The Presidents’ Council of National and Public Universities (Chair person: Jeong Byung-seok, President of CNU) held a meeting at CNU on June 11th with presidents of 39 member universities and officials of the Ministry of Education (MOE), including Yu Eun-hae, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education, in attendance.

In the greeting address, Minister Yu expressed gratitude as she stated, “We have experienced an unprecedented crisis due to the outbreak of COVID-19. Still, we are in a rather stable stage thanks to the efforts of national and public universities nationwide, which have been committed to the prevention of the epidemic and the upholding of safety measures for students and faculty.”

In addition, Minister Yu announced that the MOE would employ relatively lenient disbursement rules for university innovation projects to solve financial problems and come up with fundamental measures to raise the bar for various regulations for national and public universities. In particular, she emphasized that the MOE would cultivate universities as bases for educational innovation in preparation for the post-COVID-19 era.

In response to Minister Yu’s statement, President Jeong said, “We appreciate that the MOE acknowledges the current issues of universities, such as financial problems, even under the condition that the MOE is fully dedicated to quarantine and safety measures for students.” He also promised to actively cooperate with the MOE to overcome COVID-19.

Previously, presidents of national and public universities put current issues on the table, such as measures to alleviate income loss due to COVID-19 from university agencies which were established for replacing revenue, guarantee autonomous budget planning and execution for own-income, improve the employment quota of public institutions for attracting local talent, and better the laboratory safety management system, etc.

In particular, they presented various opinions on the preparation for the post-COVID-19 era, such as ways to improve the obligatory teaching hour system, ease the requirements for online courses, and allocate additional budgeting for the infrastructure of online education.