In Cho Dong Ho’s laboratory at Kaist, South Korea’s top science and technology university, researchers are trying to develop technology that could let you fold a notebook-size electronic display and carry it in your pocket like a handkerchief.

It's too early to say when something like this might be commercially available. But the experiment has already achieved one important breakthrough: it has mobilised professors from eight departments to collaborate on an idea proposed by a student.

This arrangement is almost unheard of in South Korea, where the norm is for a senior professor to dictate research projects to his own cloistered team.

“When we first got the student’s idea on what a future display should look like, we thought it was crazy, stuff from science fiction,” said Cho, director of Kaist’s Institute for Information Technology Convergence. “But under our new president, we are being urged to try things no one else is likely to.”

That university president is Suh Nam Pyo, 71, a mechanical engineer who used to be an administrator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His moves so far, from requiring professors to teach in English to basing student admissions on factors other than test scores, are aimed at making the university, and by extension South Korean society, much more competitive on a world scale.

When the South Korean government hired Suh in 2006 to shake up the state-financed Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (which formally changed its name to its acronym, Kaist, on Jan 1) the country’s leading schools faced a crisis. Since his arrival, Suh has become the most talked-about campus reformer in South Korea by taking on some of Kaist’s most hallowed traditions.

In a first for a Korean university, Suh has insisted that all classes eventually be taught in English, starting with those aimed at freshmen. The move to English supports another of his changes: opening undergraduate degree programmes to talented non-Koreans. Meanwhile, he has ended free tuition for all; any student whose grade average falls below a B must pay up to $16,000 a year.

In what may have been his most daring move, the university denied tenure to 15 of the 35 professors who applied last September.

In this education-obsessed country, Suh’s actions have been watched intensely for their broader impact. More than 82 per cent of all high school graduates go on to higher education. What university a South Korean attends in his 20s can determine his position and salary in his 50s, a factor behind recent exposes of prominent South Koreans who faked prestigious diplomas.

Against this backdrop, Kaist has been experimenting with test-free admissions. For this year’s class, it brought applicants in for interviews and debates and make presentations while professors looked for creativity and leadership.

The science and technology ministry, which oversees Kaist, had first looked outside South Korea for someone to lead the changes, choosing the Nobel physics laureate Robert Laughlin, who became the first foreigner to head a South Korean university in 2004. But he returned to Stanford University within two years, after the faculty rebelled against him for attempting some of the same changes Suh has instituted. So far, Suh’s innovations have mostly received favourable reviews.

International Herald Tribune