Distinguished Service Award: Jae-won Lee

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Two KACA members reflect on the legacies of Dr. Jae-won Lee, the founding president and longtime supporter of KACA, whose generous donations have led to the creation of the Jae-won Lee Distinguished Service Award.

 

​PROFESSOR JAE-WON LEE: SOURCE OF INSPIRATION

 

A towering presence inside and outside KACA, Professor Emeritus  Jae-won  Lee  (Cleveland  State  University) deserves recognition for his role as the founder and a two-time president and for his enduring scholarly impact and his remarkable generosity. He has been a role model for me and many others.

Lee’s  1982  article,  “South  Korea,”  for  World  Press Encyclopedia (substantially revised and updated for the encyclopedia’s second edition in 2003) was a revelation to me. I was indelibly impressed with his unmistakable expertise in Korean journalism and his superb mastery of English. (This and other highly acclaimed articles by Lee are included in Korean Communication, Media, and Culture: An Annotated Bibliography.)

In 1994, for the IAMCR conference in Seoul, Lee co-edited Elite Media Amidst Mass Culture: A Critical Look at Mass Communication in Korea. The book was the most comprehensive scholarly treatment of Korean mass communication published in English.

In the early 1990s, Lee, along with Professor Seong H. Lee (Appalachian State), the second KACA president, reached out to me concerning KACA’s ongoing existential challenge. He wanted KACA Newsletter, which I edited during KACA’s second founding, to illuminate his vision for the reborn KACA.

Lee has been an exceptional advocate for KACA. His personal commitment to the KACA Founders Scholarship is particularly noteworthy. In 2008, he emailed me about his

$1,000 scholarship contribution: “Whether there are others participating or not, I would like to pledge that I will make this donation of the same amount annually as long as I stay alive and well.”

I hope we’ll revisit and embrace Lee’s laudable scholarship philosophy.

And, just as importantly, we should embrace our unfinished business to honor Lee, an inspiring leader, in appreciation of his far-reaching and significant legacy.

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Kyu Ho Youm

Youm, 1993–94 KACA president, is professor and the Jonathan Marshall First Amendment Chair at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication and co-editor (with former KACA President Nojin Kwak at the University of Michigan) of Korean Communication, Media, and Culture: An Annotated Bibliography.

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KEEP UP THE GOOD FIGHT, DR. LEE!​

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It was hot and humid June. I arrived on the fourth floor-hallway of JeonJu Woosuk Oriental Medicine University Hospital. I was visiting Dr. Jae-won Lee who was being treated for Lou Gehrig’s Disease or ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). He was losing the ability to speak, eat, move and breathe.
The last time I saw Dr. Lee was 2005 when I visited Dr. Lee’s Cleveland home with my newly-wed wife. Dr. Lee’s wife and my mother were close when I was a graduate student at Ohio State, but my mother never made it to the get-together with Mrs. Lee because six months before the wedding she died of the same Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
In 2008 Dr. Lee retired from Cleveland State University where he taught journalism for 36 years and served various academic and administrative positions, such as Assistant to Provost, Director of Curricular Affairs, and Director of Journalism Division of School of Communications.
A fixture of SPJ Cleveland Chapter, Dr. Lee received the SPJ Distinguished Service Award in 2011 and he won 1987 National Teaching Awards for Excellence in Journalism Teaching from the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. In 1995, Dr. Lee founded the first-ever global Olympic journalism competition, Olympic  Media  Awards. An  internationally recognized journalism educator, Dr. Lee was selected as Fulbright Scholar for whopping 4 times, first as a Korean student to US in 1967, and three times as a Cleveland State University faculty: Korea (1988), Botswana (2002) and Nepal (2008).
Dr. Lee had a special place in his heart for KACA, which he helped found and twice served as its president.
Fast forward to 2017, I reunited with Dr. Lee in Korea, where he had resettled in his beautiful “new home” in Namhae. I was now facing a different Dr. Lee, who now walked with a limp and could no longer talk or write. I tried my best to sound cheerful, but it was impossible for me to watch Dr. Lee without getting chocked up.
A loud pumping noise from the air compressor was the only sound that broke the awkward silence in the hospital room. I held Dr. Lee’s limp wrist and told him it is time for me to go, remembering his once powerful handshake grip and palms cracked and calloused from gardening.
When my mother was going through the same ordeal, I used to pray to God to reverse my mom’s condition. I knew what Dr. Lee was going through is one of those irreversible things in our life.
What is also irreversible, it turned out, is Dr. Lee’s undying affection toward KACA. Even in the face of incurable life-threatening illness, Dr. Lee wanted to continue to nurture KACA as if KACA is his birth child.
So, with his shaking right hand, Dr. Lee painstakingly scribbled his signature on his personal check and handed it to me. This is how KACA Jae-won Lee Distinguished Service Award was born last summer. This award will instill Dr. Lee’s humility, generosity and intellectual courage in the minds of the next generation of Korean American scholars in the U.S.
KACA and Dr. Lee will always be inseparable.
 

Taehyun Kim

Kim is an associate professor in the Department of Journalism at California State University, Northridge. He served KACA as student representative, webmaster, newsletter editor and treasurer from 1995 through 2008.

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