Faculty jackets are positioned throughout the campus at Dongduk Girls’s College in northeastern Seoul as a symbolic protest in opposition to the plan to shift to co-education, Nov. 20, 2024. Korea Occasions picture by Park Si-mon
After Dongduk Girls’s College confirmed plans to turn out to be a coeducational establishment in 2029, college students at a number of girls’s universities started a web based petition marketing campaign urging the Ministry of Schooling to halt the transition.
The backlash at Dongduk underscores a widening generational debate in Korea over the function of single-sex schooling. As the federal government urges universities to answer demographic modifications and shrinking enrollment, many college students argue that girls’s establishments stay very important areas for cultivating feminine management and that they need to not abandon their historic and social missions for monetary causes.
Though college students argue that the transition may nonetheless be stopped with out formal approval from schooling authorities, the ministry seems to have restricted authority over whether or not the change finally proceeds.
The announcement comes a couple of yr after college students occupied and spray painted buildings on campus as a part of protests to oppose the transfer.
The schooling ministry famous {that a} separate authorities approval isn’t required for ladies’s universities to shift to coed.
With no particular laws outlining a process for transitioning to a coed establishment, such modifications are decided via inner deliberations, together with consultations with college members and approval by the college’s board.
Beneath the Non-public Faculty Act, amendments to a college’s basis articles require approval of no less than two-thirds of its board members, after which the choice must be reported to the schooling minister inside 14 days.
The schooling ministry maintains that changing into a coed college isn’t among the many institutional modifications that require authorities authorization.
As soon as Dongduk Girls’s College completes its inner deliberations and secures approval from our bodies comparable to the tutorial affairs committee and the college council, there may be just about no mechanism for the ministry to halt the transition.
Nevertheless, eradicating “Girls’s” from the college’s official identify nonetheless requires authorities approval. Any change should be reviewed by the ministry’s College Institution and Reorganization Evaluate Committee and permitted by the schooling minister.
The Larger Schooling Act states that college founders or operators should acquire authorization from the schooling minister when abolishing a college or altering “necessary issues.” These embody the establishment’s founding goal, official identify, location and plans to determine affiliated colleges.
If Dongduk strikes to amend its official identify, the committee is anticipated to boost no objection to eradicating the phrase “Girls’s.”
Committee members might take scholar opposition into consideration, however an official on the schooling ministry identified that the “autonomy of personal universities additionally must be revered.”
College students maintain a press convention at Dongduk Girls’s College in northeastern Seoul, condemning the college’s push to undertake a coed mannequin, Nov. 12, 2024. Korea Occasions picture by Jung Da-bin
In the meantime, college students at girls’s universities nationwide are urging friends on-line to file complaints with the schooling ministry opposing Dongduk’s shift. Many are submitting petitions via the federal government’s on-line grievance system.
Since Thursday, posts calling for a coordinated marketing campaign have appeared not solely on the net neighborhood portal for Dongduk Girls’s College but in addition at different establishments comparable to Ewha Womans College and Seoul Girls’s College.
“Girls’s universities present an area the place girls can develop free from social function expectations,” mentioned Yoo Ji-soo, a regulation graduate scholar at Ewha Womans College. “Robust gender norms nonetheless stay in Korean society, and the voices of scholars opposing going coed shouldn’t be silenced.”
Though Dongduk Girls’s College says the plan was reviewed by its deliberation committee, college students argue the choice did not adequately replicate their opinions.
