From Indictment to Dean's Office: How Dongguk University Rewarded a Criminal Conviction with Promotions

February 18, 2026 — Gender Watchdog

A university founded on Buddhist principles of truthfulness (진리), compassion (자비), and righteousness (정직) indicted a professor in 2015, watched him be convicted of bid-rigging in 2017, and responded by promoting him twice — the second time to Dean.

This is not speculation. Every step of this timeline is documented across major Korean news outlets and Dongguk University's own institutional history page.

The Man at the Center

Tcha Seung-jai (차승재) is not a minor figure in Korean cinema. The Hollywood Reporter identified him as the founder and co-CEO of Sidus FNH, the production house behind some of Korea's most internationally recognized films. He served three terms as President of the Korean Film Producers Association (KFPA) — the position that effectively controls industry-wide hiring standards, blacklisting power, and access to co-production networks across Asia and beyond.

We have documented at length how he simultaneously leveraged corporate control, academic authority, industry gatekeeping, and association leadership into what we term a "Quadruple Coercion" model — a structure that creates near-total dependency for any career-seeking student at Dongguk's Graduate School of Digital Image & Contents.1 His company Sidus FNH shared physical facilities with the very department where he taught, a fact confirmed by Dongguk University's own official website before it was quietly archived.2

That analysis is documented elsewhere. This post is about something that has not been fully assembled in public until now: the criminal conviction timeline, and Dongguk's remarkable institutional response to it.

June 2015: Indictment as a Professor

Korean media first reported Tcha Seung-jai's indictment in June 2015. Sports World identified him as 현 동국대 영상대학원 교수 — current professor of Dongguk University's Graduate School of Digital Image — at the time of his arrest.3 Sisafocus covered the same story, confirming his academic position and the nature of the allegations.4

The charges stemmed from a scheme involving government education subsidies routed through a film personnel education institution in Seoul. The alleged misappropriation totalled approximately 350 million KRW — roughly CAD $340,000 at current exchange rates — drawn from public funds explicitly designated for film industry workforce training.

The political economics of this matter. These were not private monies. They were taxpayer-funded subsidies intended to develop Korean cinema's human capital. The allegation was that those funds were manipulated at the procurement stage — vendors selected not on merit but through coordination.

2017: Conviction for Bid-Rigging

When the case reached trial, Tcha Seung-jai was acquitted of the embezzlement charges but convicted of bid-rigging in the same government subsidy program — found to have manipulated which vendors received contracts funded by public education money.

A criminal conviction. Not an allegation. Not a settlement. A court verdict.

Dongguk University did not announce his departure. He continued as a professor.

2020: First Promotion — Research Institute Director

Three years after his 2017 conviction, Dong-A Ilbo, Kyunghyang Shinmun, and Hankyung (Korea Economic Daily) all reported a March 2020 Dongguk personnel announcement: Tcha Seung-jai had been appointed Director of the Image Culture & Contents Research Institute (영상문화콘텐츠연구원장).5, 6, 7

Three of Korea's largest national newspapers treated this as a routine university personnel notice. None mentioned the 2017 conviction. The university issued the announcement without comment on his criminal record.

He had gone from convicted felon to research institute director in 36 months.

2023: Second Promotion — 11th Dean of Film & Video Production

On March 2, 2023 — six years after his criminal conviction — Dongguk's Graduate School of Digital Image & Contents formally installed Tcha Seung-jai as its 11th Dean (제11대 원장, 영화영상제작학과 차승재 교수 취임).

This promotion was:

  • Announced by Yonhap News Agency, Korea's official state wire service8
  • Confirmed by Business Post, Financial News (Fnnews), Veritas Alpha, and University Journal9, 10, 11, 12
  • Recorded permanently in Dongguk Graduate School's own official institutional history page at dic.dongguk.edu/page/104213 — which reads verbatim:

2023.03 · 제11대 원장에 영화영상제작학과 차승재 교수 취임 (March 2023 — Professor Tcha Seung-jai of the Film & Video Production Department inaugurated as 11th Director/Dean)

The appointment was not challenged. It was celebrated.

2026: The "Ghost Dean" & Institutional Opaqueness

As of February 2026, subsequent to our investigation exposing his conviction, Dongguk University's presentation of its leadership has become increasingly opaque and contradictory.

  1. Absent from Korean Faculty List: Tcha Seung-Jai has vanished from the official Korean-language faculty page (dic.dongguk.edu). It is unclear when this removal occurred, but his absence from the primary domestic resource is striking for a figure who was appointed Dean as recently as 2023.
  2. Retained on English Faculty List: He remains listed on the English faculty page (dongguk.edu/eng/dandae/122), where his name is spelled "Sung-Jai Tcha" and he is curiously listed with only a "Bachelor Degree" in "French Education".
  3. Promotional Video Presence: Despite his absence from domestic text lists, Tcha remains a central figure in the Graduate School's official promotional video. At the 1:28 mark, he appears on screen, identified clearly by Hangul text as a professor of the department.

Tcha Seung-jai featured in Dongguk Promotional Video at 1:28 Figure 1: Tcha Seung-jai featured in the official promotional video (Source: Dongguk University)

Close-up of Tcha Seung-jai's name and title in video Figure 2: Close-up of on-screen text identifying him as "Professor Tcha Seung-jai of Film & Video Production"

Watch the full video here:

This suggests a university operating with a "One Foot In, One Foot Out" strategy—hiding a controversial figure from domestic scrutiny to avoid scandal, while maintaining his image internationally to attract students and prestige. This is the definition of Institutional Capture: protecting the network at the expense of transparency.

The Global Fallout: Panic Scrubs and University Alerts

This lack of transparency has triggered a global response. Between February 14-17, 2026, notices regarding this misrepresentation were notified to the General Counsels of the QS Top 400 universities. The alert explicitly warned that international partnerships are being used to "reputation launder" an administration that includes convicted leadership.

Simultaneously, we have observed a "Panic Scrub" spreading across other Korean institutions:

  • Sogang University (#6 Ranked) took its International Partners database offline on Feb 11, 2026.
  • Chung-Ang University (#11 Ranked) followed suit, momentarily disabling access to their partner data after public scrutiny.

These actions indicate that the "semantic fraud" we first identified at Dongguk—where universities claim partnerships that do not exist or are functionally dead—is likely a systemic issue across the sector.

Institutional Capture: The Probability of Protection

Why would a university risk its reputation to promote a convicted felon? The answer likely lies in the same "Elite Cartel" dynamics that protected figures like Kim Hak-ui (the Vice Minister of Justice involved in a sexual bribery scandal) and the perpetrators of the Burning Sun scandal.

In South Korea's hyper-connected elite circles, Tcha's industry power—as the gatekeeper of film investment and casting—translates into political currency. We hypothesize that his survival of the 2017 scandal (where a multi-million dollar bid-rigging case resulted in a trivial fine of ~1.5 million KRW, or ~$1,100 USD) is evidence of high-level protection. By promoting him, Dongguk University signaled its alignment with this impunity network, prioritizing industry access over student safety.

For a deeper analysis of these structural dynamics, see our report on Institutional Capture in Korea.20 We also previously mapped the intersection of luxury marketing and grooming in the industry's "sponsorship" culture in our analysis of the Chanel x BIFF partnership.21

What Dongguk's Response Tells Us

Every institution faces difficult decisions about employees who encounter the legal system. The question is what the institution's response reveals about its actual values — not its stated ones.

Dongguk University did not quietly accept Tcha Seung-jai's resignation after his 2017 conviction. It did not demote him, place him on administrative leave, conduct a review, or make any public accounting of the conflict between a bid-rigging conviction and a position of authority over students whose careers depend on industry access he controls.

Instead, it promoted him. Twice. Into progressively more influential positions of institutional authority — over research, over graduate programs, over the academic futures of the next generation of Korean filmmakers.

This is not ambivalence. This is endorsement.

Dongguk University's founding institution, the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism, describes the university's educational mission through three interlocking principles: truth (진리), compassion (자비), and righteousness (정직). The promotion of a criminally convicted figure into the Dean's office — where he exercises authority over students already documented by the Korean Women's Development Institute (KWDI) as experiencing sexual violence at a rate of 61.5%14 — represents a sustained institutional failure to embody any of those three values in practice.

The KWDI's 2020 report — produced by a Korean government-linked research body — assigned film departments the highest risk rating (81/100) of all academic disciplines. The university is not unaware of this data. It exists within the same government certification system that reviews and renews Dongguk's IEQAS (International Education Quality Assurance System) status year after year.

The Silencing Mechanism

When Gender Watchdog first documented the co-location of Sidus FNH within Dongguk's film department building — and Tcha Seung-jai's simultaneous corporate and academic roles — Sidus responded not with a rebuttal of the facts but with a criminal defamation threat through the law firm Shinwon.15

The legal notice, sent May 27, 2025, demanded retraction of our documentation and threatened criminal complaint under South Korea's defamation statutes, which, unlike those of most liberal democracies, permit criminal prosecution for statements that are true but deemed injurious to reputation.

This legal architecture creates what we have described as a "perfect immunity" system that outperforms even the silencing tactics seen in the Epstein case.22 By criminalizing truthful testimony, the system converts sexual violence allegations into administrative offenses against the accuser, ensuring that institutions like Dongguk never have to address the substance of the claims.

Sidus's letter asserted that the company had relocated its office from the Chungmuro Visual Media Center more than fifteen years prior. Dongguk's archived official website — captured April 8, 2025 — stated that the Film & Digital Media department building "houses Sidus FNH, one of Korea's top 5 film production companies."

One of these statements is false. The legal threat came from the party whose statement contradicts the archived institutional record.

We have analyzed this corporate panic response in detail elsewhere.16 The salient point here: institutions that have nothing to hide do not respond to factual documentation with criminal defamation threats. They respond with facts.

Why This Matters for International Students and Partners

Universities that partner with Dongguk — through exchange agreements, co-production treaties, or research MOUs — are entering an institutional relationship with a graduate school currently administered by a person convicted of manipulating public education funds.

The international students most at risk are not just from Korea. They come from around the world, with the largest populations hailing from China and Vietnam, alongside Japan's Zainichi Korean community — a group whose mistreatment exposes how deeply discrimination runs even against those of Korean descent.

On October 31, 2025, The PIE News reported that South Korea had reached its target of hosting 300,000 international students nearly two years ahead of schedule. Yet this rapid expansion has occurred without the safety infrastructure to protect them. These 300,000 students — whose visa status, language barriers, and social isolation make them structurally vulnerable — are entering an ecosystem where the Quadruple Coercion model Tcha embodies is standard operating procedure.1

We have been documenting this racialized dimension of the crisis since April 2025. Victim testimony collected through Xiaohongshu (China's "Little Red Book" platform) details how faculty exploit visa vulnerability as a mechanism of compliance.17 These accounts are not anonymized rumors; they represent a pattern consistent with the KWDI data, consistent with the 2025 Professor F case reported by Maeil Kyeongjae, and consistent with the structural access architecture Tcha Seung-jai's appointments have maintained and expanded.

The Korean government certified this institution. The Korean government has received our full evidence file since April 10, 2025 — more than 300 days of documented silence.

The "Crime Against Humanity" Hypothesis

On February 17, 2026, UN Human Rights Council experts stated that the "scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach" of the atrocities revealed in the Jeffrey Epstein files may meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity.18

We have argued since July 2025 that the systematic sexual violence documented in Korea's "Sponsorship" economy—where institutions like Dongguk University and the Ministry of Culture facilitate grooming pipelines—functions on a similar structural level. The "Sponsorship" system is not a series of isolated crimes; it is a transnational industrial network that commodifies vulnerable students (especially foreign nationals) for the benefit of protected elites.

The parallels are not rhetorical. The "Epstein Model," as described by Professor Pak Noja, is defined by institutions that are captured by predatory interests to protect their own impunity.19 Dongguk University's promotion of a convicted felon to Dean, while falsely claiming partnerships to recruit foreign students into a 61.5% sexual violence environment, fits this model of institutional capture perfectly.

The Public Record

This timeline is assembled entirely from public sources: Korean news archives, Dongguk University's own institutional pages, and Yonhap's official wire records. None of this required investigative access. It required only someone willing to look, to connect, and to say clearly what the pattern means.

Dongguk University promoted a criminally convicted professor to Dean. It did so six years after his conviction, through multiple steps, with official announcements covered by national media. The institution's international accreditation certifiers, its Korean government overseers, and its international academic partners received this appointment as routine.

We do not accept that it is routine. And we will continue to document why.

Gender Watchdog is an independent advocacy organization supported by End Rape On Campus (EROC). Our full evidence log is available at: https://drive.proton.me/urls/F5PM468JNM#D3aT2Bghd7lb

Follow the evidence: https://x.com/Gender_Watchdog

Footnotes

1 Gender Watchdog, "The Alleged Predatory Appointment and Government Cover-Up: How IEQAS Certification Enables Systematic Corporate-Academic Exploitation at Dongguk University": https://blog.genderwatchdog.org/the-alleged-predatory-appointment-and-government-cover-up-how-ieqas-certification-enables-systematic-corporate-academic-exploitation-at-dongguk-university

2 Dongguk University official film department page (archived April 8, 2025): states the Film & Digital Media department building "houses Sidus FNH, one of Korea's top 5 film production companies."

3 Sports World, June 4, 2015 — identifies Tcha as 현 동국대 영상대학원 교수 (current Dongguk Graduate School professor): https://www.sportsworldi.com/newsView/20150604001257

4 Sisafocus, 2015 — confirms indictment and academic position: https://www.sisafocus.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=123718

5 Dong-A Ilbo, March 13, 2020 — reports Dongguk Research Institute Director appointment: https://www.donga.com/news/article/all/20200313/100141733/1

6 Kyunghyang Shinmun, March 12, 2020: https://www.khan.co.kr/article/202003122103005

7 Hankyung (Korea Economic Daily), March 12, 2020: https://www.hankyung.com/article/2020031273811

8 Yonhap News Agency, March 2, 2023 — reports Tcha Seung-jai inaugurated as 11th Dean of Dongguk Graduate School Film & Video Production Department: https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20230302140300004

9 Business Post, March 2, 2023: https://www.businesspost.co.kr/BP?command=article_view&num=307884

10 Financial News (Fnnews), March 2, 2023: https://www.fnnews.com/news/202303021801350946

11 Veritas Alpha, March 2, 2023: http://www.veritas-a.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=448768

12 University Journal (unn.net), March 2, 2023: https://news.unn.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=542805

13 Dongguk Graduate School official institutional history (dic.dongguk.edu/page/1042): lists 2023.03 · 제11대 원장에 영화영상제작학과 차승재 교수 취임 ("March 2023 — Professor Tcha Seung-jai of the Film & Video Production Department inaugurated as 11th Director/Dean"): https://dic.dongguk.edu/page/1042

14 Korean Women's Development Institute (KWDI), 2020 — "Sexual Violence in Arts Education After MeToo: Current Status and Policy Issues." 61.5% of female students in university arts and culture programs reported experiencing sexual violence; film departments scored 81/100 risk rating, the highest of all academic disciplines. Analysis: https://blog.genderwatchdog.org/sexual-violence-in-arts-education-after-me-too-current-status-and-policy-issues/

15 Sidus FNH / Law Firm Shinwon legal threat, May 27, 2025. Original document archived in Gender Watchdog evidence log: https://drive.proton.me/urls/F5PM468JNM#D3aT2Bghd7lb

16 Gender Watchdog, "Sidus Legal Threat Backfires: Evidence of Corporate Panic and Institutional Cover-Up at Dongguk University": https://blog.genderwatchdog.org/sidus-legal-threat-backfires-evidence-of-corporate-panic-and-institutional-cover-up-at-dongguk-university/

17 Gender Watchdog, "Viral Xiaohongshu Post Exposes Dongguk University Sexual Violence Crisis: Victims Break Their Silence": https://blog.genderwatchdog.org/viral-xiaohongshu-post-exposes-dongguk-university-sexual-violence-crisis-victims-break-their-silence/

18 Reuters, "Allegations in Epstein files may amount to 'crimes against humanity,' UN experts say," Feb 17, 2026. Experts cited the "scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach" of the atrocities.

19 Pak Noja, "The Epstein Model: US Ruled by Predators," The Hankyoreh: https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/english_editorials/1244571.html

20 Gender Watchdog, "Institutional Capture in Korea: Exploitation Economy, Governance Failures, and AI Safety Hijacking": https://blog.genderwatchdog.org/institutional-capture-in-korea-exploitation-economy-governance-failures

21 Gender Watchdog Analysis: "Chanel, BIFF, and Korea’s 'Sponsorship' System: When Luxury Marketing Overlaps with Sexual Grooming." (See X/Twitter thread: https://x.com/Gender_Watchdog/status/1966813553140396281 for full analysis).

22 Gender Watchdog, "BIFF to Epstein: How Korea's Exploitation Economy Fueled the MAGA Far-Right Alliance": https://blog.genderwatchdog.org/biff-to-epstein-how-koreas-exploitation-economy-fueled-the-maga-far-right-alliance/