Shin Eun-Jung - Verita$ : Harvard’s hidden history

Shin Eun-jungs careful study raises many important questions not just about Harvard but about elite educational institutions and their nature and roles more generally. A valuable and thought-provoking contribution.

Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor of Linguistics (emeritus), MIT

Eun-jung was a remarkable person. It was wonderful to have even a small role collaborating with her on Verita$, which I call Verita$ the Dollar. I was impressed by every aspect, starting with the concept and the research she had done. She took on the huge subject of Harvards corporatization. Later I watched with admiration as she drew this difficult material together into a cohesive whole and deployed immense persistence in showing it around the world and writing about the subject.

Margaret Morgenroth Gullette, resident scholar, Womens Studies Research Center, Brandeis University; Harvard PhD, 1975; Radcliffe College, B.A., 1962

What I loved about Eun-jung was her couragethe courage to follow her hearts desire and to leave her country and everything familiar to her, to come to our distant country where she amazed us all with her remarkable critical intelligence and energy. Overnight, it seemed, she learned English at Harvard and then became an award-winning filmmaker with her incisive analysis of that very institution.

Inez Hedges, professor of French, German, and cinema studies, Northeastern University

Harvard is an organ of the American ruling class whose mission is to do the intellectual labor that class needs.

Richard Levins, professor at Harvard School of Public Health

Harvard has prestige. That is probably the single thing that brings back to mind the campaign of Harvard clerical workers when they tried to organize against poor working conditions. Their slogan was you cant eat prestige.

Victor Wallis, professor at Berklee College of Music

VERITA$: Harvards Hidden History

Shin Eun-jung

2015 Eros Effect Foundation

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-62963-040-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014908070

Cover by John Yates/Stealworks

Interior design by briandesign

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John Trumpbour

Shortly before her sudden death at age forty, the Korean documentary filmmaker and television writer Shin Eun-jung (1972-2012) produced a movie and a book about the global role of Harvard. The film Verita$: Everybody Loves Harvard won her the award of Best Director of a Documentary Film at the 2011 New York International Film Festival.

Eun-jung developed her political and artistic sensibility as a student activist in Gwangju, Korea. In her high school years studying Korean literature and poetry, she delivered passionate speeches in support of teachers fighting for educational reform and striking for the right to join a union, the Jeongyojo (the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union). In 1989, 1,139 teachers were sacked for supporting the union, but in 2002 a special committee under the Prime Ministers Office reinstated them and praised them as exemplars of educational reform and the rising democratic movement in South Korea.

After years of service as director of the Gwangju Human Rights Film Festival, she later created a thirtieth anniversary documentary on the Gwangju Uprising of May 18, 1980, a signal event in which government troops massacred student protesters against the authoritarian regime of Major General Chun Doo-hwan. The Martial Law Command officially listed 144 civilians, 22 soldiers, and 4 police as dead on June 2, 1980, though Asia Watch, a division of Human Rights Watch, later offered estimates that as many as 2,000 citizens perished in the brutal repression. Gi-Wook Shin, the founding director of the Korean Studies program at Stanford University, has examined the wide variations in the grisly death toll, observing, The best estimates available today suggest about five hundred civilians dead and over three thousand injured. Many injured people still suffer from wounds, both physical and psychological.

Throughout her research, Eun-jung noticed that many leading apologists for anti-democratic repression in Asia were distinguished graduates and officials of Harvard University. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act confirmed U.S. military and government awareness of the capacity of the Korean Special Forces for merciless crackdown on dissenters, but U.S. officials in several cables gave what the Martial Law Command could regard as a green light for the ensuing iron-fisted suppression. Indeed the Special Forces lacerated students with bayonet thrusts and scorched them with flamethrowers, while mowing down protesters with M1 and carbon rifles blazing with bullet fire. The U.S. academic specialist in East Asian Studies most outspoken for bolstering the regime was University of California Berkeley professor of political science Robert Scalapino, who received his MA and PhD training at Harvard.

In the years after her graduation from Chonnam National University in Gwangju, Shin Eun-jung also took sharp notice of the mounting obsession in South Korean society with elite U.S. universities, most dramatically with Harvard. In much of the world, ambitious students pursue undergraduate studies in local universities and then later seek admission to graduate programs in the United States. But many affluent families in Korea start far earlier. In considerable numbers, Koreans send children in their early teens to the United States for high school. Eun-jung heard from many families that the ultimate prize would be an undergraduate seat at Harvard. She appreciated the arduous discipline and work ethic of many young Koreans but also worried that she was witnessing, to paraphrase beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the best minds of her generation destroyed by this uncritical quest to make their Harvard dream come true.

Korean elites are hardly alone in the belief that Harvard represents the pinnacle of educational accomplishment. Alex Beam of the Boston Globe captures this sensibility when he regularly calls the Crimson institution WGU (Worlds Greatest University).

Several dramatic indicators reveal overwhelming global deference to Harvard. A very conventional search on the Anglophone-skewed Google using the phrase in quotations Harvard educated yields 394,000 hits (October 12, 2014). Other highly esteemed educational institutions may boast of Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel laureates, prestigious faculties, and outstanding students, but the Harvard educated modifier is bestowed six to forty times more on the worldwide web than any of the names of elite U.S. rivals: Yale educated (61,400 hits); Cornell educated (48,700 hits); Columbia educated (38,800 hits); Stanford educated (33,200 hits); Pennsylvania educated (27,200 hits); MIT educated (24,900 hits); Princeton educated (23,300 hits); Dartmouth educated (18,500 hits); Brown educated (12,100 hits); and Duke educated (9,490 hits). There are indeed significant false positives in this Google exercise, but these actually increase the hits more markedly for places such as Brown, Columbia, and Pennsylvania. (Some aggrieved followers of the University of Pennsylvania may prefer the modifier Penn educated, but that adds a mere 3,990 hits.) The only university in the world that gives Harvard competition in the Google search sweepstakes is Oxford: Oxford educated (163,000 hits). Cambridge educated yields 75,900 hits.