An article written with Noémie Cadeau for Le Vent se lève
Academic freedom in Turkey is again under threat as the year 2021 begins. At the famous University of the Bosphorus (Boğaziçi in Turkish), student demonstrations against the appointment of a rector close to the government have been going on for more than a month. However, the mobilisation against this "university putsch" is nevertheless growing and goes beyond the academic sphere. The fight for the autonomy of Boğazici is turning into a battle for academic freedom in general, against a backdrop of polarisation of the political and social space.
In front of Bogazici campus, first protest, 04/01/2021
A polemical appointment against a backdrop of political repression
On 2 January 2021 Melih Bulu was appointed President of Bogazici University by the President of the Turkish Republic, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The university is renowned for the quality of its teaching and is known for training the country's liberal elites. At the beginning of 2021, the university is rising up against an appointment that is as illegal internally as it is symbolic externally. A month after the protests began, student repression has escalated dramatically, and the issue has become national in scope.
While students had already denounced the forced appointment of the former president in 2016, the protest was able to lead to a real mobilisation at the beginning of the year thanks to the support of professors who, for the first time, rose up on and off campus. From 4 January onwards, students and teachers from Bogazici met to denounce Bulu's appointment in slogans and common songs that brought together nearly 2,500 people at the height of the mobilisations. Supported by other universities in Istanbul and the rest of the country, they were very quickly confronted with a heavy police and military presence on the outskirts of the campus, reinforced by dozens of plainclothes policemen inside the premises and night shifts in charge of carrying out raids in the early morning in different districts of Istanbul to pick up students from their homes. The street demonstrations of the first week were gradually replaced by seatings in front of the President's office and boycotts of courses in consultation with the various department heads. Despite the pressure of the end of term exams and police repression (around fifty people in police custody for the first week), the fervor of the mobilisation is a phenomenon unheard of since the coup d'état, and even since the Gezi protests in 2013. The movement hardened considerably during the first week of February, leading to the arrest of LGBTQ+ activists against a backdrop of national controversy. Now the movement is intensifying and the lines are shifting: while students were organizing an exhibition at their demonstration site inside the campus, four of them were arrested, two of them charged with placing a representation of the Kaaba surrounded by a multicolored flag on the ground. Blessed bread for the media close to the authorities, who hastened to denounce, in the footsteps of Erdogan, the "small fringe of perverse extremists outside humanity" who are mobilising in the Bogazici style. The arrest of 159 students on campus on 1 February, of 104 demonstrators in the streets of Istanbul and 59 in those of Ankara found an echo in the pots and pans that reasoned in the evening in the secular districts of the city and in the messages of solidarity coming from all over the country.
While there is no doubt that the nomination is illegal, it is the personality of Bulu, a former AKP candidate and close to the government, that explains the extent of the mobilisation. This former Bogazici student is in fact above all accused of not being a member of the house, i.e. of the academic body of the university, and of not having proven himself to his peers. This non-adaptation to Bogazici culture does not stop at the only question of Bulu's academic career. It is part of the rejection of all the values held by the university's student and teaching staff. As the first and only university with non-gendered toilets in Turkey, an associative ground open to minorities and a breeding ground for feminist and LGBTQ+ struggles, the Bogazici represents a unique space for activism and research influenced by a certain form of liberalism and a common opposition to the ruling power. As many values as the appointment of a man from the AKP poses a great threat. Accustomed to the recurrent attacks of Erdogan, who likes to present it as an elite landmark acquired in the West, Bogazici is developing a culture of opposition in reaction to the progressive seizure of power over higher education initiated under the military junta. As early as 1992, students had defied the authoritarian procedure for appointing rectors by holding internal elections. The government was forced to legalise the procedure, which will be undermined in 2016 and finally abolished by the appointment of Bulu in 2021. The latter thus acts as a phenomenon already known that the personality of the man would have made particularly unbearable, especially since he enjoys a very negative academic reputation. He is notably accused of plagiarism on many of his works, up to 50% of the third part of his thesis being a copy-pasted. If it is therefore Bulu's very personality that has triggered a large-scale mobilisation, it is the militant culture and political practice specific to Bogazici that is back in use.
The handover of the universities continues to expand
There is a sense of urgency in the voices and messages that are being raised across the country. The cohorts of police who have invaded the university neighborhood rub shoulders with students on a daily basis in a shared animosity. Everyone knows the importance of the struggle to defend this institution, which is one of the few universities still independent in 2021. In Libération, the philosopher Étienne Balibar and the political scientist Zeynep Gambetti underline the tradition of autonomy, scientific freedom and respect for democratic values that are specific to the university. They recall, for example, the holding of an international colloquium on the situation of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire before 1915, which brought the university to the wrath of nationalists and conservatives.
In view of the five years that have passed since the failed coup d'état, it would seem that a further turning point in educational freedoms on a national scale is at stake here. In 2016, Erdogan put in place a major plan for "total educational reform" with the aim of driving "traitors to the nation" and other "terrorists" out of the universities - in other words, a purge of the academic body. In the immediate aftermath of the coup, 1,500 deans were dismissed, while academics were assigned to the country as of 20 July. More than 6,000 teachers were then dismissed by decree for alleged links to terrorism, not counting "voluntary" resignations and leaks abroad. While the wave of dismissals is impressive at the turn of the putsch, it is an integral part of Erdogan's authoritarian exercise of power over a longer period of time. The missed putsch is an opportunity for Erdogan to intensify a tutelage already well underway in early 2016 by the massive repression of the signatories of the petition "we will not be complicit in your crimes" who demand the lifting of curfews and the establishment of talks in the Kurdish areas around 11 January 2016. In addition to the 1128 signatories, other academics have been added to the ranks of the accused over the years. The Collective of Academics for Peace, which was created the day after the petition, counted a total of 549 signatories excluded by decree, dismissed or in forced early retirement as of 26 January 2021, and 505 disciplinary proceedings underway for a total of 808 academics indicted for "terrorist propaganda" and "insulting Turkey". In 2017, 171 arrest warrants are issued for teachers and staff of the former Fatih University in Istanbul, which had already been banned from operating by presidential decree. At present, three academics, including a doctoral student who is staying in Turkey as part of investigations for his thesis, are being arbitrarily detained pending trial in an Istanbul prison. Behind the arrest figures, a whole academic world is gradually running out of steam between the reduction of access to scholarships for certain populations, the restriction of possible fields of research and the infiltration of universities by Erdogan's men.
It is in this perspective that Bulu's appointment should be analysed: a net blow in a hunt for academics that has been underway for many years against the already highly fragile freedom of research and teaching. For many of the students and teachers present at the demonstrations, Bulu is merely a puppet that must be opposed, but which in reality hides a whole system of criminalisation of academic activity that must be urgently stopped.
In search for a political space
As a result, academic freedom is more than ever under threat in Turkey. Nevertheless, in order to assess the consequences and importance of the mobilisations underway at the University of the Bosphorus, it is also necessary to measure the political space they have within the Turkish public agenda. One of the first indications of the visibility of these events is to note the place offered to them in the traditional media. On this subject, silence is the main rule: whether in newspapers, on television or on the radio, the demonstrations at the University of the Bosphorus were only mentioned at the height of the rallies, i.e. only during a short week around 4 January. Moreover, this meeting is presented as episodic, even anecdotal in the mainstream media. It is therefore mainly on social networks that the resistance is organised. Many accounts have been created on Twitter and Instagram to coordinate the movement. It is also a question of being able to disseminate alternative news through articles, videos or live actions carried out on campus. However, this information remains fragmented and accessible to a limited audience. Thus, as Deniz, a Master's student in sociology at the University of the Bosphorus, explains: "When you are deprived of your freedom of expression, it radically restricts the political space at your disposal. It is important to have a political space where you can be free, where you can produce information without any form of restriction. »
In this limited political space, we must also face a political counter-discourse that tries to discredit these mobilisations. The term "terrorism" is thus regularly used improperly by the government to refer to these student movements. The Turkish president at the head of the government, in a communiqué of 8 January 2021, declared: " Öğrenciler Değil, Teröristler Var ", which can be translated as : "They are not students, they are terrorists". This desire to criminalise university protest movements is in line with all the rhetoric deployed by the AKP to qualify its political opponents on all sides. Academics, intellectuals, artists, journalists, members of opposition parties, Kurdish personalities, are described indifferently by the government as terrorists. This semantic manipulation allows the AKP to position itself in public opinion as the guarantor of the order in place, which protects the population against the enemies of the nation. This rhetoric is all the more employed since the attempted coup of 2016, which is now at the heart of government propaganda. The number of places in Turkey's public space that have been renamed "15 Temmuz" (15 July), monuments erected to the glory of the day when democracy was saved, according to the official AKP narrative, is currently testifying to this.
Academic freedom did not come out unscathed by the attempted putsch either. The government took advantage of the state of emergency and general panic to dismiss thousands of academics, to initiate legal proceedings against certain institutions, but above all to restore the appointment by decree of university rectors. This authoritarian procedure had been put in place in 1980, following the military coup d'état. The universities had then lost their scientific and administrative autonomy, bringing an abrupt end to the cycle of mobilisation, protest and politicisation of the 1960s and 1970s (Yilmaz, 2013). The aim of the generals was then to repoliticise higher education on the right and to promote their patriotic ideas. Left-wing forces (trade unionists, student groups, academics, teachers, grassroots activists) were then violently repressed. During the 3-year state of emergency following the coup, thousands of people were arrested, tortured, sometimes sentenced to exile or reported missing. Military tutelage is imposed on universities through the Higher Education Council (YÖK), an undemocratic state institution, all members of which are chosen by the government. The YÖK in turn must appoint rectors, deans and professors. Elections are abolished in favor of appointment and political co-option. Nevertheless, it was once again Bogaziçi University that managed to break this tutelage in 1992 by imposing on the YÖK a legitimate candidate following internal elections. Caught short, the Higher Education Council then had to reform the selection of rectors, replacing their appointment with elections. However, this regaining of university independence was short-lived. The struggle for independence in Bogaziçi is thus emblematic and representative of that of all other universities in the country.
The mobilisations of the University of the Bosphorus are therefore part of an eminently significant historical context. Beyond the academic sphere alone, it is a question of placing these events in the broader context of the social mobilisations that have taken place since Erdogan's AKP took power. Indeed, many voices agree that, since the Gezi demonstrations in the spring of 2013, a social movement of such magnitude had not been seen before. The Gezi demonstrations had started in Istanbul following the opposition of a small number of environmental activists against the uprooting of trees in Gezi Park. The government was planning to build a shopping centre and renovate Ottoman barracks in the park's square. The movement then broadened into a broader political protest, which succeeded in bringing together various social strata, but above all a broad political spectrum, from the pro-Kurdish right to the left, not forgetting non-political people. The demands became political and democratic: criticism of the authoritarian attitude of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, of the violation of democratic rights, of police violence. In addition to these democratic demands, there was also a desire for societal change, calling for recognition of the LGBTQ+ community, women's rights, and Kurdish and Alevi minorities. Nevertheless, the wave of hope generated by the movement was quickly swept away by force: the park was violently evacuated after 11 days of occupation, 8 people lost their lives and thousands were injured. This repression confirmed the "authoritarian turn" (Esen and Gümüşçü, 2016) initiated by the AKP since the years 2010.
Gezi was thus a decisive turning point for Turkish democracy, and it seems that the spectrum of this mobilisation floats above the Bogaziçi demonstrations. The police and military arsenal deployed at the entrance of the campus attests to this: the power is protecting itself. The movement is moreover in the minds of many activists born at the end of the 1990s and whom these demonstrations had helped to politicize. However, the context in which the demonstrations at the University of the Bosphorus took place is very different: a new generation, which did not know Gezi, has arrived at the university, the health crisis is complicating the gatherings, and the authoritarianism of the government has continued to increase. These mobilisations are both in continuity with Gezi and in rupture with him: they are nevertheless in common the criticism of the hegemony of the AKP. At a time when Erdogan's party is losing momentum, notably because of the economic and health crises that are hitting Turkey hard, these mobilisations could well reconfigure the country's political landscape for the decade ahead.
Bulu's appointment has gone beyond the confines of the university to become an umpteenth fracture point in the Turkish population and a new opportunity for a show of strength on Erdogan's part. Voices are rising and repression is hardening, is this the sign of a power that fears a new Gezi?