Frabjous day!  I have just read one of the great higher education management tracts of all time. I’m of course speaking about, On Improving Higher Education, by Kim Il Sung.  (Pyongyang Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1974).

Don’t let Kim’s “communist” label fool you – what this guy cared most about was the concept of Juche  (self-reliance), which continues to be the underlying ideology of the north’s nationalist, quasi-fascist state.  As you can imagine, this meant a lot of belt-tightening.  As such, Kim’s thoughts have mostly to do with things like optimization, efficiency, and austerity.  Really, a perfect book for our times.

Pay raises, for instance are Right Out.  “As long as you make an issue out of remuneration, you cannot be a revolutionary,” says Kim, righteously noting that nobody paid Marx to write Das Kapital (the fact that Marx died before completing it might have had something to do with that, but no matter). North Korean intellectuals had the privilege of giving lectures and writing books, “and yet they insist on receiving money for this wonderful task,” Kim splutters.

Work rules, too, come under serious scrutiny.  Responding to complaints that “university and college professors lecture a thousand hours a year”, which some consider to be too much, Kim is clear: “You are wrong!  Fundamentally speaking, calculating lecture hours is not the attitude of a revolutionary.  If you are true revolutionaries who serve the people, you would never calculate the hours; you try hard by all means to work as much as you can”.

(I make the following offer to university administrations across Canada: if any of you decide to try to outflank your faculty union to the left by telling them their views are evidence of captiveness to bourgeois ideology, I’m buying the first round.)

Times were tough in North Korea in the 60s.  In order to rebuild the country after war, there was a need to get Engineers into the field quickly, leaving little time for things like, say, a final year of studies.  “They say our technicians’ qualifications are low, but in fact they are not so low”, says Kim.  “Our Engineers may have graduated a year earlier, but since they have had more training at the actual places of production, they have many merits”.  Glen Murray couldn’t have put it any better.

The same applies to student enrolment, generally.  “Providing so many students with stipends is causing a heavy burden on the state”, he notes.  The solution?  Send them to work, and have them study while working.  If MOOCs had been around in the 60s, you know he’d have been all over them.  Juche, dontcha know.

Really, I can’t recommend this book enough.  A text for our times.