The Cultural Technology department at CWNU is the only department of its kind among all other universities in Korea. Nevertheless, it was not the integration we know now from the beginning. In the past, it was known as ‘Free major’ and two different departments had that option. There was a ‘free major’ in the Humanities Department and one in the Natural sciences Department. As the title of the major indicates, students enrolling in this major had to transfer their majors after sophomore years restricting them to a major in their same department. This left only freshmen and sophomores in this major. Another unique feature of this fabulous major was that it did not belong to any colleges in our campus although the student lounge was located in the Humanities building at the time. At some point, the ‘free major’ affiliated with the Natural sciences department was assimilated into one major under the Humanities Department.

Up until 2014 they were still called ‘Free major’, but with the change of a new semester, they were transformed into a new college to greet freshmen. The major was integrated and formed one whole college.

One of the major changes were its name. It was converted to department of Cultural Technology. Next, the number of students has grown enormously. Before, students could not be in this department for more than two years, but after the changes, there was no longer a transferring policy so students remained in the department for all four years of their university life. This led to an expansion of the major into its own college due to a high student demand.

Then the problems began to arise. Since the department of Cultural Technology did not belong to any other colleges, there were many difficulties such as student solidarity in campus life. Therefore, last year the school began some measures to cope with the problems. One of them was adding the department of Cultural Technology into the college of Visual Art. This was quite reasonable, because many required courses in the Cultural Technology major and Visual Art department overlap. Thus, the department of Cultural Technology held an appeal session in front of the personnel from the Visual Art College. Nevertheless, the plan was denied with many objections from each of the majors affiliated with the college of Visual Art. According to personnel from the college of Visual Art, “a case like relocating or moving an original major to a different college is a decision of school policy; our department cannot really reach a result. These decisions are made in headquarters.”

Therefore, a student from the department of Cultural Technology was interviewed to find out some specifics on this issue.

Q: Are there any difficulties, such as solidarity problems, as a student from the department of Cultural Technology? And do you think your department should be part of the Humanities department or the Visual Art department?

Kim: If one belongs to the Cultural Technology department, I am pretty sure that one would have problems related to solidarity throughout ones campus life. Since we don’t belong to any Colleges, we are quite confused when filling out job application and facing circumstances where we have to disclose our affiliated colleges.

Even though we don’t belong to the Humanities Department, since my freshman year, our department implemented all of our events such as MT, OT and even the festival as part of the Humanities Department.

Thus, it is true that we spend more time with the students in the Humanities Department in non-academic events, but in lectures we mostly have to work with the students from the College of Visual Art. Which is very confusing to most of our students.

According to my information, moving into the College of Visual Art has not failed completely. I enroll in most of the major courses that belong to fine arts and dance. Furthermore, what we as the student of Cultural Technology do is bring theories of Culture and Art we learn in classes to real people. Therefore, if we have to be part of one of the colleges I believe that the college of Visual Art is most suitable for us.

By Kim Young-min, cub reporter  dnl2874@naver.com

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