Former President Yoon Suk-yeol's wife, Kim Keon-hee, has had her doctoral degree from Kookmin University definitively invalidated. This decision comes after her master's degree from Sookmyung Women's University was revoked due to plagiarism, leading to her loss of eligibility for doctoral program admission. As a result, Kim Keon-hee has now lost both her master's and doctoral degrees.
Kookmin University announced today, the 21st, that it has "finally decided to invalidate the efficacy of the admission and degree conferral for Ms. Kim's Ph.D. program at the Techno Design Graduate School." Kookmin University reportedly made the decision to revoke the doctoral degree in accordance with Article 33, Paragraph 4 of the Higher Education Act. This article stipulates that the eligibility for a doctoral program is for "a person who holds a master's degree or a person recognized as having an equivalent or higher level of academic achievement under relevant laws." Kookmin University explained that the loss of admission eligibility due to the revocation of the master's degree falls under the legal category of "nullity by operation of law" (dangyeonmuyoh), emphasizing that this measure is to uphold the trust and ethics of the academic community.
Kim Keon-hee obtained her master's degree in 1999 from Sookmyung Women's University Graduate School of Education with the thesis titled "A Study on the Characteristics of Paul Klee's Paintings." In 2008, she received her doctoral degree from Kookmin University's Techno Design Graduate School with the thesis "A Study on the Development of Fortune-Telling Content Using Avatars." However, in December 2021, allegations of plagiarism arose regarding her Sookmyung Women's University master's thesis, citing similarities in sentence and paragraph order to another professor's thesis. Sookmyung Women's University's Research Ethics and Integrity Committee concluded in February 2022 that the thesis was indeed plagiarized. Consequently, Sookmyung Women's University decided to revoke Kim Keon-hee's master's degree last June, and as a follow-up measure, her Kookmin University doctoral degree has also been invalidated. This final decision comes approximately four years after the allegations regarding Kim Keon-hee's academic theses first surfaced.
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