Experts fear the crackdown on academic freedom in Turkey will be followed by a drive towards the Islamisation of campuses, after the country’s president accused one of its top universities of failing to “lean on national values”.
President Tayyip Erdogan’s claim in a speech that academics at Bogazici University in Istanbul are against “Turkish values” and the Turkish state, has drawn criticism from student groups and from the institution’s former rector. It has also prompted some observers to suggest that the president expects to reshape a sector already reeling from the dismissal and arrest of thousands of academics for alleged sympathy towards Kurds or the exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen blamed for a failed 2016 coup attempt.
Umut Ozkirimli, a guest professor at Sweden’s Lund University, who has written on Turkey’s academic crackdown, says the comments could be a “harbinger” of a broader purge at the university, where some faculties are perceived to be sympathetic to “secessionist” Turkish Kurds.
Some of the most prominent members of Academics for Peace, a group that in 2016 publicly condemned a Turkish government offensive in Kurdish areas of the country, have come from Bogazici — and have been subsequently arrested. “We were expecting this to happen,” Prof. Ozkirimli says of the president’s speech. “He has a strategy in his mind… there’s an order in what he’s doing.”
Although President Erdogan’s rhetoric is still couched in nationalist rather than religious terms to avoid alienating overseas allies, the president “very clearly” has an Islamist agenda, adds Ozkirimli. The anti-intellectual tone of the Turkish government is “driving the brightest minds out” of the country, he says.
The government has already set up 20-30 Islamic or nationally focused universities, says Faruk Birtek, professor emeritus at Bogazici’s department of sociology, which “creates slots for their people” to gain faculty positions. “He doesn’t have to destroy universities like Bogazici, but he creates his own scheme of universities and professors. It’s a battle against secular Turkey.”