Boğaziçi University academics, Zeynep Gambetti, Mine Eder, Ahmet Ersoy and Esra Mungan, argue in their recent article published in the Wire, that as academic institutions all around the world are antagonised by authoritarian politicians, the Turkish university is defending autonomy and imagining a better future for higher education.
Zeynep Gambetti, Mine Eder, Ahmet Ersoy and Esra Mungan // The Wire
The Boğaziçi University resistance is bound to acquire a unique place in history for being one of the longest uninterrupted struggles for academic freedom and university autonomy ever to be waged. Hundreds of Boğaziçi faculty members have been resisting the take-over of the university by the Turkish government for over two years now. As academic institutions all around the world (including the US) are antagonised by authoritarian politicians or debilitated by market pressures, the Boğaziçi example stands out as a testimony to the power of collective action in defending university autonomy and imagining a better future for higher education.
Although the Turkish Constitution guarantees university autonomy, universities across the country have been largely subjugated since the 2016 failed coup attempt. Boğaziçi remained partially protected until 2021. This is a highly prestigious, top-ranking public university with an English-language curriculum inherited from Robert College, an American higher education institution opened in 1863 in Istanbul. After banning internal elections at universities and acquiring the power to appoint rectors while the country was still under a State of Emergency, however, Turkish President Recep Erdogan named Melih Bulu rector of Boğaziçi on January 1, 2021. Bulu was not a faculty member and like dozens of other rectors in Turkey, he was affiliated with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). In keeping with Boğaziçi’s long-standing democratic governance practices, faculty, students and alumni reacted to the appointment from day one. In the first week of January 2021, the university became the main news agenda in Turkey and abroad when the police cracked down on students and clamped the university gates with handcuffs. The protests have been going on uninterrupted since then.
The treatment inflicted on Boğaziçi brings to light the authoritarian methods used to undermine many other time-honoured institutions in the country. Faced with wholesale opposition at the university, the government’s first strategy in Year 1 of the resistance was to flood the campus with riot police and take students under custody on fabricated charges of belonging to terrorist organisations. Religious discourse was also used to delegitimise the resistance and harness conservative support. Boğaziçi was portrayed by government mouthpieces as alien, pro-American, not “local and national” enough, and an elitist university out of touch with Turkish society. Anti-LGBTQ discourse became toxic during the first weeks of the resistance when “religious sentiment” was used as an excuse to ban the LGBTQ student club and criminalise the rainbow flag. An anti-gender equality stance was also discernable in how all upper administrative positions were filled with male faculty (mostly appointed from outside the university) in contradistinction to Boğaziçi’s egalitarian tradition. Along similar lines, the Coordination Office for the Prevention of Sexual Harassment was closed down on grounds that the coordinator was a “radical feminist.”
But clashes between the police and students attracted too much foreign and domestic attention to Boğaziçi. As a result of university-wide resistance, Erdogan retracted Bulu’s appointment in July 2021. Instead of backing down, though, he chose to appoint vice-rector Naci Inci as rector, despite an overwhelming 95% vote of no confidence against him by faculty. Only three Boğaziçi faculty members were willing to collaborate and Inci, a professor at the physics department, was among them.
You can read the full article here.