KAIST President Suh Nam-pyo should have left the university when he finished his first four-year term in 2010. If he had done so, he would by now be enjoying the peace of retired life back in Boston, or research at MIT, even though some of the innovations he initiated at KAIST might have fizzled out. 

“Leave the stage while they applaud” is appropriate advice not only to entertainers but to all public figures. Applause subsides after some time, and if the performer still remains on the stage, he or she will be booed off.

In the latest scenes of turmoil on the KAIST campus by the Gapcheon river, the association of professors rejected Suh’s offer of an open debate for communication and mutual understanding. The student council conducted a sort of a vote of confidence on the president in which an overwhelming majority demanded Suh’s departure. About a third of graduate and undergraduate students took part in the vote.

Since he came to KAIST in June 2006 on a leave of absence from MIT, Suh has done a lot to change the leading research university of Korea. What dismays many observers is that he has been held captive by his own achievements.

I had an opportunity to take a close look at him and the school as I worked for it as an adjunct professor for two years during Suh’s first term, chiefly helping the school in external affairs. It was the time when the Suh Nam-pyo brand for university reform thrilled the media and awoke Korea’s community of higher learning from inertia. First, he asked students with low academic performance to pay part or all of their tuition, breaking the tuition exemption system at the state-run institution.

In order to spur competition in the faculty, the university subjected professors to tenure track examinations after eight years’ appointment; about a third were dropped in the first screening. Suh stipulated that all lectures be delivered in English to enhance students’ global competitiveness and provide improved education to international students. He believed that Korean universities were generally underrated in worldwide rankings because of low scores in “globalization.” He started the Presidential Forum for Global Research Universities in 2008 as an international publicity effort.

Suh’s long-time friend from the MIT days, Neil Pappalardo of Meditech Inc., delivered $2.5 million to KAIST, starting a rush of donations by businesspeople in Korea and the United States. Among the donors was Oriental medicine doctor Ryu Keun-chul, whose transfer of 60 billion won worth of property made him the largest single benefactor to a Korean university. Suh set the goal of 1 trillion won in donations to KAIST by 2013.

And then there were the two major research projects of “online electric vehicle” (OLEV) and “mobile harbor,” both of which were the brainchild of Suh Nam-pyo the mechanical engineer. The concept electric car powered by a supply system buried in the road and the crane-equipped barge to ply between ships and piers in congested ports brought huge government research funds to KAIST.

While these projects have yet to reach practical application, it is regrettable that dispute arose over patent registration. Some professors who took part in the projects complained that technologies they developed were registered in the name of the university president.

Time flew fast and when Suh neared the end of his first term, he was seized by the devil’s temptation to extend his service. As a number of professors who felt “reform fatigue” under Suh opposed his serving another term, Suh offered a two-year extension just to see the completion of reforms he started. The KAIST board eventually approved a full four-year second term for him with government endorsement.

The hard-earned second term, however, has proved no blessing for the 76-year-old KAIST president. During the first four months of last year, four students and one professor committed suicide under pressure of what complainants in the university described as an extremely competitive campus atmosphere. Grieving students and disgruntled professors demanded Suh’s immediate resignation, although not everyone believed that Suh was responsible for the deaths.

With his brilliant career record, which includes stints as chair of mechanical engineering at MIT and vice president of the U.S. National Science Foundation, and his worldwide academic networking, Dr. Suh Nam-pyo, who holds more than 50 international patents is a pride of Korea regardless of his nationality. Then what has thrown him into trouble?

When Suh was appointed, Kaistians favorably compared him with the outgoing Robert Laughlin, a Nobel laureate in physics from Stanford University, in terms of communication with new colleagues. But after six years, Suh too failed to penetrate the society of Korean professors.

He has Korean blood, and speaks perfect Korean, but he looked at his new colleagues through MIT eyes. He had a general disdain toward Korean professors, who spend too much time drinking and playing golf, who are reluctant to open their departments and their minds to outsiders and who compete more fiercely among themselves to win important university offices than in academic achievements.

He failed to understand how proud students were to tell their parents that they were being admitted to KAIST, which exempts tuition for all entrants, and how ashamed they were to report that they now had to pay tuition because of poor academic results.

The KAIST campus in Daejeon has roughly three different types of buildings. The oldest are red brick ones built at the time of the university’s opening as a graduate school. Many blue-tiled structures were built when undergraduate courses were established in the 1980s. The newest glass and steel buildings erected with donations after Suh Nam-pyo’s arrival represent a new KAIST, which no doubt set off a model for a renewal of Korea’s higher learning institutions from admissions to academic restructuring.

It looks like Suh can hardly expect any more applause during the rest of his second term, given the disquiet at the school. If he leaves the university now, KAIST and Korean universities in general will again prove to be hopelessly reform-resistant institutions. If he stays on, conflicts will deepen on the campus and government interference will be inevitable.

Whichever the case, much time will be needed to overcome the present challenges and Suh should ponder if he had invited them by seeking to monopolize his achievements at the institution. Further responsibility should be asked of our professors, who generally qualify as great politicians but tend to resist from the moment a leader comes from the outside.

By Kim Myong-sik

Kim Myong-sik, former head of the Korea Overseas Information Service and an adjunct professor at KAIST, served as an editorial writer for The Korea Herald until last month. ― Ed.