SEOUL, Sept 18, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – A scandal over educational privilege in
South Korea that threatened to derail the new justice minister’s appointment
has spread to engulf the opposition’s parliamentary leader, whose son is a
student at Yale.
The world’s 11th largest economy is an intensely competitive society where
teenage students are under tremendous pressure to win admission into elite
universities.
Success can lead to lifelong advantages in employment, society and even
marriage, and any hint of manipulation of the process by wealthy or
influential parents outrages ordinary South Koreans.
Prosecutors in Seoul said Wednesday they had opened a probe into
allegations that Na Kyung-won, the parliamentary floor leader of the
opposition Liberty Korea party, pressured a Seoul National University
professor to accept her son as an intern.
The teenager was later named the lead author of a medical paper that won
him first prize in a US scientific competition — “Research on the
Feasibility of Cardiac Output Estimation Using Photoplethysmogram and
Ballistocardiogram” — and he subsequently secured a place at Yale to study
chemistry.
But his supervisor Yoon Hyung-jin told broadcaster KBS that the paper was
“beyond the level that a high schooler could have comprehended”.
“It’s clear he had not understood what he was doing,” he said. “But we gave
him ideas.”
The allegations directly parallel the accusations against Justice Minister
Cho Kuk, who barely survived confirmation scrutiny this month when it was
revealed his daughter was named lead author of a medical paper during her
high school years, helped by her family connections.
Na — who was a classmate of Cho at Seoul National University, where they
studied law in the early 1980s — had herself been one of the new justice
minister’s fiercest critics, accusing him of ensuring his daughter’s resume
was “riddled with lies”.
Na maintains her son is solely responsible for the paper and has denied
foul play.
Score-settling is ingrained in the country’s winner-takes-all political
system, with every one of the country’s living former presidents either
currently in prison or convicted of crimes after leaving office.