“If you don’t see it, I’m a woman from Edae. You can’t put me into the big house!” Kim Hye-su famously said in the 2006 hit movie “Tazza.” The glamorous actress, playing a gambling house madam, was resisting a police detective trying to arrest her in a raid.

“Edae” here is short for Ewha Womans University, the oldest women’s university in Korea and reputedly the largest in the world, with 25,000 students and 210,000 graduates.

Without understanding the special place this school has in Korean society, it would be hard to catch the nuance of what Kim Hye-su said, so unconvincingly with her arms folded, a burning cigarette between her fingers. Superlatives such as oldest and largest alone cannot explain how Koreans look at Ewha and how its students and alumnae feel about their school, and why there was so much concern over the campus turmoil that ended up with the exit of its president.

Started in 1886 by Mary Scranton, an American Northern Methodist missionary, at a house in the present location of Seoul, it offered systematic education for women for the first time in Korea, and has remained one of the most influential institutions in this country. As its ungrammatical name indicates, it has maintained a unique tradition defying the trend of mixed education, championing women’s emancipation, independence and self-development against social disadvantage and prejudice. 

Kim Hwal-lan (Helen Kim, 1889-1970), who served as the first Korean president of the university from 1939 through 1961 is revered as an educator in the formative period of the republic despite her record of forced cooperation with the Japanese colonial authorities in the final years of the Pacific War. She was succeeded by Kim Ok-gil, who led Ewha until 1979 and is remembered for her efforts to protect students who resisted authoritarian rule.

Chang Sang was the first married Korean president of the women’s university. She resigned during her second term in 2002 when President Kim Dae-jung nominated her to be prime minister. (Her appointment failed to win parliamentary approval.) Successive Ewha presidents served out their four-year terms until Choe Kyeong-hee resigned last week in the middle of her tenure, after nearly two months of protests by students and professors.

The exposure of the privileged treatment of a student in entrance and academic assessment poured fuel on the fire of an on-campus demonstration that started in objection to a university plan to open a special undergraduate program for working women with government subsidies. The Ewha situation had turned volatile since university authorities called 1,600 police to the campus “to rescue” professors from detention in a classroom occupied by hundreds of students.

Even in the days of radical student resistance in the 1970s and ’80s, police never came onto the campus of the women’s university. At one point, former President Kim Ok-gil created a legend by personally blocking police troops at the university gate and persuaded both the students and their pursuers to return to their places.

Never before in the 130-year history of Ewha were university rules changed or bent to accept an “athletic talent” into the Sports Science Department, or to keep her enrolled despite infrequent attendance and poor academic performance. The student in question was Chung Yoo-ra, daughter of Choi Soon-sil, currently in the focus of political controversy for her suspected improper use of influence as a close associate of President Park Geun-hye.
Choi’s alleged role in the establishment of two private foundations with dubious missions using donations from large businesses has been in the news for weeks. The virus of political power has thus infected the university to induce its president and spoiled professors into doing improper favors for a student who had a medal from an international equestrian competition, but showed dismal academic ability. That collusion bore fruit in the form of government-sponsored projects that were awarded to the university, protesting students claimed.

One student posted a letter to Chung Yoo-ra on the bulletin board: “Again, I passed the whole night reading textbooks and a reference book, programming with my notebook computer and pounding a calculator (most of my classmates do the same as me) ... while you are staying abroad, getting all the required credits without attending the class.”

She went on: “Some say that you are lucky with your parents, but I don’t envy you. I do not think that pursuit of expediency instead of making the right efforts or the intellectual incapacity that naturally results from such a way of life is something to be envied. ... I am rather happy and proud that I do not succumb to the kind of circumstances that people like you enjoy, but rise up along with my colleagues against those who create them.”

Ewha students returned to their classrooms as the university board unanimously accepted the president’s resignation. The board started an extensive inquiry into improprieties in the entrance of “special talent” students and traces of political connections in winning government-subsidized research programs. The intelligence of professors, students and alumnae of Ewha will now be able to steer the women’s university back to normalcy, but the probe into the Choi Soon-sil scandal outside the campus has little likelihood of an early conclusion.

A piece of advice to the leaders of Ewha is that they can better serve the university and the nation by staying away from politics -- the farther the better -- keeping themselves from the temptation of high government jobs. Kim Hwal-lan served as the minister of public information under President Syngman Rhee while retaining her Ewha position during the Korean War. Many saw her work for the government during the difficult time as cleansing some of her past wrongdoings of helping the Japanese.

Chang Sang’s unsuccessful nomination for prime minister did not help improve Ewha’s image at all, nor did her later activities with a major political party. Lee Bae-yong (president 2006-2010) was on the policies advisory committee for president-elect Lee Myung-bak in 2008, inviting questions about the appropriateness an incumbent university president taking the job. She has held a number of government positions ever since.

I believe that the presidency of a reputed university is not exchangeable with the chair of prime minister, given the rather lowly level of respect Koreans today attach to the latter. But to my disappointment, there is a long list of university presidents who have willingly accepted offers to serve as prime minister or even as presidential chief of staff.

By Kim Myong-sik

Kim Myong-sik is a former editorial writer for The Korea Herald. He can be reached at kmyongsik@hanmail.net – Ed.