World Class Worldwide: Transforming Research Universities in Asia and Latin America

6 The Making of a World-Class University at the Periphery: Seoul National University

6 The Making of a World-Class University at the Periphery Seoul National University Ki-Seok Kim & Sunghee Nam In response to the globalizing economy, many developing countries have been paying serious attention to building world-class universities. Creating a world-class university is challenging on many fronts, especially in a peripheral country like Korea. As Philip Altbach (2003) points out, the patterns, ideas, and values of a world-class university in the Western tradition reflect high academic standards. It is increasingly difficult for a middle-income country to become a competitive player at this elevated level of competition, because the fiscal demands of playing on the world stage of science and scholarship are growing dramatically. Despite these challenges, there have been noticeable achievements in building a competitive university in many developing nations, particularly in Asian countries. Singapore’s attempt to establish the “Boston of the East” and South Korea’s Brain Korea 21 (BK 21) program are cases in point (Altbach 2000). China launched the 211 Project in 1994 with an ambitious goal of building 100 select universities by the early 21st century, and the 985 Project in 1998 with an impressive budget of US$3.4 billion invested in 33 key universities to create world-class universities. While Altbach (2000) maintains that these attempts produced mixed results, it is premature to come to any conclusive evaluation. Korean universities have seriously committed themselves to producing internationally competitive human resources. A central strategy was to focus on doctoral programs and to build them up to the world-class level. According to various measures and standards, Seoul National University (SNU), a flagship university in Korea, seems to have reached the worldclass level. In 2005, the Times Higher Education Supplement, a British newspaper, ranked SNU as the 45th among the world’s top 100 science universities (THES 2005). After the institution’s short history of 60 years and 30 years of full-fledged doctoral programs, SNU’s accomplishments are extraordinary. What were the driving forces behind the remarkable achievements of SNU? This chapter examines the process of transforming SNU into a worldclass university in Korea. The analysis focuses on the internal reforms implemented at SNU during the past 10 years and the effectiveness of these policies in building a world-class university. SNU is an important case study that bears vital theoretical and practical implications for other Korean universities, as well as for universities in other middle-income countries. ECONOMIC RESTRUCTURING AND HIGHER CONOMIC RESTRUCTURING AND HIGHER HIGHER EDUCATION REFORM The speed and extent of economic development that Korea has achieved since the early 1970s have been well documented. By 1996, South Korea—with a $10,000 per capita national income—had become a major competitor in the world market. By the late 1990s, however, the Korean economy faced serious economic hardships, mainly due to the foreign exchange crisis. The unemployment rate jumped up from 2.6 percent in 1997 to 7.9 percent in 1998. This economic crisis uncovered the limitations of a material-oriented manufacturing economy, and the Korean government proposed a shift to a knowledge-based economy as one of its major policy goals. The Ministry of Education formulated a series of educational reform policies to prepare for a knowledge-based society. In this context, building world-class research universities that will play a central role in Korean economic development has become a national priority. A major strategy for world-class research universities was BK 21, which is a major higher educational reform project to cultivate the creative and high-quality human resources necessary for a knowledge-based society. To accomplish this goal, the Korean government decided to invest about US$1.2 billion in universities over the seven years between 1999 and 2005. In contrast to other previous educational reform policies, this project focuses on graduate programs. The graduate students at the selected schools are the direct beneficiaries of the project. Research funds do not The Making of a World-Class University at the Periphery 123 go directly to the faculty in the form of grants. Instead, three-quarters of the whole budget is used to provide a supportive educational environment for graduate students in the form of stipends, financial support for overseas study, and research infrastructure. The budget allocated for BK 21 was unprecedented. However, the available funding for policy-related reform programs was still relatively limited. For example, in 2004, the Ministry of Education...