Kyle Haddad-Fonda
THE NATIONAL INTERESTS - July 24, 2017
I taught at a Moroccan university in the spring of 2013, a period of
time that happened to coincide with the apex of popularity of the Korean
rapper Psy. On Friday afternoons, after the prayer had let out of the
campus mosque, students would sometimes blare music on the central quad
to celebrate the beginning of the weekend. The song they chose was
always “Gangnam Style.”
My students often came to my office to discuss their plans to study
abroad. Inevitably, the two most popular destinations were the United
States and France. But the third choice surprised me: a remarkable
number of my students hoped to spend a year in South Korea. Many of
them, it turned out, liked to watch Korean television shows in their
dormitories. And the university had recently concluded an agreement for a
bilateral exchange program with Hannam University in Daejeon, which had
simplified the process.
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