationship.

I don't want to go on for too long; what I wanted to say in support   
of and reaction to
Dr. Peterson's remarks is that hoping for  selfless help by CS and JS  
in case of a
threatened KS program or  position might be unrealistic under the  
usual circumstances.
In  other words, if the question is "us or them", they will of course   
say "them" and
sacrifice KS in order to save themselves. This is not  nice, but quite  
understandable
and, frankly, hard to criticize. So  what is the solution? Well, it's  
easy: make our
problem theirs. In  other words, create structures in which KS are an  
integral part of
CS and JS, and vice versa. East Asian Studies are harder to attack   
than Korean Studies.
Similar strategies can be followed with regard  to social sciences or  
other disciplines.
Such a strategy has its   downside and risks, and I discuss some of  
them in my paper.
However,  it should at least be considered if we want to avoid the   
continuation of the
same sad procedure as at Humboldt, Berkeley and  many other places.

My best wishes,

Rudiger


--
Prof. Dr. Rudiger Frank
Chair of East Asian Economy and Society
University of Vienna
East Asian Institute
Spitalgasse 2 Hof 2
1090 Vienna
- Austria -

phone: +43-1-4277 43871
fax:   +43-1-4277 43849
web:   www.koreanstudies.de/frank
email: ruediger.frank at univie.ac.at






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