1. After 5 and a half years of research in the United States and Switzerland, it has been a year and a half since I returned to Korea and began my teaching career as an assistant. There are so many excellent researchers in Korea. New research personnel who have completed degrees/training are constantly coming in from abroad. However, the backward research environment that erodes their performance is eroding the productivity of researchers. In particular, there is a serious inefficiency that would not have been experienced if it had been established in a foreign university or research institute.
2. Sungkyunkwan University, where I work, has seen a pattern of declining international university rankings, which had been rising at a breakneck pace. (Recently, I understand that the rankings are rising again.) I think this is an inevitable result of not meeting the standards of global research-oriented universities. And this problem is not just about Sungkyunkwan University. It is a structural problem facing all Korean universities except a very small number of universities, and it is seriously eroding their competitiveness in the global science and technology competition. (As I will tell you later, I think that individual universities, including my school, are doing their best despite difficult situations.)
3. I think the biggest difference between Korean research-oriented universities and foreign excellent research-oriented universities that I experienced while working as an assistant professor is core, startup, and class.
3-1. It is because of the core facility that I was able to produce a huge amount of research results while researching in Switzerland for about two and a half years. Thanks to the staff of the core facility, which is equipped with a sequencing core and a flow cytometry core in the school itself, can handle equipment, and has a lot of experience in practice, I was able to produce results quickly while minimizing trial and error. Korea also has a lot of equipment. However, few places have established an efficient system called core facility that centralizes it and manages it by experienced full-time professionals. Among the newly established research projects this year, there is the ‘Shinjin Researcher Infrastructure Project’, which is an expanded and reorganized innovation laboratory support project that originally paid up to 100 million won, which pays up to 500 million won. I think this is the wrong direction. I think it is right to let each university build a core facility with the money to go into this project, so that new researchers do not have to purchase and manage expensive equipment. From a researcher’s point of view, it is important to be able to use equipment comfortably at any time, because you do not have to own it in your own laboratory. Rather, sharing research equipment but being able to share even skilled equipment management personnel is much more helpful in research production.
3-2. When a new teacher is appointed, a ‘start-up’ is provided to settle down. With this money, you need to build a laboratory and build basic infrastructure and experimental equipment, and most Korean universities are given a truly remarkable start-up except for a few universities in one hand. You can think of it as a scale where one zero is missing from the back compared to foreign universities at the same level. It means that there is a more than 10 times difference. That’s why new teachers should immediately set up their labs and prepare for their first class, and focus on winning research funds. It is overwhelming just to cover basic equipment and material costs, excluding research expenses. Research’s capital dependence continues to increase, at least in the field of life sciences. Experiments that cost tens of millions of won at a time and equipment that cost hundreds of millions of won have become not a good factor, but an essential factor for successful research. Under such circumstances, it is absurd to expect foreign universities that provide 100 million or 1 billion startups and Korean universities that provide 10 million startups to produce the same performance. (Still, it is really thanks to the struggles of Korean researchers that are producing this level of performance.) In particular, the lack of even start-ups without core facilities pushes emerging researchers into the Death Valley.
3-3. Last year, when I attended a foreign conference and talked to professors from other countries, I often asked if I was working at a ‘teaching university’ after listening to my class hours. (Teaching university is literally an education-oriented university, that is, a school centered on the education of undergraduate students rather than research. When we hear the name, we can think of most foreign universities we know as research-oriented universities, not teaching universities.) This is despite the fact that our school does not have a large number of responsible hours among domestic universities. Especially when I was an assistant professor for the first time, many classes were taught for the first time, so it takes a lot of time and effort to prepare for a lecture. As the class burden increases, the immersion in research inevitably decreases.
Universities believe that education obligations are natural and very important for teachers who work there because research institutes used to be higher education institutions. However, for proper education, I believe that the number of responsible hours per teacher should be reduced. It is important to teach even one subject properly, but if there are many class hours in the middle of being hit by work, the effort and affection that eventually lead to each class will be reduced. In the United States and Switzerland, the amount of instruction itself is very small, but I now feel really jealous to see my advisors work very hard on one class for a certain short period of time.
4. The greatest strength of Korean universities is their human resources. No matter where I travel around the world, the skills and passion of Korean university teachers and students are strong enough. However, they are not able to realize their potential in an inefficient and backward system. When it comes to life sciences, I have experienced only three areas: core facility, start-up, and class burden, if they meet the global standard level, the competitiveness of Korean universities will increase tremendously.
5. However, it is not that Korean universities do not know this. As I adjusted to Korea, I felt frustrated and talked with senior professors and school management, and what I felt is a matter of money. Core facility, start-up, and class burden are all problems that cost money. Running a core facility costs equipment and labor costs for equipment management personnel, and start-ups themselves are money, and in order to reduce the burden on classes, more people must spend money to teach. After all, the root cause of the decline in global competitiveness of Korean universities is the lack of university finances. In the face of scarce financial conditions, many universities, including our universities, are making every effort to maintain their competitiveness.
In fact, due to the lack of experience and knowledge, it is difficult to judge what is the right solution. Investment in higher education is the most profitable investment, and it seems that we should continue to think about how and how to realize it in the future.