They Catch Up on Work Missed During Protests : Seoul’s Students Trade Bricks for Books

At the large gates to Seoul’s Yonsei University--where weeks ago thousands of students battled riot troops with firebombs, rocks and tear gas--the banners no longer demand the end of President Chun Doo Hwan’s “military dictatorship.”

Instead, posters advertise “summer cultural classes,” a “special summer session in computer science” and “summer church music classes.”

The university’s library is packed every afternoon and on weekends. Every study cubicle is occupied. Even the fifth-floor rare book room is full of students poring over ancient manuscripts.

The scene is the same at virtually all colleges and universities in this city of 10 million people, where tens of thousands of dissident students have traded bricks for books as they commit themselves to catching up on the studies they missed during the recent months of violent anti-government street demonstrations.

In interviews last week, most students said that Chun’s July 1 announcement accepting sweeping democratic reforms helped to quell the disturbances and gave them time to return to their studies. But they said it may only be a brief hiatus if the regime fails to implement the reforms.

Quiet Not Surprising

“This new quiet on the campuses should not be surprising,” said Kim Uk Sun, 20, an architecture student, during a brief study break at Yonsei’s library.

“We Korean students feel that we must study so our nation can catch up with the advanced countries of the world. We love our country. We don’t like the administration. We don’t like the dictatorial government. But it is our mission to study so we can help the country advance.”

In Seoul, political analysts and Western diplomats have been saying that the university campuses are quiet now because many Korean students have returned to their home provinces either for work or relaxation, as a result of Chun’s declaring an early summer vacation at the height of the protests.

But, according to the students themselves, the reasons for that campus peace are far different. The campuses are not quiet because some students have left; they are quiet, the students say, because the students are silently but vigilantly monitoring the government’s progress toward democracy.

At Korea University, where school officials say a record 7,000 students have enrolled for summer classes, Lim Mi Young, a senior studying to be an English teacher, said: “We are still watching. Behind this veneer of quiet study, we are watching all the moves that the government and the opposition are making. But, since there is an indication that things will develop toward democracy, this is the time to wait and see.

Protest Warning

“If the government does take real measures toward democracy, then fine. We will continue our studies quietly. But, if it does not, we will hit the streets again.”

Like many Korean students, Lim is spending the summer improving her foreign-language skills. She is attending one of the many Korean university summer courses that use Time and Newsweek magazines as textbooks to improve their understanding not only of English but of the rest of the world as well.

The lesson one recent afternoon was from the movie section of Newsweek--a review of the recently released American film “RoboCop.” Lim said she was stumped by only one term in the article--an obvious one in a nation that manufactures all its own automobiles. She asked a visiting American journalist, “What is a Chevy Nova?”

In explaining why so many students abandoned their studies for street protests, even though the competition for university admission is so fierce that only one in six applicants is accepted, another student said he believes that personal ambition is inseparable from the ambitions of a nation.

“It’s not like American society here,” the young man said. “Most Korean students regard the Korean people and the Korean nation as one and the same. If the nation is lost, I am lost. So we regard the nation as more important than our own individual ambitions.”

Return of Radical Professors

Even the most radical university professors also have returned to the campus to teach summer school.

Yoon Yong, who teaches communications at Korea University, said that he and many middle-class businessmen and housewives, whose eventual participation in the street protests appeared to be the final push that forced the Chun government into offering its concessions, view the students as “the real guardians of society.”

“They lead us, they teach us and they are always one step ahead of us,” said Yoon, who became so radicalized himself this year that he bit off the tip of his index finger, wrote, “Get the hell out, you murderous government” in blood on a placard and led 1,000 students out of the Korea University campus gates in a June 27 protest.

“Nobody really believes that this government’s proposals are anything more than a television script written to fool and appease the people,” Yoon said. “But we must give them (the government) time to prove that by themselves.”

Not everyone, of course, is so enamored of the students. President Chun, for example, has warned that his government will arrest any students who return to the streets.

Lingering Signs of Dissent

Even on the quiet campuses, there are lingering signs of dissent.

As the students pour into Yonsei University’s library, most stop at the picture windows and read the large, angry posters placed outside by the student government.

“We demand the immediate resignation of murderers and military dictators who have no right to share in the pains of this pure nation,” one poster declared.

Such rhetoric was dwarfed, though, by the scene at the only Seoul campus where unrest continued recently--a five-week sit-in by students at Sejong University. And student leaders there warned that their protest was an indication of what may be in store for the nation if the government reneges on its promised reforms.

More than half the windows are shattered in the private university’s three largest buildings. The buildings’ outer walls are covered with huge, red spray-painted graffiti and hundreds of splatters of multicolored paint, all of it done in the space of one day last month when the students commandeered the entire campus. And every hallway inside the buildings has been converted into combat bunkers, with thousands of desks piled up to serve as barricades.

Years of Seething Frustration

The June 15 takeover, according to student body president Hwang Dong Yeol, was the climax of several years of seething frustration among students who each pay $1,600 a year to attend a university where the trustees have allegedly diverted millions of dollars earmarked for education to their own private use.

Yeol, a junior in the school’s college of economics, said the students found extensive evidence of the alleged corruption in documents they discovered while going through private files in the administration building and a guest house on campus during their day of rage last month. The board of trustees has had no comment but agreed to meet with students today.

It is true, Yeol conceded, that Sejong is the only Seoul campus where no one is studying this summer, and he added that it is “a great sacrifice” for most students.

“We want to study,” he said. “But if we stop (the protest) now, the majority of the student body will almost certainly be expelled, and no one will ever be able to study again.

“If we stop studying for now, though, continue our protest and possibly change the entire ownership of the school through our effort, we can study again in the future.”

Mark Fineman, chief of The Times’ Manila bureau, was recently on assignment in South Korea.