In the year 2012, while travelling through Australia with my family, we set out on a quest to see kangaroos in the wild. After scouring the internet, we stumbled upon a series of Korean blog posts that indicated we could encounter these fascinating creatures frolicking in vast, verdant meadows in a small town, roughly two hours northeast of Sydney.
We arrived in this quaint, sparsely populated town by train, only to learn we had to journey another 20 minutes by taxi to reach our desired location. A local Aussie lady, upon seeing our group waiting for the taxi, appeared bemused, then left us with this parting comment before continuing on her way: "Our quiet town has recently begun to see many visitors from South Korea."
Once we encountered the kangaroos, bounding freely through the grassy expanse, our family was filled with a sense of exhilaration as our ignorance and curiosity were simultaneously satiated. As the lady at the train station suggested, Korean tourists indeed seemed noticeably prevalent in the area. Amongst the kangaroos, individuals donning crisp white uniforms milled about, and a nurse pushing a wheelchair brushed past me.
The allure of the unknown is a universal phenomenon. While ignorance can incite fear, it can also spark a light curiosity, energizing our desire to learn and explore. My own ignorance of what it would feel like to encounter a kangaroo at close range led me to rely on online information and venture to a remote village in Australia. While we did eventually meet kangaroos at the end of our adventurous trip, the embarrassment was inescapable - did we truly need to visit an Australian rural psychiatric hospital just to see these kangaroos?
It leads one to question how much we truly understand about the myriad of universities, or higher education systems, scattered across the globe.
The breadth and depth of knowledge and information encapsulated within the realm of "higher education" is practically infinite and evolving. Even those who claim extensive knowledge may actually know very little. Mathematically, no matter how large the numerator, if the denominator is infinite, the result tends towards zero. As a collective society, we are constantly striving for knowledge, and it is this pursuit that propels our progress.
The world of higher education is no different.
We strive to overcome ignorance, seeking out, learning, and applying information on the innovation and development strategies of universities worldwide. Yet, upon closer examination, one might perceive an air of parochialism or a dependence in our efforts.
The 'parochialism' could be largely attributed to a unilateral American perspective. The dominance of the United States and its higher education system within the global academic ecosystem is a fact. In an era of digital transition led by technological innovations, surpassing a knowledge-based society, it is only natural to discuss American universities, renowned for their world-class research capabilities and innovative approaches to education.
However, anyone involved with higher education should, at least once, critically consider the long-standing dependency on the American education system. It's a product of history; from the US-led reforms of South Korean higher education after the Korean War, to the intellectuals who studied advanced disciplines and systems in America and later occupied leadership positions in Korean society when domestic universities were not competitive enough, and to the significant influence of those educated in America on academia and university administration.
But it's not only about America. ‘Dependence' signifies an uncritical acceptance. A logic that asserts, 'If it is effective or innovative overseas, it must be correct', often overpowers a more contextual and subjective thinking that considers what suits South Korea. The process of discerning the pros and cons of a new concept, finding implications, understanding its underlying philosophy, and correlating it with the characteristics of our nation and higher education is often overlooked. Such a trend sets the stage for the 'logic of illogic' based on personal experiences, like 'when I was studying abroad, it was like this', and gives undue strength to claims like 'this is how it's done overseas' in discourses on university innovation.
Professor Jongyoung Kim of Kyung Hee University's Department of Sociology illuminates such actors, whom he refers to as 'transnational middlemen', in his book 'The Rulers Being Ruled'.
It's not difficult to find cases where, without proper reflection and review on contextual similarities and applicability in the field, the importation of a foreign university's components, cases, and terminologies, based on the word of knowledge brokers behaving somewhere between overseas and Korean higher education fields, has caused significant confusion in the day-to-day administration of universities, all under the pretext of internationalization and innovation.
One day in 2013, a senior leader who had just returned from an overseas trip commented, "At a university I visited, all administrative staff were seated at the front." Consequently, the entire office layout was turned upside down, leaving the staff, who worked there all day, puzzled and spending days moving cabinets and desks. This experience, intertwined with my episode of visiting a psychiatric hospital in a suburban Australian village in search of kangaroos, remains a rather interesting memory.
Were animals around the mental hospital really kangaroos? As I was leaving, I heard a Korean tourist exclaim, "Isn't this a wallaby?"
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*Disclaimer
This content is a translation of an article originally composed in Korean language, which was published in July 2023 on the University News Network, a premier media outlet in South Korea dedicated to higher education. For the original article, please visit http://news.unn.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=548843.
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