It is highly fashionable nowadays to invite famous pop singers to university festivals. Their performances are usually the highlight events of the festivals. However, students’ eagerness for the shows sometimes goes to the extreme. Seongki Lee, a young pop singer, is said to have made the female audiences swoon at a performance held in a woman’s university. At Seoul National University last spring, two students were injured in a stampede as the crowd was trying to get a better view of the performance of the Wonder Girls.
Many critics consider this phenomenon as an example of the loss of university culture; they lament that today’s university campuses are over-dominated by pop culture. As they note, under the political oppression in the 70s and 80s, the university students were saturated with resistance ideology. The spirit of resistance helped to make the unique university culture which was basically leftist, progressive, and anti-governmental. In those days, the status of pop culture was only subsidiary to the dominant university culture.
I do not, of course, have any nostalgia for the outdated university culture promoted and shared by the activist students. The university culture then was an anomaly created by political emergency and consistently opposed to the established system of education. Regrettably, when the culture of political resistance prevailed, it was hard for a person to maintain his or her own identity as an individual: a person was regarded as a subject to ideology, not respected as an autonomous self.
Contrary to the students in the past, the students of today are distinctively apolitical and individualistic. Moreover, they seem to be much more materialistic than their predecessors. Most students today were born in the 80s and grew up in the 90s tasting probably the first fruits of the Korean materialism. It is no wonder that university education is often regarded by them as no more than a preparation to get a profitable job after graduation. They seem to have little interest in exploring their own major subjects in depth; of course, extracurricular activities on campus are shunned unless they are conducive to getting a job. 
It is in this arid academic climate that today’s pop culture has replaced the old university culture. It is now urgent to recoup the crumbled university culture. To be relevant, however, a university culture should be newly reshaped, not just revived from the old, and students themselves should be the makers of it. More specifically, they should stop being passive consumers of pop culture; then, they should make efforts as responsible individuals to pursue a university culture, which in turn will make their college lives more meaningful.