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An unthinking mistake back in 2005 might end up costing Yale tens of millions of dollars.
Dongguk University in South Korea is suing Yale for $50 million in damages over the case of Shin Jeong-ah (right), a former Dongguk art history professor who falsely claimed to have received her doctorate at Yale. When Shin applied for the position in 2005, she produced a forged letter, purportedly from Yale, attesting to her degree. Dongguk contacted Yale to verify the letter, and officials at the university faxed back a confirmation -- even though Shin had never actually been a student at Yale. In the summer of 2007, shortly after Shin was tapped to direct a major art event in Korea, it was revealed that she had forged her academic credentials and plagiarized her dissertation. Officials at Yale then said Shin had never been a Yale student. They also denied having sent the fax verifying Shin's forged letter. But in December, they reversed themselves and announced that Graduate School officials had in fact verified Shin's fraudulent letter. Yale president Richard Levin apologized to Dongguk for the mistake, but on Monday, Dongguk filed suit in Connecticut, alleging that Yale's mistake led to irreparable damage to Dongguk's reputation, which in turn damaged its fund-raising and recruiting abilities. The scandal -- nicknamed "Shin-gate" by English-language media in Korea -- has been covered intensively by newspapers and television outlets in Korea. The story grew more complicated last fall when it became public that Shin had an affair with a then-married aide to the president of South Korea. The aide, Yang-Kyoon Byeon (who is in fact a Yale alumnus: he earned a master's from the university in 1987), was fired for allegedly helping to protect her position at Dongguk. If it hadn't been for the enormous attention garnered by the scandal, Dongguk might have forgiven Yale's mistake, says Yale political science professor Seok-ju Cho, who studies Korean politics. "Dongguk University was blamed for being incompetent," he says. "[Now] they want to prove that it was not their mistake, in the court." Shin's connections to the government official fueled Korean media interest in the scandal, which was particularly shocking because Shin was able to uphold her deception for so many years, Cho says. After Shin-gate became public, a number of other top academics in Korea were revealed to have lied about their credentials. Shin herself is now on trial for forgery. Yale announced in December that is has revamped its own procedures in response to the scandal: henceforth, administrators will verify degrees only by checking internal records. |
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