Study abroad? What about work abroad? Dialogues with international faculty working at a Korean university

• In Event: Faculty members and doctoral students abroad

Proposal

Traditional international migration literature finds a general direction of global migration is from south to north or from less developed to more developed countries (e.g., Hugo, 2007). With the quest to build a World Class University (WCU), Korean universities have been actively participating in recruiting international faculty—changing the mobility patterns from more developed western (e.g., the United States) to less developed, non-western countries (i.e., South Korea). Indeed, recruitment of foreign faculty members has been “ramped up to a near feverish pitch,” in South Korea (Altbach, 2004), resulting in 7 percent of South Korea's full-time faculty members are foreigners, putting South Korea ahead of neighboring Japan's 5 percent foreign faculty, despite a much longer history of foreign hires in Japan (Shin, 2017). In this paper, we examine academics who crossed national borders in response to the strong pull of recruiting efforts (with added financial and programming benefits) from a Korean university which seeks to improve its university rankings and internationalization indicators with greater representations of international faculty. Specifically, we discuss the motivations for global mobility among fifteen foreign faculty members hired at a highly prestigious university in South Korea and their professional experiences and future plans for crossing national borders (again!).

While academic faculty have moved across national borders for employment and scholarly opportunity dating back to the emergence of western civilization (Granberg, 1973), the transnational movement of academics has begun to significantly increase starting in the 1990s (Hopkins, 2009) and continues to grow throughout the 21st century (Hopkins, 2009; Kim, 2017). One of the primary forces that drives the increasing global mobility of highly educated professors is the quest to build world- class universities happening globally. Many higher education institutions, especially those located in non-western countries, actively seek to find the most efficient and strategic ways to reach world-class status. Despite the contentious debates about what constitutes a world-class university, due to the difficulties in clearly defining the quality of a university, international university rankings are often seen as a convenient and cost-effective tool for institutions to strategically target their resources and delve into selected criteria to achieve world-class status. The South Korean government, with its strong involvement in higher education, for example, “strategically” provided funding to selected universities with strings attached, designating funding that must be used exclusively to recruit international faculty. With this funding, South Korea’s selected higher education institutions were able to recruit foreign professors, who were often hired under a separate faculty category, namely “foreign professors” or “Brain Korea professors,” instead of under the regular faculty hiring process.

In-depth interviews at the case university
The case university was ranked 34th by the QS World University Rankings in 2017. Because the Korean government assigned a special quota to national universities for hiring foreign faculty with additional budget, the case university actively recruited foreign faculty, resulting in about 5% of the total regular faculty members being international faculty in 2016 (Shin, 2017). Eighty percent of them were from Western countries (55 from the U.S.,; 31 from the U.K. and Europe),; 9% from Japan and other Asian countries, and 10% from other continents. In contrast to the majority of foreign professors in South Korea was hired either as temporary instructors or contract-based faculty members or to teach in foreign language training programs even if they were on tenure track (Kim, 2005), the foreign professors at the case university in this study are on tenure track (or tenured) and teach regular academic courses in various academic departments and colleges. We interviewed fifteen international faculty members at the case university.

Research questions
1. What are the patterns of international experience “prior to” arriving at the case university for a tenure track faculty position?
2. What pushed the international faculty members from their home (or their last country of residence) and pulled them to Korea and the case university?
3. How do the international faculty members experience the case university? Why do they experience the case university the way they do?
4. What are their future plans for their professional and personal mobility?

Summary of the Findings and Discussion
Utilizing two conceptual frameworks, world-system theory and the push-pull model, we seek to understand global mobility and the underlying motivations of this mobility, which in turn influence foreign faculty experiences at the case university. Faculty mobility between similar social systems (e.g., from the U.K. to the U.S., or from Hong Kong to Singapore is frequent), but movement from the U.S. to totally different societies like Korea is very uncommon (e.g., Whitsed & Volet 2011; Kim, 2016). Moving into a new social system that differs in term of language and culture brings many other issues to consider (Gress & Llon, 2009). Most prior literature on international faculty—particularly those who indeed moved into different social systems—tend to focus on their personal and professional experiences and understanding ways to improve their process of adjustment to the new higher education system in a different country setting. This study, on the other hand, focuses on the power dynamics of countries, regions, and languages and how foreign faculty and their lived experiences manifest their privilege as citizen of English speaking or western countries and their resistance to fully engage in the non-Western country’s setting as a place of settlement, due to the perceived “lack” of benefits of learning the language and culture (Korean) in the non-western setting. English imperialism is a strong persistent force that determines foreign professors’ surface level of “voluntary” involvement in the departmental/institutional business, which in turn influences their lack of belongingness to the case university. Consequently, the majority of foreign professors consider the case university and South Korea as a place to “work,” refusing to settle down and consider the university community as a place to “live.” By working at the case university during the regular semester and spending time with their family and friends back home during breaks and long holidays (flying back and forth frequently), these professors maintain separate places for professional and personal lives, representing the divided nature of their personal and professional spaces in global mobility.

Authors

• Dongbin Kim, Michigan State University

• Sung-Sang Yoo, Seoul National University

• Heekwon Son, MyungGi University

• Erin Luyendyk Sonneveldt, Michigan State University