Abstract
Korea was a kingdom and is now a nation with a continuous identity conflict between a cultural-political conservatism and a no less compelling urge to progress and come to terms with surrounding powers and the world at large. The political establishment under the leadership of Park Geun-hye (February 2013–March 2017) was no exception. During her conservative leadership, South Korean academia underwent a remarkable university reform characterized by an explicit attack on social sciences and humanities. This chapter offers a critical analysis of this event. The so-called academic capitalism, with cognates such as the commercialization and corporatization of universities, predates this policy development. It argues that the reforms of 2015–2016 involved a great deal of repressive and conservative syncretism such as the dismissal of careful public consultation and clearly top-down implementation, with justifications drawn from “STEM education” and the Weberian rationale of an “ideal workforce.”
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Notes
- 1.
Noninstitutional high learning system existed in the form of a school of thought by mentor and mentees. See Kim and Kim (2013).
- 2.
Recent reverberation of Cold War dynamics due to Vladimir Putin’s doctrine of nationalistic assertiveness is unlikely to bring back a comparable level of tensions to institutions of higher education. For a discussion of knowledge production and its role in colonized Korea and during the Cold War, see related works (Chen 2010; Park 2016).
- 3.
Oh Moon-myeong was the 33rd minister of education since the foundation of the Korean Republic and first of the post-military democratic era. His term in office ran from 26 February to 21 of December of 1993.
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Park, J. (2020). South Korea: Managerial Wisdom in Higher Education for a Selective Academic Repression. In: Hao, Z., Zabielskis, P. (eds) Academic Freedom Under Siege. Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects, vol 54. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49119-2_10
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