This is just insane. Apparently some dude (American) faked all sorts of credentials and scored some university job here in Korea. He probably would have never gotten caught if not for the fact that he got too big for his britches and got greedy. Check out the full report courtesy of The Chosun Ilbo.
A high school graduate from the United States, who found employment at a certain private university in Korea after faking a master’s degree and doctorate from a famous U.S. university, now finds himself in police custody.
◆ Degree forged, “open” employmentSeoul Metropolitan Police arrested on Monday a 34-year-old Mr. M, a graduate of an art high school in New York, for taking employment at a private university in Seoul after faking a master’s and doctorate degree from a U.S. university. M received a salary and research fees from the school.
According to police, M met a Korean woman while he was working at a hotel in New York and came to Korea last November. Last April, he asked a broker in Thailand to falsify a master’s degree from New York’s Columbia University, after which he found employment as an English teacher at a university in Seoul. He worked as an instructor until last February and received W24 million per year.
Later, M counterfeited a doctorate degree in a similar way. He falsified a doctorate degree from Central Michigan University and applied for an assistant professor position at the same university. He was hired, and received a total of W68 million from the university, including W44 million in salary and research funds.
◆ Fabricated thesis, even smoked pot
Police investigation revealed that M, putting the school’s policy of granting money to professors who public theses in famous academic journals to ill use, received research grants for theses he carefully stole from other scholars.
After he became an assistant professor, he opened a website with a domain name similar to that of a famous academic journal, on which he registered edited versions of others’ academic theses under his own name. He did this three times, receiving W15 million in research fees.
He also took wild hemp and planted it in flowerpots in his on-campus professor apartment, regularly smoking marijuana.
As this shows that the strict screenings given to Koreans applying for professorial openings are not being properly applied to foreign candidates, there are those calling for university hiring standards to be fairly and strictly supplemented.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
I had a conversation with my friend from university recently. He does the same type of job, only in Japan. He commented how a lot of the other foreigners in Japan are total geeks who are obsessed with all things Japanese, he asked me if this was the case in Korea. I told him that it was not really the case. There were some people who came here to learn Korean while teaching, or to pay off debts, but there were also a lot of the foreigners were just misfits who couldn’t function in their home countries. Apparently I wasn’t that far off the mark in my declararion.
The one problem I have is that the guy is American…I mean the GIs and our president do a good enough job of causing the Korean people to dislike Americans, do we really need this crap as well.
