“After I tried to overcome various obstacles for four years, I finally found a place to rest here in Austin. …The reason why I am writing this is to prevent a similar tragedy in the future. …Social irregularities cannot only be solved by plausible slogans. These irregularities and contradictions made me abandon my passion towards study and teaching.”

This is part of the will that the local police found in the room of a former part-time lecturer in Korea. On February 27, 2008 a Korean part-time lecturer, Han Kyung Sun died in a hospital in Austin, Texas. According to the local police, they found three pages of her last will and testament. In the testament, Ms. Han wrote about the sorrow of part-time lectures and the irregularities in the employment of professors in South Korea. Last month, a part-time lecturer (43, female) of the French Literature Department at Seoul National University committed suicide. Following two suicides—a lecturer in the Russian Literature Department in 2003 and another lecturer in the German Literature Department at the same school—it’s the third death in a human sciences department at the school. The school insists it is due to "depression," but people around them have different opinions. Since 2000, six part-time lecturers have committed suicide. All of them cited a common reason, which was worry over the unstable income that lecturing jobs at universities offered.

A part-time lecturer said, “When those two lecturers killed themselves, the school laid the cause of death as depression and didn’t care. But what led them to suicide is not just simple depression, but the cruel reality that they face.”

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