근대의 마지막 성채, 대학

초록

Youth unemployment is rampant among university graduates from liberal arts and social sciences programs in Korea, and departments and colleges in these disciplines are rapidly being cut down, merged or abolished. It has been pointed out that youth unemployment and university restructuring are a direct outcome of the massive reduction in managerial labor, that is, the meltdown of the white color middle classes. The drastic shift in the world capitalist system is being manifested as an unprecedented crisis of the university. There are largely three phenomena - popularization, commercialization and privatization – that can be observed in Korean universities. Set off by the higher education bubble, popularization refers to the downward standardization of university education and the multilevel subjugation of the university. Commercialization indicates the university’s deterioration to University INC., as exemplified by the exorbitant amount of tuition required to obtain a university degree and the competition among professors to score higher in their number of research products. The third dominant phenomenon in Korean higher education is the acceleration of privatization in over 90% of universities, which are private institutions. Korean universities are thus faced with an imperative necessity to restore their publicness. A national board of education should be established to implement neutral and long term alternative measures to improve higher education in Korea. Restructuring in universities should be coordinated both by a national board of education and the civic society, with a long term vision toward resolving the current problems of popularization, commercialization, and privatization. And it is crucial that experiments in forming alternative models of higher education be conducted as part of a university movement. May there be a better future for the university, the last stronghold of modernity!

키워드