공업 없는 공학— 1950-60년대 서울대학교 공과대학의 지향과 현실

This article examines the situation of engineering education before it was integrated into the national innovation system by focusing on the College of Engineering, Seoul National University (SNU) in the 1950s and 60s. During this period, the faculty members and students of the College of Engineering expressed various opinions on the role engineering graduates should assume within the context of South Korean society undergoing postwar recovery and industrialization.
In particular, students in fields lacking mature industry, such as naval architecture, metallurgy, and mechanical engineering, were bound in a dilemma. Moreover, some faculty members of the College of Engineering, with no industry to refer to, tried to construct a vision of the future of engineering based on foreign cases, especially the United States. The discourses on engineering research and education found in Bulam Mountain, the official magazine the SNU College of Engineering and other media show that colleges of engineering in Korea struggled to secure their place somewhere between a vocational school training technical experts for industry and an institute for research and education on “engineering science” training researchers. The SNU College of Engineering began to recover from the damage of the Korean War with U.S. aid, and constructed a vision that SNU will assume a role similar to that of American engineering schools within post-World War II United States. However, the South Korean vision of Americanization was inherently incomplete. Not only was its context of late industrialization vastly different than that of the United States, but also the South Korean political leaders during the 1950s and 60s refused to accept universities as partners in the project of national development. As a result, engineering education in Korea pursued an ideal that was markedly removed from the harsh realities of the South Korean industry of the time.