IT HAS been almost a year since Yonsei University’s Professor Lew Seok-Choon became the subject of a national controversy after his contentious remarks equating wartime comfort women to “prostitutes.” In response to the criticism from the students and public alike, the professor responded that he was simply trying to encourage discussions. After the academic sanctions committee gave the professor a one-month suspension in May, he retired last month.

   This, however, should not signal an end of a period of self-reflection for the university. Many were dismissive of Professor Lew and his supporters’ defense invoking freedom of speech, but their self-justification raises important points of consideration for the university. There has been a protracted debate in North America on freedom of speech dating back to at least five years ago—one which has even been termed as an “existential threat” facing academia. Popular social justice movements, including the resurgent feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, and Black Lives Matter movements have sired a controversial offspring, dubbed “cancel culture.” The movement targets those the left deems as contributing to injustice by muzzling them through overwhelming public pressure. However, even amongst progressives, this tactic has been accused as intolerant−silencing any dissent, caught up in their self-righteous zeal. Roster of heavyweights such as Francis Fukuyama, Margaret Atwood, and Noam Chomsky have recently signed an open letter, titled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” to Harper’s Magazine, decrying the fact that this “new set of moral attitudes [have]…weakened our norms of open debate” and warned that “resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma.”

   Their points are hard to disagree with. Freedom of speech is sacrosanct—especially within academia. History is rife with intellectuals who have advanced our collective knowledge by necessarily taking us beyond the realms of what is socially acceptable. “All silencing of discussion is,” as John Stuart Mill put it, “is an assumption of infallibility.” But the debate on free speech eclipses a much more salient issue. It cannot be reduced to be either a problem of a few professors of bad faith or a problem of students who cannot accept disagreements. Instead, Professor Lew and the overwhelming condemnation are both indicative of the failures of society, and especially academia, in facilitating critical thinking that should be central to education. After all, ideas that challenge the prescribed norms, progressive or otherwise, are only threatening to society that has lost its capacity to think for themselves. The Korean education system is particularly guilty of this failure, as it has long relied on rote learning. Such a system breeds overreliance on authority and formalized education for knowledge, which is why it is so harmful when impressionable undergraduates who cannot think critically are taught by professors who aggressively forward their perspectives.

   But more importantly, it has also failed Professor Lew himself, an educator who has openly admitted having based his views on comfort women on a single source—a book written by a controversial and disgraced former professor of Seoul National University, Lee Young-hoon.* In the transcript of the exchange made public, the professor freely admits his lack of expertise in the area. “I did not study the issue of comfort women,” he said. “I just read Lee Young-hoon’s book.” To hear him subsequently chide his students for failing to maintain an open mind after his own admittance is a tragic irony.

   It has often been said that the ultimate goal of liberal arts education is to instill democratic values within the citizenry. The factual content of this education, of which can be crammed in the last two weeks before the final exams, is less important than the values it espouses. When such education is successful, it would produce individuals who are both open-minded and critically oriented. Academia has failed us on this front. Concerned only with the short-term benefits of transferring functional knowledge, it has lost sight of what it means to foster educated individuals who can properly think for themselves. Especially in this age of information, it is no longer the quantity of knowledge that we absorb in classes that is important, but our ability to process the information.

   The academia in Korea has, for far too long, been silent about the necessity for change, but the raging debate in North America shows that we must deal with this sooner or later. We should remind ourselves of the tenets of democracy, the value of openness, and freedom that our education is supposed to promote.

*The transcript is from mediawatch.kr