Turkish university protests continue over Erdoğan-appointed rector
The president has called students and staff at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University ‘terrorists.’
Students and lecturers at a top Turkish university have entered a second week of protests against their state-appointed rector, fearing that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s expanding reach onto campuses will crush what remains of academic freedom.
Demonstrations at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University erupted last week after Erdoğan overrode the school’s tradition of electing one of its own faculty members to the post and appointed Melih Bulu, a former politician, as rector. Students at a handful of other universities have been staging rare protests in solidarity with Boğaziçi and against their own state-appointed administrators.
Arrests and dismissals of professors since a failed coup in 2016 have already eroded autonomy at the country’s 200 or so universities. The campus crackdown is part of broader backtracking on freedoms in Turkey that has crippled the press, civil society and the political opposition as Erdoğan tightened his grip on power.
Boğaziçi had avoided some, if not all, government meddling in recent years, protected by its reputation for academic excellence and its relatively progressive culture: feminist and LGBTQI groups are active on its campus and devout female students were allowed to wear a headscarf long before a nationwide ban was lifted. Detractors see Boğaziçi as a bastion of Western-oriented elites that fails to hire religious or nationalist instructors.
“Boğaziçi’s culture is based on concepts of freedom and justice, but the government wants to mold all universities in its own image. When the president talks about Boğaziçi, he spews hatred,” said Devrim Barış Yılmaz, a 19-year-old sociology major who joined the protests.
Erdoğan called the protesting students “terrorists,” accusing them of exploiting Bulu’s “routine appointment” to stir unrest at other universities. Police teargassed students last week outside the school gates and released footage of heavily armed units raiding homes and detaining 45 students. All of them have been released pending charges, according to a lawyer.
Emergency regulations following the abortive coup canceled elections of rectors and allowed Erdoğan to issue a decree to assign any professor to run a university. In 2016, he named a well-regarded Boğaziçi faculty member as rector, dampening opposition to the appointment.
That rector is credited with shielding staff against a sweeping purge of intellectuals while other universities drew up lists of perceived government enemies, leading to the dismissal of more than 8,500 of Turkey’s estimated 150,000 academics after the coup attempt.
This time, Erdoğan chose Bulu, who unsuccessfully ran for parliament with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) before serving as rector of another university that opened in 2015. Bulu earned graduate degrees at Boğaziçi.
The appointment of an outsider breaches the faculty senate’s statement of principles that the head of Boğaziçi must come from within the ranks of its staff to ensure autonomy, said lecturer Can Candan, who has joined other professors in their robes for daily silent protests outside the rectorate.
“This is a self-run university with a bottom-up approach to administration,” he said. “Parachuting in a rector … raises questions about whether he is qualified to be a part of the faculty, let alone president of the university.”
Bulu’s thesis advisers when he was a graduate student at Boğaziçi are now looking into allegations he may have engaged in plagiarism, Candan said. Bulu has called the accusation “slander” and an attempt to misconstrue his use of citations in thesis.
For his part, Bulu has refused to step down but has allowed students to continue protesting on campus, such as when they blared the metal anthem “Master of Puppets” outside his office after he described himself as “a hard-rock, Metallica-listening rector.”
Established by missionaries in 1863 as the first American college overseas, Boğaziçi — named for the Bosphorus Strait that snakes below the ivy-covered campus — became a state university in 1971, and among its alumni are prime ministers and chief executives at the country’s biggest companies. Admission is the most competitive in Turkey, with just 1,500 of the 2.4 million students competing for placement at Turkish universities each year winning a spot at Boğaziçi.
“I actually see Bulu’s appointment as an attempt to ‘conquer’ a university that has been known for its strong engagement in university governance and ethical principles, even as Turkey became a more and more autocratic regime,” said Esra Mungan, a Boğaziçi professor of psychology.
Boğaziçi enrolls students from diverse backgrounds who learn ideas they were previously unexposed to and “how to tolerate opinions they may be strongly against. I think this is what made Erdoğan furious,” she said.
Mungan knows firsthand the cost of challenging government doctrine. She spent 40 days in jail in 2016 after joining more than 1,000 colleagues in signing a petition calling for an end to military operations against Kurdish militants in which scores of civilians were also killed. Unlike several signatories at other institutions, she kept her position during more than three years of legal proceedings before the Constitutional Court tossed out the case.
The state’s long-running conflict with the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is a particularly perilous issue to speak out against on campuses. In 2018, 14 Boğaziçi students who handed out sweets to protest the invasion of a Kurdish-run province in northwest Syria spent three months in prison before they and 13 others received suspended sentences for spreading terrorism propaganda.
Thousands of university students, who are mostly Kurdish from underprivileged families, are in Turkish prisons on vague terrorism charges or convictions.
Erdoğan’s government is not the first to empty the country’s universities of perceived opponents; Turkish intellectuals have been forced into exile since the 1930s. But the scale this time is unprecedented, dwarfing the last great purge when 1,400 academics were sacked by a military junta after the 1980 coup.
The current clampdown has put Turkey at the bottom of the Academic Freedom Index alongside countries like Libya, Iran, North Korea and China. The report, compiled in part by the Scholars at Risk Network, says Turkey is among the 10 countries whose scores worsened the most in the last five years.
It has also harmed the quality of higher education in Turkey, with its top universities sinking in global university rankings; Times Higher Education now puts Boğaziçi in the bottom 25 percent of schools after previously including it in the top half. That slump is “no wonder” to Mungan, who worries that a brain drain of top scholars and students since 2016 will only accelerate over the fight at Boğaziçi.
“It will again be the most brilliant ones and not necessarily only those who are directly affected by this, because in science it is about the climate,” Mungan said. “It is not just private investment that shies away but intellectual capital as well. And intellectual capital, much more than foreign investment, makes a country a country.”
An estimated 100,000 Turks study overseas and more than 70 percent say they do not want to return home after earning their degrees, according to one study. A figure for the exodus of scholars is not available, but news reports put it in the thousands.
For students like Yılmaz, expensive study-abroad programs are not an option. “I don’t have that kind of opportunity, nor do I have the desire,” he said. “My part to play is here. If Turkey is going to be a democratic place, it has to start with the students.”
Demonstrations at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University erupted last week after Erdoğan overrode the school’s tradition of electing one of its own faculty members to the post and appointed Melih Bulu, a former politician, as rector. Students at a handful of other universities have been staging rare protests in solidarity with Boğaziçi and against their own state-appointed administrators.
Arrests and dismissals of professors since a failed coup in 2016 have already eroded autonomy at the country’s 200 or so universities. The campus crackdown is part of broader backtracking on freedoms in Turkey that has crippled the press, civil society and the political opposition as Erdoğan tightened his grip on power.
Boğaziçi had avoided some, if not all, government meddling in recent years, protected by its reputation for academic excellence and its relatively progressive culture: feminist and LGBTQI groups are active on its campus and devout female students were allowed to wear a headscarf long before a nationwide ban was lifted. Detractors see Boğaziçi as a bastion of Western-oriented elites that fails to hire religious or nationalist instructors.
“Boğaziçi’s culture is based on concepts of freedom and justice, but the government wants to mold all universities in its own image. When the president talks about Boğaziçi, he spews hatred,” said Devrim Barış Yılmaz, a 19-year-old sociology major who joined the protests.
Erdoğan called the protesting students “terrorists,” accusing them of exploiting Bulu’s “routine appointment” to stir unrest at other universities. Police teargassed students last week outside the school gates and released footage of heavily armed units raiding homes and detaining 45 students. All of them have been released pending charges, according to a lawyer.
Emergency regulations following the abortive coup canceled elections of rectors and allowed Erdoğan to issue a decree to assign any professor to run a university. In 2016, he named a well-regarded Boğaziçi faculty member as rector, dampening opposition to the appointment.
That rector is credited with shielding staff against a sweeping purge of intellectuals while other universities drew up lists of perceived government enemies, leading to the dismissal of more than 8,500 of Turkey’s estimated 150,000 academics after the coup attempt.
This time, Erdoğan chose Bulu, who unsuccessfully ran for parliament with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) before serving as rector of another university that opened in 2015. Bulu earned graduate degrees at Boğaziçi.
The appointment of an outsider breaches the faculty senate’s statement of principles that the head of Boğaziçi must come from within the ranks of its staff to ensure autonomy, said lecturer Can Candan, who has joined other professors in their robes for daily silent protests outside the rectorate.
“This is a self-run university with a bottom-up approach to administration,” he said. “Parachuting in a rector … raises questions about whether he is qualified to be a part of the faculty, let alone president of the university.”
Bulu’s thesis advisers when he was a graduate student at Boğaziçi are now looking into allegations he may have engaged in plagiarism, Candan said. Bulu has called the accusation “slander” and an attempt to misconstrue his use of citations in thesis.
For his part, Bulu has refused to step down but has allowed students to continue protesting on campus, such as when they blared the metal anthem “Master of Puppets” outside his office after he described himself as “a hard-rock, Metallica-listening rector.”
Established by missionaries in 1863 as the first American college overseas, Boğaziçi — named for the Bosphorus Strait that snakes below the ivy-covered campus — became a state university in 1971, and among its alumni are prime ministers and chief executives at the country’s biggest companies. Admission is the most competitive in Turkey, with just 1,500 of the 2.4 million students competing for placement at Turkish universities each year winning a spot at Boğaziçi.
“I actually see Bulu’s appointment as an attempt to ‘conquer’ a university that has been known for its strong engagement in university governance and ethical principles, even as Turkey became a more and more autocratic regime,” said Esra Mungan, a Boğaziçi professor of psychology.
Boğaziçi enrolls students from diverse backgrounds who learn ideas they were previously unexposed to and “how to tolerate opinions they may be strongly against. I think this is what made Erdoğan furious,” she said.
Mungan knows firsthand the cost of challenging government doctrine. She spent 40 days in jail in 2016 after joining more than 1,000 colleagues in signing a petition calling for an end to military operations against Kurdish militants in which scores of civilians were also killed. Unlike several signatories at other institutions, she kept her position during more than three years of legal proceedings before the Constitutional Court tossed out the case.
The state’s long-running conflict with the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is a particularly perilous issue to speak out against on campuses. In 2018, 14 Boğaziçi students who handed out sweets to protest the invasion of a Kurdish-run province in northwest Syria spent three months in prison before they and 13 others received suspended sentences for spreading terrorism propaganda.
Thousands of university students, who are mostly Kurdish from underprivileged families, are in Turkish prisons on vague terrorism charges or convictions.
Erdoğan’s government is not the first to empty the country’s universities of perceived opponents; Turkish intellectuals have been forced into exile since the 1930s. But the scale this time is unprecedented, dwarfing the last great purge when 1,400 academics were sacked by a military junta after the 1980 coup.
The current clampdown has put Turkey at the bottom of the Academic Freedom Index alongside countries like Libya, Iran, North Korea and China. The report, compiled in part by the Scholars at Risk Network, says Turkey is among the 10 countries whose scores worsened the most in the last five years.
It has also harmed the quality of higher education in Turkey, with its top universities sinking in global university rankings; Times Higher Education now puts Boğaziçi in the bottom 25 percent of schools after previously including it in the top half. That slump is “no wonder” to Mungan, who worries that a brain drain of top scholars and students since 2016 will only accelerate over the fight at Boğaziçi.
“It will again be the most brilliant ones and not necessarily only those who are directly affected by this, because in science it is about the climate,” Mungan said. “It is not just private investment that shies away but intellectual capital as well. And intellectual capital, much more than foreign investment, makes a country a country.”
An estimated 100,000 Turks study overseas and more than 70 percent say they do not want to return home after earning their degrees, according to one study. A figure for the exodus of scholars is not available, but news reports put it in the thousands.
For students like Yılmaz, expensive study-abroad programs are not an option. “I don’t have that kind of opportunity, nor do I have the desire,” he said. “My part to play is here. If Turkey is going to be a democratic place, it has to start with the students.”
