As 12 students gathered in the hallway outside the classroom, expectations were pretty straightforward. They were shopping a new course about North Korea on Thursday afternoon of the first week of winter quarter.
Not quite. “It’s 7:10 in the morning, and you’re in Pyongyang,” instructor Robert Carlin said cheerfully, as they filed into the room. “Now hand over your cell phones, and they’ll be returned to you at the border when you leave—like they always are.”
Carlin, former chief of the Northeast Asia Division of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, wants students to experience the “mindset of North Koreans.” As someone who has studied the reclusive nation for more than 30 years and has made 25 trips to the capital, some as senior policy adviser to the U.S. special envoy for talks with North Korea, he is well suited to the task of geopolitical tour guide.
At a time when a conservative government is taking office in Seoul, ending a decade of liberal rule in South Korea, tensions on the peninsula are strained. President-elect Lee Myung-Bak has stressed the importance of denuclearization. “And if North Korea does become denuclearized, Lee will consider an even bigger economic package, a Korean version of the Marshall Plan,” says sociology professor Shin Gi-Wook, director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the first holder of an endowed professorship in Korean studies at Stanford.
Shin has been building Stanford’s program for more than six years, raising some $10 million and recruiting faculty, including assistant history professor Yumi Moon. He also has brought “distinguished practitioners,” like Carlin, to campus to lecture and conduct seminars. While most Korean studies programs at U.S. universities take a humanistic approach, exploring Korean literature, arts and history, the Stanford center is carving out a niche with a focus on social science research. “We do a lot of work on current issues and policy implications,” Shin says. “It’s a unique program we’re establishing here.”
The course Carlin is teaching, Media in North Korea: A Window to Plans, Perceptions and Decisions, is one of only a handful about the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) that are being taught nationwide—at Columbia, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins and Wellesley—according to David C. Kang, ’87, professor of government at Dartmouth College. By examining North Korean documents and media commentaries, cablegrams from diplomats stationed in Pyongyang and declassified U.S. government analyses, students learn how the DPRK has made decisions affecting Sino-Soviet relations, military spending and the economy.
Although Western observers typically characterize the DPRK as an informational black hole, Carlin encourages students to look beyond the caricatures of “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-Il’s elevator shoes, poufed hair and khaki jumpsuits. “It’s not a joke,” Carlin says. “It’s a real place.”
As they analyze official bulletins from the Korean Central News Agency, students also are learning to write a range of North Korean statements and reports. “They have to do an exegesis, explaining what each line means and what the internal discussions were,” Carlin says. “And they have to be historically accurate.”
