Why Taejae University Is Not Just Korea’s Minerva
There are, unsurprisingly, many competing interpretations of Taejae University. Although it received government approval three years ago as a new institution, its significance extends well beyond the establishment of another university. For years, Korean society has voiced frustration with the inefficiencies of higher education: rote learning, curricula that lag behind industrial and social change, and rigid institutional structures that resist meaningful reform. In that climate, Minerva University, aided by highly effective marketing and branding, came to occupy a powerful place in the public imagination as the emblem of the “innovative university.” Taejae can be seen as the most visible attempt to materialize that ideal within the Korean context. Why, then, did Minerva generate such an outsized response in South Korea? One plausible explanation is that, in Korea and much of Asia, dissatisfaction had already been building around one-way teaching, hierarchical university systems, lectu...