A base camp to nurture global multiplayers
Published: 11 Sep. 2009, 02:45
Park Chul
This is good news for Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, though, because the institute has already anticipated, and is responding to, these factors.
To illustrate this, Park Chul, the university’s president, enumerated the 45 languages that the university teaches and explained that his faculty have successfully nurtured global leaders not from powerful Western countries, but from emerging economic forces such as Vietnam, Brazil, Russia, China and nations in Africa and Europe.
“HUFS is a global base camp to nurture global multiplayers who are not only equipped with vast linguistic knowledge, but who can embrace different values and understand various ways of thinking at a global stage,” Park said in a recent interview at the HUFS campus in Seoul.
Park said the university’s slogan, “Come to HUFS and meet the world,” represents where the university is headed.
Established in 1954 with five departments for foreign languages and literature studies, HUFS has grown into a top university specialized in foreign studies in Korea. It’s the third biggest such institution in the world.
Since appointed as president in February 2006, Park has traveled overseas to bolster the 55-year-old private university. He has struck research collaboration and scholastic exchange partnerships with the world’s most prestigious universities, brought distinguished students and scholars to Korea and sent more students from the university abroad to study.
The number of partnerships doubled to 300 universities in 71 countries after he took office. HUFS currently sends 2,000 students to study abroad annually, and another 2,000 overseas students from 50 countries come to study at HUFS every semester.
The university, long renowned for its foreign linguistic and international studies departments, opened an Asia-Pacific center of the University for Peace, a UN-affiliated master’s program, in March 2008.
This Monday, Spain’s Royal Spanish Academy appointed Park as its corresponding member. Park is the second Korean to receive such honor for his ceaseless dedications for promoting Spanish language and culture to Korea and vice versa.
The 60-year old president graduated from HUFS with a degree in Spanish literature in 1972 and earned his Ph.D. in Spanish Literature at Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain in 1985. Since then, he has served as a professor at his alma mater, spent a year as a guest professor at Harvard University in the U.S. and became HUFS president in 2006.
By Kim Mi-ju [[email protected]]
Globalizing universities
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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