“Dear fellow SNUians, are you going to let our precious place of learning face a crisis? We should protect our university for ourselves. We should prevent our university from being incorporated into a profit private organization. Please, come here and cast a vote against the incorporation of our Seoul National University. ” It was a potent roar from the microphone as one of the students of Seoul National University (SNU) shouted to his fellow students on a sunny day last semester. As an exchange student, while studying at SNU, which is called the most prestigious university in Korea, I could see some banners and posters of illegal election and Seoul National University Incorporation there. They represented the distracted atmosphere of SNU. Among them, one of the predominant things to me was the plan to incorporate SNU into a profit private organization. They demanded that SNU must not be incorporated. However, on December 9th in 2009, as if making fun of the SNUians’ voice, parliament passed the bill to incorporate SNU, and the incorporation of SNU became an accomplished fact.
 

 As a national university student, I thought about what if Chonnam National University would be incorporated following SNU. The Korean government mentioned that by making SNU incorporated, they have a plan to develop the responsibility and autonomy of school management, and reinforce educational capacity and competitiveness, raising it to a world-class university level in the world. Also, the president of SNU added that the reason why SNU should be incorporated is that the incorporation is the only key to guarantee the autonomy of the university. The meaning of incorporating a national university is to obtain autonomy of personnel matters, sound finance, organization, and operation by making the national university transformed into an Independent Corporation freed from government. If so, the president of a national university becomes the CEO and he will have an overall authority and responsibility of the university and moreover, there will be a board of directors which will make decisions about the affairs of the university. That is to say, the national university will be managed like a private company without the main owner like students of faculty members. Is the national university transformed into a private business? That’s just ridiculous. The thing that the national university becomes an independent corporation means it should manage by itself and raise money like a private university, not by being supported from the government. If so, the national university will lose their own authority as a “National University”, and it will cause tuition fees to rise dramatically to manage by themselves. I think that incorporation of a national university isn’t beneficial to anybody. The students will have a hard time to come up with their tuition fee and also the faculty members will lose their jobs. Moreover, the real meaning of a national university will be degraded by incorporation. Whose incorporation is this for? Following incorporation, the faculty members including school workers, and professors should change their status into non-regular workers, and the school system will be unstable.

 Incorporation of a National University doesn’t necessarily mean that the responsibility for the university is transferring from the government to a private corporation. It means the government whose responsibility is controlling the public education passes the buck to the students and their parents trying all means available to pay for the increasing tuition fee. So, I think the incorporation policy of a national university should be abolished because there’s no substantial benefit on the inside even though it appears prosperous. I want the Korean government to reconsider what this policy is for and the representativeness of a national university. They should draw up measures all the people recognizing to enhance the competitiveness and autonomy of a national university.

By Park Sue-hye, Guest Reporter