A Korean professor has been captured on film scolding two Indonesian exchange students, calling one “not human” and “a low animal.”

The online video shows the professor at Gyeongsang National University in Jinju, South Gyeongsang Province, berating two female students from Indonesia for not attending his classes, as well as threatening to call the police and cancel their master’s degrees. Noting one section of the video that skips, some YouTube users commented that the footage may have been edited.

Elvira Fidelia Tanjung, one of the students, filmed the incident outside her college accommodation on March 4. She uploaded it on The Indonesian Students Association channel on South Korea’s YouTube on April 9.

Tanjung and the second student in the video, Merisha Hastarina, have both since returned to Indonesia.

Tanjung said the incident occurred about a week after the department had told her and Hastarina they could not receive their master’s certificates at their graduation ceremony because the professor wished to give it to them directly after he returned from a conference in Japan.

Feeling that it was unfair that the rest of her class could receive their certificates at graduation, Tanjung went to the graduate office and asked to see her parchment to take a photo for her family. She took then took the certificate from the office without permission.

She and Hastarina spent the next week avoiding attempts by the college to contact them about the certificate and their whereabouts.

“We were not sleeping at our home at that time because we were really scared at that time, maybe he would call the immigration office, he might say we were stealing something,” she said.

Tanjung claimed that the professor, who teaches at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, had previously expressed doubts about her graduating and had given her three papers to complete about a month before the ceremony.

“Before my graduation, he was always telling me, ‘you are not graduating this time, you are not going to graduate this semester, I am not sure about your skill, your ability,’” she said.

The two students also claimed they were forced to credit the professor’s son, a student at Pusan National University, as a co-author on a number of their papers despite him having no involvement.

When contacted by The Korea Herald, the professor declined to apologize or express regret for his choice of words, again using “animal” to refer to the students.

He said the remark was intended to describe someone who did not keep their agreements.

The professor claimed they had wanted to extend their visas after graduation for research but then did not submit academic papers and had failed to produce receipts for a trip to Japan funded by his foundation. He said he visited the women’s accommodation after being unable to contact them for a week to get a form for their visa extension.

“(I said) they should submit the official (visa extension recommendation) sheet to our university (but) they didn’t submit the official sheet, so I went to visit them and then I told them to submit the official sheet, that’s all,” he said.

The professor, who heads the BK 21 foundation that paid part of the students’ tuition, also said the students’ papers had been largely copied from his son’s.

He added that he believed they had “planned this manipulation from the start.”

Lee Jae-yun at the university’s graduate school office confirmed the students had fulfilled all academic obligations to graduate and now held master’s degrees.

He said the university was investigating the incident captured on film and the claims that the professor forced his students to credit his son on their papers.

“We formed an investigative committee on April 12 to look into the case and if the results show that any law was broken appropriate action will be taken,” said Lee.

He also confirmed the professor had asked for the students’ certificate to be withheld in violation of normal procedure.

Sara Rai, manager of the Korea International Student Support Association, said cases of professors abusing foreign students were common.

She disclosed the testimony of two foreign exchange students at different colleges who complained of being cursed at, having objects thrown at them and being scolded for hours on end by professors.

Neither student was willing to give their name to KISSA.

“There are many students like them who choose not to talk or seek help but silently suffer so as not to endanger their prospect of getting their hard-earned master’s or Ph.D.,” said Rai.



By John Power

(john.power@heraldcorp.com)

Intern reporter Jin Eun-soo contributed to this article ― Ed.