The 50-year history
of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies(HUFS) has been marked
with an unbroken succession of steady development since the
founder of the University, the late Dr. Heung-Bae Kim, put his
personal assets to establish a university for advanced foreign
language training.
In April 1954 the University admitted its first students to
the five departments of English, French, Chinese, German and
Russian at the Yongbo building in downtown Seoul, from which
it moved in 1957 to its current site in the eastern part of
the city.
With the increasing involvement of Korea with the global
community since the 1960s, HUFS played a key role of providing
the nation with expert human resources who lead the nation
towards the international arena and towards the nation's brilliant
economic success.
This, in turn, gave the university further momentum to expand
its program so that through the 1960s and the '70s, HUFS continued
to set up new departments of foreign languages, graduates
courses, and various research institutes. At the same time,
to steer the University's curriculum towards a full-fledged
interdisciplinary approach to international studies, non-foreign
language departments in law, economics, and education were
added. By the late 1970s, HUFS's leading position among the
universities of the nation was indisputable.
The 1980s was for HUFS both a challenge and an opportunity.
In 1980 the government promoted the university's status from
a foreign language college to a full-scale university. To
facilitate its expansion, HUFS opened its second campus in
Yong-in near Seoul in 1981 which housed, along with branch
programs of its prestigious foreign language departments,
new departments in natural science, philosophy, history, and
later, engineering.
By the early 1990s HUFS successfully added to its previous
reputation as a specialist center of foreign studies a breadth
of comprehensiveness and universality requisite to a full-scale
university. A crowning moment in the university's efforts
to keep up its unique tradition and to incorporate new programs
was the selection in 1996 of HUFS, along with other older
universities including Seoul National University and Yonsei
University as one of the recipients of a special government
grant given to the institutions with the best qualifications
to train international experts. With the government support,
HUFS established the Graduate School of International Area
Studies and recruited the first group of students in 1997.
This symbolically? confirmed the University's leading role
in the next century as a center for international studies
in an increasingly globalized world. |
