How hard is academic life in North Korea?

In 2017, 22-year-old American student Otto Warmbier returned home from North Korea in a coma. If you google “North Korea” and “student”, Warmbier’s mysterious and contested case dominates the search results. Information about the North Korean student experience for those who aren’t jailed or deported is conspicuous by its absence. Like so much in North Korea, the country’s higher education system is a black box to outsiders. Back in the mid-1980s when Ji-hyun Park was a student in North Korea, there was no question about where she’d attend university. Park, who later defected to the UK, was to complete a four-year degree at an agricultural university in North Hamgyong, the country’s northernmost province, within walking distance of her home. “The homework was really hard because it’s not just one subject but also Kim Il-sung history,” she recalls; Kim Il-sung, the current leader’s grandfather, led the officially named Democratic People’s Republic of Korea from its establishment in 1948 until his death in 1994. On campus, Park and 30 or so classmates would stay in one room, with different teachers coming to lecture. While many of her classmates were starting university right out of high school, others – those who weren’t as strong academically – joined after several years of military service, and they bullied the younger students into doing their homework. “I said no, so I was punished [with] one year [of] cleaning the toilet,” she laughs, cringing. Park’s least favourite time, though, was during planting and harvest seasons, when the government would send her class to a collective farm. However, at least she had the good fortune to have her family home near her university. “Students were falling asleep because of the cold and because they just didn’t have anything to eat. “I graduated but didn’t learn anything – we never learned widely, only what teachers wanted to say,” says Park. Outdated as it was, Park’s education was probably similar to what most North Korean students learn today: entirely out of step with what goes on in the rest of the world but calculated to instil political ideology and prepare students for life in what is still a largely rural, largely poor collectivist society. Like Park’s, most of North Korea’s 300-odd institutions are specialist colleges, offering courses in practical subjects such as mining, agriculture and marine transport. The most detailed insight into North Korean higher education comes via the anomalous Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST). At Pyongyang’s Kim Il-sung University (KIS), the country’s first and most prestigious institution, founded in 1946, information from foreigners is also strictly controlled.

Alek Sigley was deported from North Korea amid accusations of spying Sigley, the Australian student deported in 2019, is the only Western student to have pursued a master’s degree there. But even with – or perhaps because of – his fluent Korean, Sigley wasn’t able to mix with local students, except for those assigned to live in the international dormitory to keep tabs on foreigners. Even though he was at KIS for more than a year, he “never got to meet a single fellow graduate student from Korean literature”, he says. “The textbook was written by the professor who taught me, but they wouldn’t let me borrow or purchase a copy of his book,” he laughs. Other books accessible to North Koreans were also out of bounds. In North Korea, the information barrier goes both ways – designed to keep information about the country in and foreign influence out. Hoare, who laid the groundwork for the British embassy in North Korea, remembers visiting the KIS campus when he first arrived in North Korea in the early 2000s. “You would occasionally see a computer, but if you looked closely, it wasn’t actually connected. But these are still unlikely to be connected to the internet. At KIS, though, the two foreign student dorms each have a computer room, with unrestricted internet access. But the North Korean student-minders “wouldn’t dare enter” the computer room, and even administrators kept their distance. How, then, do North Korean academics manage to research anything? The answer, according to Hoare, is that they have access to academic journals. However, the country’s academics also have access to fairly up-to-date international journals – even if the content is vetted. But the vast majority of North Korean academics would struggle to get their work published in top Western journals. When North Korean academics find that they can’t publish in foreign journals, they often turn to predatory journals, which publish substandard papers for a fee. That verdict is endorsed by Leonid Petrov, a scholar of North Korea and international relations in north-east Asia at the Australian National University. Even at KIS, which is among few universities to hold international conferences, talk is tightly controlled.

Undergraduate students also have a conference where they share presentations, but the experience is similar, he says. Intellectually unexciting though it may be, academia is highly revered by North Korean students and families – and its rewards can be considerable. Around the year 2000, North Korea scrapped its earlier restrictions on who could become a scientist, making it easier for bright students with less social currency to enter the field. But despite its advancements in certain areas of hard science, North Korean academia has languished. Yet whatever the limitations of their teachers, learning materials or methods, North Korean students make up for it with sheer grit. Eun-jeung Lee, a professor at the Free University of Berlin and director of its Institute of Korean Studies, has taught North Koreans several times. Petrov recalls that even back in the 1980s, when he was a student in St Petersburg, the North Korean exchange students had excellent Russian pronunciation and near-native grammar. The North Korean students who go abroad are carefully selected, with the opportunity extended only to those who are “both trusted and smart” says Petrov. Moreover, perhaps more than academics in any other nation in the world, North Korean researchers’ and students’ international opportunities are tied to the current political zeitgeist. “I had the sense they had to forget everything after their return, and didn’t talk to anyone about their experiences, because that was a violation of North Korea’s security law,” he says. More recent academic interactions have been plagued by the same geopolitical divisions, says the Free University of Berlin’s Lee. As a result, McCulloch recalls that in 2017, PUST was “hanging on by our fingernails”, and even now still can’t supply computers “because they’re a forbidden product. Yet, despite all the difficulties, McCulloch is a strong proponent of continuing the internationalisation endeavour. Nor is McCulloch the only one to back continued efforts to fulfil the slogan displayed on a wall in PUST: “Plant your feet on the motherland and look out on the world. Sigley himself also believes that despite the inherent political – and personal – risks run on both sides, exchange is better than the alternative. And Sigley is convinced that the West’s curiosity about the black box of North Korea is reciprocated. “North Korean intellectuals are aware of their country’s isolation,” he says.

Read full article at Times Higher Education

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