[KS] Teaching English in Korea
JONGMIN PAEK
jongmin at sbcglobal.net
Tue Sep 15 23:06:58 EDT 2009
What a timing! I just was asked by Education Director of Korean Council General in San Francisco to forward the information about teaching English in Korea. And here it is.
EPIK
English Program in Korea
S. Korean Government sponsored - The 'EPIK (English Program in Korea)' program is inviting adventurous young, responsible, enthusiastic native English speakers who are motivated to share knowledge with students and teachers through the Korean Consulate General in San Francisco.
Benefits
1. Monthly Salary: 1.8~2.7million KRW (approximately, 1,200~2,300 USD)
2. Accommodation (free single furnished housing)
3. Entrance and Exit allowance (each 1.3 million KRW)
4. Medical insurance (50% of your premiums paid by your employer)
5. One-off settlement allowance (300,000 KRW), etc.
Eligibility
- Be a citizen of a country where the national language is English.
* Ethnic Koreans with legal residencies are also eligible.
- Have completed a bachelor’s degree in any major.
- Be fluent and proficient in the English language.(*Korean fluency is not required)
Required Documents (www.epik.go.kr)
- A personal essay, Personal medical assessment, Two sealed and signed recommendation letters, A copy of diploma(Apostilled), Two sealed transcripts, One criminal record check(Apostilled, State level), A copy of passport photo page, A copy of regal residency certificate(for Korean Nationals only), etc
Duty
- Assisting with or jointly conducting English classes with a Korean co-teacher.
Contract Period: one year (can renew the contract)
- February 2010 placement: February 26, 2010 ~ February 25, 2011
* includes 10-day unpaid mandatory orientation in late Feb
Application Procedure: On a first come, first serve basis
- Submission of application to the Korean Consulate -> documents screening and interview by Korean Consulate -> Final Screening by EPIK Office in Korea
* Download the EPIK application from www.epik.go.kr and submit application documents in the mail or in person to the Korean Consulate General in San Francisco.
☞ For more info, contact the Korean Consulate General in San Francisco
☎ 415-921-2251(ext106,108) /*email: jade0516 at gmail.com
Or please visit http://www.epik.go.kr
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TaLK PROGRAM
Teach and Learn in Korea
The 'TaLK' (Teach & Learn in Korea), a program of the Korean Ministry of Education, Science & Technology, is inviting adventurous global leaders to teach English to students and to experience and learn about Korean culture. Participants will receive Korean government scholarships and teach English in after-school classes of Korean elementary schools while enjoying cultural programs during their free time.
Benefits:
1. Monthly allowance: 1.5 million KRW (approximately, 1,200 USD)
2. Accommodation (a studio-type room, or a home-stay etc.)
3. Round-trip Airfare, Health Insurance Cover
4. Opportunities to participate in cultural programs
Eligibility
- Be a citizen of a country where the national language is English.
* Ethnic Koreans with legal residencies are also eligible.
- Have completed two or more years of education at an accredited university,
* Ethnic Koreans who are in their 1st or 2nd year of college are eligible
Required documents
- One Lesson Plan, Two sealed and signed recommendation letters, Two sealed transcripts, One Original criminal record check(County level), One copy of passport photo page, One copy of permanent residency certificate(for Korean Nationals only)
Duty : Working for the designated elementary schools in rural areas in Korea
*Teaching English in after-school classes: 15 hours per week
Contract Term
- Either 6 months or one year, starting August 2009.
* Feb. 2010 – July. 2010 (six months) * Feb. 2010 - Jan, 2011 (one year)
l The contract may be extended for an additional period not to exceed two years in total.
Application Deadline: Dec 16th, 2009
l Application is accepted on a first come, first serve basis: applicants who have successfully passed the interview and submitted the complete documents without error will be accepted first
l Our preference will be given to the early applicants by 20, Nov, 2009.
Application Procedure
l Only Online application at www.talk.go.kr -> Documents screening and interview by Korean Consulate -> Final Screening by TaLK Office in Korea
Contact Information
Korean Consulate General in San Francisco ☎415-921-2251(ext 106, 108)/email: jade0516 at gmail.com
3500 Clay Street, San Francisco,CA 94118
----------------------------------------------------------
Min Paek
--- On Tue, 9/15/09, sethmj at jmu.edu <sethmj at jmu.edu> wrote:
From: sethmj at jmu.edu <sethmj at jmu.edu>
Subject: [KS] Teaching English in Korea
To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
Date: Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 5:21 PM
Do people have any recommendations for U.S. college students who would like to teach English in Korea? I am looking for information about reliable programs I could comfortably suggest to interested students.
Thanks,
Michael Seth
---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:31:39 -0400
>From: koreanstudies-request at koreaweb.ws
>Subject: Koreanstudies Digest, Vol 75, Issue 21
>To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
>
>Send Koreanstudies mailing list submissions to
> koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
>
>To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> http://koreaweb.ws/mailman/listinfo/koreanstudies_koreaweb.ws
>or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> koreanstudies-request at koreaweb.ws
>
>You can reach the person managing the list at
> koreanstudies-owner at koreaweb.ws
>
>When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
>than "Re: Contents of Koreanstudies digest..."
>
>
><<------------ KoreanStudies mailing list DIGEST ------------>>
>
>
>Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: The Mystery of the Breve (Otfried Cheong)
> 2. Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST):
> Opening tomorrow, Sep 16! (Afostercarter at aol.com)
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Message: 1
>Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2009 09:33:36 +0200
>From: Otfried Cheong <otfried at airpost.net>
>Subject: Re: [KS] The Mystery of the Breve
>To: Korean Studies Discussion List <koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws>
>Message-ID: <4AAF4350.2070107 at airpost.net>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
>
>Frank Hoffmann wrote:
>> Regarding replacements or left-out of br?ves, both has been practiced
>> heavily on this list when using older email software -- leaving them out
>> as well as replacing them by ?, ? (included in the ASCII set).
>
>Neither of which fulfils the requirements we discussed: no diacritics,
>but no major loss of information either. The circumflexes _are_
>diacritics, and _not_ included in the ASCII set (which is a 7-bit
>character set).
>
>The issue is not a particular character set - as I think I have
>demonstrated, there are numerous occasions where you simply must be able
>to restrict yourself to the letters A-Z (capitals only!).
>
>> And I have not seen anyone in Korean Studies who,
>> as you claimed, would have made the argument that replacing br?ves with
>> circumflexes would be an unforgivable sin.
>
>I certainly did not claim this - what I said is that many on this list
>considered replacing the breves by the _digraphs_ 'eo' and 'eu' an
>unforgivable sin.
>
>> NORTH Korea: this is an entirely different topic, of course. You wrote:
>>
>>>> As I said earlier, I would have suggested to simply allow
>>>> "eo" and "eu" (...), and to replace the apostrophe by 'h'.
>>>> (...) Is that true? I've never seen the spelling Phyo?ngyang
>>>> anywhere.
>>
>> (1) As you already pointed out yourself, "eo" and "eu" are used instead
>> of o and u + br?ve. "Phyo?ngyang" is therefore no valid example.
>>
>> (2) The "h" is indeed used to replace the apostrophe in McC-R for an
>> aspirated t' or p'. For example "thongil" instead of "t'ongil."
>
>This raises an interesting question: North Korea uses a modified
>version of McC-R that does not need diacritics at all (except for
>hyphens to separate syllables, if necessary). But apparently the North
>Korean system was not considered as a contender for the new South Korean
>romanization - as far as I can remember, this was not even suggested at
>the time. Why?
>
>Unification with the Northern system would be the only good reason for
>South Korea to change its official romanization again. But of course
>that's a hairy issue unless you can work out the differences in Hangul
>spelling in the two Koreas.
>
>Best wishes,
> Otfried
>
>
>
>
>------------------------------
>
>Message: 2
>Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:26:32 EDT
>From: Afostercarter at aol.com
>Subject: [KS] Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST):
> Opening tomorrow, Sep 16!
>To: Koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws, members at asck.org, baks at jiscmail.ac.uk
>Cc: tom at softlandingkorea.com, nkeconwatch at gmail.com,
> Philip at londonkoreanlinks.net
>Message-ID: <d26.3d4c48ac.37e12848 at aol.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
>Dear friends and colleagues,
>
>This is the best thing I've yet seen about PUST,
>whose own website appears to have disappeared
>just as the place is about to be declared open.
>(Its sister college YUST is at _www.yust.edu_ (http://www.yust.edu) ,
>but Pust.edu brings up something pontifical in Rome.)
>- Sorry, found it! _http://pust.kr/_ (http://pust.kr/) or
>_www.pust.or.kr/_ (http://www.pust.or.kr/)
>
>What amazing faith. Call me naive; but surely this is
>one way of easing the NK knot, and well worth a try.
>
>
>Aidan FC
>
>
>Aidan Foster-Carter
>Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Sociology & Modern Korea, Leeds
>University, UK
>Flat 1, 40 Magdalen Road, Exeter, Devon, EX2 4TE, England, UK
>T: (+44, no 0) 07970 741307 (mobile); 01392 257753 Skype:
>Aidan.Foster.Carter
>E: _afostercarter at aol.com_ (mailto:afostercarter at aol.com) ,
>_afostercarter at yahoo.com_ (mailto:afostercarter at yahoo.com) W:
>_www.aidanfc.net_ (http://www.aidanfc.net/)
>
>_________________________________
>
>_http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/14/magazines/fortune/pyongyang_university_nort
>h_korea.fortune/?postversion=2009091509_
>(http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/14/magazines/fortune/pyongyang_university_north_korea.fortune/?postversion=200909
>1509)
>
>
>The capitalist who loves North Korea
>After making it as an entrepreneur in America, James Kim is fulfilling his
>dream of opening an university in North Korea that will offer, of all
>things, an MBA.
>
>_EMAIL_ (javascript:ET();) | _PRINT_ (javascript:PT();) | _SHARE_
>() | _RSS_ (aoldb://mail/services/rss/)
>
>
>
>By _Bill Powell_ (mailto:bill_powell at timeinc.com) , senior writer
>September 15, 2009: 9:17 AM ET
>
>
>
> James Kim, founder of the Pyongyang University of Science and
>Technology (PUST)
> Kim in front of PUST, which is slated to open this month in North
>Korea.
> Kim lecturing students at Yanbian University of Science and
>Technology, located in China near the border of North Korea
> Kim eating with students at Yanbian University
>
>
> _More from Fortune_ (aoldb://mail/magazines/fortune/)
>_25 Highest-paid men_
>(aoldb://mail/galleries/2009/fortune/0909/gallery.women_men_highest_pay.fortune/index.html)
>
>_7 steps to finding a job online_
>(aoldb://mail/2009/09/15/news/economy/find_job_search_online.fortune/index.htm)
>
>_PC showdown: Netbook threat heats up_
>(http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/09/15/the-latest-pc-war-netbooks-vs-nymphs/)
>
>
>
>_FORTUNE 500_ (aoldb://mail/magazines/fortune/fortune500/)
>_Current Issue_ (aoldb://mail/magazines/fortune/)
>_Subscribe to Fortune_
>(http://subs.timeinc.net/CampaignHandler/FOnb?source_id=19)
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>(Fortune Magazine) -- James Kim, an American businessman turned educator,
>once sat in the very last place that anyone in the world would wish to be:
>a cold, dank prison cell in Pyongyang, the godforsaken capital of North
>Korea.
>Kim, who had emigrated from South Korea to the United States in the 1970s,
>had been a frequent visitor to Pyongyang over the years in pursuit of
>what, to many, seemed at best a quixotic cause. He wanted to start an
>international university in Pyongyang, with courses in English, an international
>faculty, computers, and Internet connections for all the students.
>Not only that -- in the heart of the world's most rigidly Communist
>country, Kim wanted his school to include that training ground for future
>capitalists: an MBA program.
>During one of his trips to the capital in 1998, with North Korea in the
>midst of a famine that would eventually kill thousands, the state's secret
>police arrested Kim.
>North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il didn't lock up the educator for being
>crazy. He got it in his head that the oddly persistent American -- who at the
>time, among other things, was helping to feed starving North Koreans with
>deliveries of food aid from China -- was a spy.
>So for more than 40 days, Kim languished in a North Korean prison. An
>evangelical Christian, Kim wrote his last will and testament during those days,
>not knowing if he'd ever get out.
>Which makes where he plans to be in mid-September all the more
>astonishing. Kim will lead a delegation of 200 dignitaries from around the world to
>North Korea for the dedication of the first privately funded university ever
>allowed in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea: the Pyongyang
>University of Science and Technology (PUST).
>The school will have an international faculty educating, eventually,
>around 600 graduate students. Kim dreams ultimately of hosting an industrial
>park around the PUST campus, drawing firms from around the world -- a North
>Korean version, as bizarre as it sounds, of Palo Alto or Boston's Route 128.
>There will be Internet access for all, connecting the students to an
>outside world that they've heretofore been instructed is a hostile and dangerous
>place. And among the six departments will be a school of industrial
>management.
>"We ended up not calling it an 'MBA program,'" jokes David Kim (no
>relation to James), a former Bechtel and Pacific Gas & Electric executive who has
>relocated to Pyongyang to help set up PUST, "because they [the North
>Koreans] think it sounds vaguely imperialistic."
>That the North Koreans are permitting this to happen -- that they have
>given James Kim the nod to create his university, just as he intended -- is
>remarkable.
>It's hard for outsiders to understand just how backward, isolated, and
>impoverished North Korea is. Since the collapse of the Eastern bloc 20 years
>ago, fewer and fewer North Korean university students study abroad. Allowing
>PUST to proceed lets a gust of fresh air into a stilted, frightfully
>isolated environment.
>Ben Rosen, the venture capitalist who co-founded Compaq Computer in 1982,
>befriended Kim last year on a visit to Pyongyang with the New York
>Philharmonic Orchestra. After touring the 248-acre campus with Kim as it was under
>construction, Rosen became a believer. The university, he says, will give
>students "a window to the outside world and will create a new generation of
>technocrats with the potential to lead a post-Kim Jong Il government."
>The man behind this masterstroke of international relations consciously
>creates a bit of an air of mystery around himself. Ask him two very basic
>questions -- how old are you, and where were you born -- and Kim (whose Korean
>given name is Chin-Kyung) cheerfully demurs.
>As for his age (public records in Florida, where he was a small-business
>man for more than a decade, say he was born in September 1935), he says it's
>all in the mind -- a function of your health and your attitude. "And I am
>very healthy," he says with a grin.
>As to where, exactly, he was born, he declines to say, without much
>explanation. Kim's father -- himself an educator -- was very much a product of
>the tumultuous history of colonization and war that engulfed Northeast Asia
>in the first part of the 20th century, and thus very much on the move.
>During World War II, Kim's father fled the Japanese occupation of Korea,
>escaping to northeast China -- not far from Yanji, where his son's dreams took
>shape half a century later.
>That dream -- to bring Western education to his countrymen -- first
>manifested itself some 17 years ago, when Kim built a small (1,750 students) but
>thriving, privately funded university in Yanji, the Yanbian University of
>Science and Technology (YUST).
>Twice this summer I met at length with Kim in Yanji, which abuts the North
>Korean border, and sits in Jilin province, where more than half of the
>citizens are ethnic Korean. Though pleasantly cool in the summer, this part of
>China is cold and dark in the winter, and Kim's standard greeting to
>visitors is "Welcome to the North Pole."
>He is endlessly energetic. When he's not off fundraising around the world,
>he bounces around the campus starting at six each morning, buttonholing
>students he happens upon. But these days, as the dedication of the school in
>North Korea draws near, he is more often than not in Pyongyang.
>He carries an American passport and has what amounts to a multiple-entry
>visa to the most closed country on the planet. (Although the Korean War
>ended more than 50 years ago, Washington has never signed a peace treaty with
>the North.) He wants to make sure the dedication stays on track.
>It has already been delayed once: PUST originally was to be dedicated last
>year, but Dear Leader Kim Jong Il had a stroke in the summer of 2008, and
>everything froze. Until very recently the overt hostility North Korea had
>evinced toward the U.S. and its allies cast real doubt as to whether PUST
>would ever open.
>And for that reason Kim is very, very careful to parse his language when
>he talks about the North Korean government. Read him what Ben Rosen said
>about the potential PUST has to change North Korea, and Kim interjects
>quickly: "We're not going to change North Korea. We're going to help it."
>Kim's success in America
>This is pretty heady stuff for a former small-business man who made enough
>money running a South Korean taxi company to move to Pensacola, Fla. (He
>had been visiting a cousin attending school in the Sunshine State and liked
>the area.)
>After arriving in America in 1976, he started a wig business. "In those
>days, South Korea dominated the wig export business," Kim recalled recently.
>"So I set up a business in Florida importing wigs from South Korea. It
>turned out to be pretty successful."
>Kim says he came to the U.S. for a straightforward reason, the same reason
>so many immigrants do: He figured it was the best place to "make some
>money."
>
>But money, for him, was always only going to be a means to an end. "I knew
>that if I were to go to these two Communist countries -- China and North
>Korea -- and do what I wanted to do, it would not only provide me with some
>wealth, but a U.S. passport as well. You guys are the Roman Empire of your
>day; you can go pretty much wherever you want."
>His commercial landlord at the time, Frank Webb, recalls two things about
>James Kim: that he was a devout Christian, and that he always talked about
>setting up schools in China and North Korea.
>Kim added a clothes store in the 1980s, then bought a chain of women's
>shoe stores in Pensacola that he expanded successfully. In short, Kim and his
>wife, Grace, who helped him run the business, were living the American
>dream: They were recent immigrants who worked hard and were more than making a
>go of it. They were prospering. "By the mid-1980s we had three good
>businesses," Kim says now.
>And that's when he decided it was time to get on with his life's work.
>Leaving his wife behind in Florida to sell the family business and join him
>later, Kim headed for the northeastern part of China, where his father had
>been before him.
>Support from the Christian community
>Of all the nations in Asia where Christianity has tried to put down roots,
>Korea has been the most fertile ground. Roughly 20% of the population is
>Christian. Westerners who come to Seoul for the first time are often
>surprised by the number of neon crosses that glow atop churches in the city at
>night.
>But it is not only South Korea where Christian missionaries worked
>successfully to find converts. Long before war divided Korea at mid-century,
>Christian missionaries had gone to North Korea. Ruth Graham, the late wife of
>evangelist Billy Graham, went to prep school in Pyongyang in the 1920s.
>Kim is emblematic of just how deep those Christian roots run in Korea. His
>father converted to Christianity as a young man and attended a university
>in Pyongyang started by Presbyterian missionaries in 1897.
>He was running a Christian school near Busan, in the South, when he fled
>the Japanese occupation "rather than bow to Shinto gods," as Kim now says.
>In 1939 his father went to Heilongjiang province in northeastern China,
>where he opened another school for girls; he returned to South Korea in 1945,
>with the defeat of Imperial Japan.
>When James was 15 years old, he tried to enlist in the army as the Korean
>War broke out, but a recruiter first turned him away as too young. "I cut
>my finger and wrote in blood, 'I love my country,'" so the recruiter changed
>his mind and accepted him. He joined an army unit of 800, and by 1952 only
>17 remained. The rest had been killed.
>Until that point, Kim had not himself been particularly religious. He had
>watched his grandfather "persecute" his father for his conversion to
>Christianity. But on the battlefield one night, Kim read from the Gospel of St.
>John, which had been passed out by a U.S. Army chaplain to the troops who
>remained. Having watched so much of his unit get wiped out, it was verse 3:16
>that spoke to him: "That whosoever shall believe in Him should not perish,
>but have everlasting life."
>Then and there, says Kim, "I vowed to God to work with the Chinese and the
>North Koreans -- then our enemies. I would devote my life to it, if I
>survived the war."
>For Kim, this was not a convenient "atheist in a foxhole" moment: He
>studied his newfound faith assiduously. In the early '70s Kim traveled to
>Europe, where he attended a school set up in Switzerland by an esteemed American
>evangelist, Francis Schaffer. He then went to England to study at an
>evangelical seminary before returning to Seoul in 1972.
>His plan upon arriving in China was to follow in his father's footsteps
>and to do sort of a dry run for his ultimate goal: setting up a university in
>Pyongyang. Using some of the money he had made from selling his small
>businesses in the U.S., and then raising money from private donors -- drawing
>heavily on the evangelical Christian community in South Korea and abroad --
>Kim in 1992 began YUST.
>To date, more than 90% of the graduates get jobs, and South Korean
>companies operating in China are particularly aggressive in hiring its students.
>"They just line up to recruit them," says Malcolm Gillis, the former
>president of Rice University who is on the board of PUST.
>Kim and his wife now live in faculty housing, in a small two-bedroom
>apartment. Though not officially a Christian school, which would be illegal in
>China, both the faculty and the students tend to be drawn from the devout.
>Many faculty members go without pay (as some will in Pyongyang). And the
>provincial government allows YUST to have a chapel on campus accessible only
>to university-affiliated personnel.
>"There was a lot of suspicion from the [government] at first," Kim
>concedes. "But as the school has grown we've shown them that we are not in any way
>a threat to them." Left unstated is the obvious: that the small school on
>the North Korean border was Kim's model for his Pyongyang project.
>He had two challenges: funding it and getting the North Korean government
>to agree to it. Kim's deep roots in the South Korean Christian community
>have given him a lot of contacts among Seoul's corporate and educational
>elite. He has the presidents of two prestigious Korean universities on PUST's
>board of directors, and on a recent weekend in Yanji, Kim had two senior
>executives, including vice chairman Heon-Cheol Shin from South Korea's biggest
>oil company, SK Energy, visiting him to check on the progress of the
>Pyongyang project.
>Kim has the energy of someone half his age -- and he never stops plumping
>for the university. Venture capitalist Rosen recalls that on his tour of
>the campus in Pyongyang early last year Kim kept pushing him to join his
>board of directors. At one point he pointed to one of the buildings under
>construction and joked, "Look, Ben, there's your new office!" (My wife, Rosen
>jokes, "just about died.")
>North Korea, not surprisingly, is the object of intense passion among the
>evangelical Christian community in the South.
>South Korean churches have done much good work publicizing human rights
>abuses in the North -- to Pyongyang's intense displeasure -- but they have
>also raised funds for food aid and helped distribute it via a variety of
>networks. But to say that a good portion of the evangelical community in the
>South -- and indeed worldwide -- is hostile to the Kim Jong Il government is
>to state the obvious.
>It is into this diplomatic minefield that Kim has stepped. "If you had
>told me that [Kim] was going to raise money from evangelical churches
>worldwide to help fund a new university in Pyongyang, and that he'd get the North
>Korean government to go along with it, I'd have told you that you were
>nuts," says a state department official. "Remember, in 1998 Kim Jong Il had him
>held in detention."
>That fact does raise questions. Ask him how he has been able to pull this
>project off, and Kim says, "I have unlimited credit at the Bank of Heaven."
>The suspicion, voiced by some skeptics in Seoul and elsewhere, is that he
>also must have had to make a pretty hefty deposit at the Bank of Kim Jong
>Il.
>To the extent that any business gets done in North Korea, the piper has to
>be paid, foreign businessmen and diplomats say. "I'd find it hard to
>believe otherwise," one Seoul-based executive who has done business in the North
>says, "but who knows?"
>Asked directly whether any of the roughly $10 million he raised to fund
>PUST has gone to the regime in Pyongyang, Kim says: "Every brick we used,
>every bit of steel, every bit of equipment, we brought in from China. I have
>never brought any cash into North Korea."
>So why did the North Korean government come to trust him? "When I was
>detained, I was very calm. I wrote that I was not afraid to die, because I knew
>I would go to a better place. And I wrote that if I did die, I would
>donate my organs for medical research in North Korea. I told them I was at pea
>ce." What he heard back, Kim says, is that the Dear Leader was touched by
>that sentiment.
>There are so many horror stories about Kim Jong Il and the country that he
>rules that it's hard to know what to make of that. Suspicions linger that
>some sort of deal was cut. That somehow Dear Leader Kim is using University
>President Kim. Or being paid off by him. Or that Kim has divided
>loyalties.
>There is no evidence that any of that is true, and Kim Jong Il, despite
>his recent diplomatic charm offensive, isn't giving interviews.
>And for the record, though Kim is excruciatingly diplomatic in terms of
>what he says publicly about the regime, Fortune, having spent a considerable
>amount of time with Kim and his team in Yanji this summer, is pretty
>convinced that his loyalties lie in only one direction -- to the man upstairs.
>And by that, we don't mean Kim Jong Il.
>PUST Board member Gillis believes that Kim's lack of guile may ultimately
>be what convinced the North Koreans. "This is a guy who is doing this for
>the reasons he says: that it would be a good and helpful thing for North
>Korean students to have a modern, international university, with faculty drawn
>from abroad. Through many years of hard work, [he's] been able to convince
>the government that that's the case. And it has the added benefit of being
>true. He's open and transparent. There are no hidden agendas here."
>With the formal dedication set for Sept. 16 -- Kim and his staff are deep
>into trying to hire faculty and settle on nuts-and-bolts issues, like which
>textbooks will be used in courses that will begin in a few months. As
>David Kim, the Bechtel alum, relates, very little of that stuff is
>straightforward in North Korea.
>How, for example, will economics and finance be taught? While students at
>elite universities in most of the world learn the same basic principles
>from the same authors -- Econ 101 from Samuelson and Nordhaus et al. -- in
>North Korea, Western economics is not only alien to most citizens of the
>Communist state, it is also downright threatening.
>This is a government whose underlying philosophy is known as Juche, or
>self-reliance, and everyone is supposed to be a servant of the Dear Leader.
>How you square that with Adam Smith's invisible hand and enlightened
>self-interest is not at all obvious.
>"If we're just going there to teach things the way they teach them now,
>it's a waste of our time," concedes Kim. "But we also don't want to be
>perceived as doing anything that threatens them."
>So PUST is -- very much -- a work in progress. But given how close it is
>to reality, issues like curriculum fade. The only one out there who thought
>there'd be an international university opening in Pyongyang in 2009,
>offering the equivalent of an MBA, with courses in English to some 600 students,
>was the same guy whom the North Koreans arrested in 1998.
>James Kim and his cohorts will no doubt figure out a way to teach Econ
>101. They're going to teach Western economics, and finance, and management in
>one of the most backward economies in the world, one which again is having
>trouble feeding many of its citizens, according to recent reports from NGOs
>there.
>That may seem like a rather hopeless task, but hope -- not to mention
>faith -- is something James Kim has in abundance. And given that he was sitting
>in a Pyongyang jail 11 years ago this month, who could blame him?
>Reporter associates Scott Cendrowski and Marilyn Adamo contributed to this
>article. (aoldb://mail/write/template.htm#TOP)
>
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