hankyoreh

Oct. 10

“They say a professorship is 150 or 300 million Won ($247 thousand). I was approached twice.”

These words were written in a note left behind by a private university hourly lecturer identified by the surname Seo, 45, who took his own life Tuesday at his home in Gwangju, South Jeolla Province. In the five-page letter entitled “To President Lee Myung-bak,” Seo wrote about the illegal practices of buying and selling professorships and ghostwriting papers that are taking place in university professor society. Describing his own experience, Seo wrote that he had been asked to pay 60 million Won for a professorship by a South Jeolla Province private university around two years before, and was asked to pay 100 million Won by a Gyeonggi Province private university two months prior.

Seo described the status of an hourly lecturer as that of a slave to the professor, and also exposed instances of ghostwriting papers. Referring to one private university professor in Gwangju, Seo wrote, “I wrote about 25 papers with this professor, one doctoral dissertation for the professor’s student, one Korea Research Foundation paper, four master’s theses, and four Korea Research Foundation presentation papers.” Seo also wrote, “For all of the roughly 54 papers we wrote together, I wrote the papers and this professor just put his name on them.”

Seo appears to have made his life-ending decision after failing in a recent application for a professorship at one university. Seo graduated from the Chinese department in a Seoul private university and received masters and doctoral degrees in English at a Gwangju private university. He had been working as an hourly lecturer since 2000. He is known to have been receiving 34,000 Won per hour in lecture fees, earning roughly 1.4 million Won per month teaching 10 hours of general education courses a week. The shortfall in the family’s living expenses and the children’s educational expenses was offset by the earnings of Seo’s wife, 45, who worked more than 10 hours a day at restaurant.

“The more than 58 thousand hourly lecturers at universities nationwide are all feeling despair similar to what Mr. Seo felt,” said Jeong Jae-ho, 54, Chosun University chapter head of the Korea Irregular Professors’ Union. “The Higher Education Act needs to be amended so that hourly lecturers, currently viewed as miscellaneous daily workers, are treated as teachers.”

Police have opened an investigation into the death with Seo’s surviving family, and plan to begin a full-scale investigation if the family presses charges.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]