Before the recent MERS scare made a dent, Seoul had become a popular destination for foreign students wishing to spend a semester or two on a university exchange. 


On top of that, more and more students are considering Korea as a place to pursue their academic degrees. The number of foreign students on the campuses of Korean universities has increased noticeably in recent years.
 
This addition of foreign students has worked as a critical factor in boosting the rankings of Korean universities by college evaluation institutions, whose key criteria include the level of globalization, where the number of foreign students and the number of courses taught in English are crucial.

Also included in the globalization criterion is the number of foreign faculty members. The progress in this number, however, has been mostly slow, and this has remained one of the forces inhibiting further improvements the rankings.

Modest rates of invitation and retention of foreign faculty members can be attributed to many different reasons. What stands out among these reasons is the communication wall that foreign faculty members often encounter in Korean universities.

Virtually all documents, including school regulations and guidelines, are written in Korean. Emails are written and distributed mostly in Korean. School meetings are also conducted in Korean. Translations are available from time to time, and interpretation offered by friendly colleagues.

Occasional translation and sporadic interpretation, though better than nothing, are far from being sufficient to provide a full picture of a situation or an issue. This communication barrier is said to have posed a significant challenge to foreign faculty members and sometimes to have swayed their decisions in choosing Korea as their next academic destination. The situation is improving, but there is a long way to go.

Apparently the same is true of entities other than university campuses. Foreign employees working for Korean companies in Seoul feel the same difficulty when it comes to intra-company communication. A person might happily go through an exotic cultural experience for a short period of time, but a person contemplating a permanent or long-term employment in a foreign country might find communication a very important factor.

As a society in general, there is much to be done in Korea concerning communication with foreign citizens residing in the country. The medium and method of communication with them has lagged behind the dizzy pace of globalization in other areas. There are few English-language radio and TV stations in the nation, and the content covered by them is also quite limited ― mostly traffic information and abbreviated versions of local news.

The fact that we need an effective medium of communication with foreign friends residing in Seoul in case of a grave situation has been evidenced by the recent outbreak of MERS. It seems that they did not receive relevant information from the agencies and local governments in charge promptly.

Furthermore, the scant information available has largely been in Korean: SMS messages are sent to alert the general public, but they are all in Korean. Foreign citizens in Seoul must have been groping for information in the dark. Lack of official communication tailored for them at a time when national concerns were high must have worried our foreign friends.

This intermittent communication does not fit comfortably with the oft-heard refrain that Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world. Unless effective communication with foreigners residing in Seoul is ensured, Seoul will be known to be a nice place to stop by and look around, but a difficult place to live in. Korea’s influx of foreign talent hinges upon this. 

By Lee Jae-min

Lee Jae-min is an associate professor of law at Seoul National University. ― Ed.