Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mc_jc]

A friend of mine has written to John Huer regarding his articles in the Korea Times attacking both Korean culture and the foriegn community.
He just left South Korea to take up a position at a college in Pennsylvania and is within considerable driving distance from the University of Maryland's main campus at Adelphi.

He needs help compiling all the articles that people deemed offensive toward Korean culture and to the foreign community.

Here is a copy of the letter my friend, Tom, sent to Mr. Huer;

[E_athlete]

"please stop writing bad things about Korea, it hurts our feeeeeeeeeelings"

this seems to be his principle argument.

Korea has regulations that denegrade freedom of speech if you are not a national?

[mc_jc]

He's not Korean, he is an American citizen working for the University of Maryland at Yongsan Garrison in Seoul.
He is living under the SOFA regulations, which state that no contractor will say or write anything disbarraging about the host nation.
Also, being an academic, he is held accountable for his actions, which is what my friend wants him to realize.

[E_athlete]

[Smee]

Well, hopefully in his real letter he'll spell the name of his university correctly.

No time to dig up all the articles now, but you can run a google search on Huer to get the ones that were taken apart by bloggers, and you can run a search here for the threads that already exist about his more eye-roll worthy articles. On the KT site you can also get a list of articles, and though their search function isn't good you can find letters to the editor written by Koreans who disagree with him.

[Elvis Gratton]

Your buddy and Mr. Huer sound like they really deserve each other. Maybe these two "PhDs" put together might be able to scrape up a sophmoric level of knowledge about how the real world really works.

[PRagic]

Maybe Huer should throw his name in the hat for supreme court justice.

What about the Korean SNU English prof who writes op-eds for the Herald? He is always lamenting Korean faults, yet nobody jumps on his back.

[Kimchi Cha Cha]

I don't like Mr. Huer's articles as much as the next guy but also don't like the tone of your friend's letter. Whilst he may be right in his belief that Mr. Huer is intentionally writing controversial pieces as he sees himself as being above reproach and in doing so he working outside the bounds of the SOFA agreement. Your friend's letter comes across as a case of him not liking Mr. Huer and his writing, and hoping to bring him down on a technicality.

I think your friend would be better placed if instead of this approach, he tackled Mr. Huer on the issues he disagrees with. Your friend's motives come across as less than noble IMO, and whilst I do agree somewhat with his sentiment, I can't support the approach your friend is taking. Censorship is something that a lot of Westerners feel uneasy about and your friend's approach comes across as trying to censor Mr. Huer for opinions he doesn't agree with.

Like I said, I have little time for Mr. Huer but think your friend would be better placed to find a different approach to tackle Mr. Huer's articles.

[mc_jc]

That's certainly agreeable.
Tom was thinking that by making the university aware of the things one of its professor's writing, they might revoke his tenure if Mr. Huer didn't retract his statements.
I mentioned it to him that he is better if he left things alone, but he put himself on a crusade to bring him down. He left in 2004 and he stated that before he left, the media was starting to play a huge role in the negative stereotyping of foreign English teachers here.
But he found it just stomach-wrenching to read inflammatory articles from fellow Americans putting down other Americans simply because he believes he is of a higher status than English teachers.
Yeah, Korea doesn't have much in the way of preventing libelous remarks being made about foreigners, but the US has a system to right this wrong.

[BreakfastInBed]

Couldn't finish it. It smacks of someone trying too hard. I made it to the first sentence of the second paragraph. I don't understand being "within considerable distance from" something. Is he saying he is close to this university or far away from it? Whichever it is he has phrased it incorrectly. Reminds me of some of the embarassing stuff I've written when trying to impress someone, using penultimate instead of quintessential and stuff like that.

[samcheokguy]

I wonder if Heur was a white male in a real discipline (a Ph.D. in Sociolgy) he'd have any career at all...