The Oldest University in the World is in Korea?!
You have to admit that a lot of history (text)books written in America are *used to* be very Euro-centric. I remember shortly after immigrating to US over 40 years ago I was taught that Gutenberg was the inventor of the printing press. I didn’t say anything (because I didn’t speak English) to the teacher back then, but all Korean students are taught that the world’s first movable metal type printing was done by Koreans almost a hundred years (1377) before Gutenberg (1455 or 1436, depending on how you look at it). Now, there’s been convincing evidence of metal type printing that predates it by a whopping 138 years, putting the Korean printing press as early as 1239, 200 years before Gutenberg.
I’ve discussed this very briefly in my Taeguk-gi (Korean National Flag) post, but it wasn’t Leibniz who first came up with the binary code (the language of computers), but an ancient text in China written 5000 years ago—among many, many things the Chinese civilization has invented.
And lest we forget, the Indian mathematician and astronomer Brahmagupta with the all-important concept of computational zero in the 7th century.
Am I being too Asia-centric? Perhaps, but these ARE the facts.
Granted, today’s title is pretty ambitious and it’s sure to rile up some people in Bologna and Oxford but let me preface it by saying that I’m merely a messenger, not the person who’s put forth the claim. In fact, I’m not entirely sure if I even believe what I’m about write, although it can be argued both ways.
When you bring up the subject “the oldest university in the world,” most people will probably say Oxford. But University of Bologna in Italy predates Oxford by about 10 years. Facts are facts, you know…
But, if teaching full-time students in advanced studies in a structured setting, such as a dedicated building for education in a bona fide city with some sort of financial backing from authorities, qualifies as a “university,” then the old Korean institution known as Sungkyunkwan (성균관) can definitely stake its claim on the debate of who the world’s oldest university is (not that this matters anyway, in my opinion).
Let’s bring in Professor Mark Peterson at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah, with Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilization from Harvard, and Derek Driggs, an Oxford Ph.D. and professor of Korean at the University of Utah. (What’s going on in the state of Utah with Korean studies? When you watch the YouTube video above, don’t pay too much attention to the transcription you see on the screen—it’s full of mistakes, probably rendered by AI.)
These two gentlemen—clearly Korea-philes, along with an undergraduate student Bitty, in discussing the traditional Korean education system offer up the idea that Sungkyunkwan should rightfully be called the oldest university in the world. They didn’t get too much into detail other than the fact the school is over 1000 years old, noting that it’s older than Oxford. I’ve heard this argument before, so I decided to look into it a little closer.
** South Korea, nor the University with its name, has never touted Sungkyunkwan to be the oldest university in the world, but North Korea has. The word Sungkyunkwan literally means, “institution of higher education.” You have to take anything that comes out of North Korea with a grain of salt, but some of what they claim in purely scholarly matters are, I’ve found, well-grounded.
In 992, during the early part of Goryeo dynasty (918~1392), King Seong-jong (성종, obviously different from the Joseon King of the same name) established an institution called Guhk-Ja-Gahm (국자감, 國子監) to teach and train young student-officials in the fields of—get this—what can only be translated as “Arts and Letters” and “Technology.” Under those two main “departments,” there were a total of 6 “fields of study.” The Arts and Letters department was divided into 3 sections that taught “legacy admission” or “privileged” students the art of governing, and the Technology (기술학부, literally “School of Technology”) department had law (율학, 律學), mathematics (산학, 算學), and classics (서학, 書學) majors.
This institution of higher learning and research continues on for over 1000 years although it goes through a couple of closures, a few name changes, and even through a dynastic change from Goryeo to Joseon. The name Sungkyunkwan is first established in 1308 and remains to this day as Sungkyunkwan University (성균관대학교), one of the top 5 or 6 universities in South Korea.
Who am I to pass judgment on such matters, but I think the argument for Sungkyunkwan being the oldest university stands on shaky ground because 1). Joseon, which in many ways set the country back, gets rid of the “Technology” department and only focuses on the Neo-Confucianism studies, 2). the school burns down in 1592 when Japan invades Joseon (re-built 14 years later) and 3). the school is forced to shut down for 2 years during the Japanese occupation in 1943, before being reborn as today’s Sungkyunkwan University in 1946.
Sungkyunkwan University, ranked 145th in the world by both QS and Times Higher Education, officially promotes its own history as being 626 years old, established in 1398. There are two main campuses, one in downtown Seoul (the original location during Joseon period) and a new campus in Suwon city (about 30km south from Seoul). The university is unofficially owned and operated by Samsung and not surprisingly it excels at semiconductor and electrical engineering departments, and is one of the top 5 holders of graphene-related patents in the world (Samsung Electronics owns the most).