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.”
CITATION STYLE
Park, J. (2020). South Korea: Managerial Wisdom in Higher Education for a Selective Academic Repression. In Education in the Asia-Pacific Region (Vol. 54, pp. 205–218). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49119-2_10
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