Sympathy for the US universities from Türkiye, bastion of freedoms

The idea of a university is based on research, searching for answers. To do this, it is necessary to ask questions and be free to discuss unpopular and contrary ideas. There may be a power that has taken over the media, the decision-making bodies and established a monopoly on “truth”. If the university is autonomous and free, there will be students and academics who will challenge this hegemony and say “no, that is not the truth”. They may not be able to make their voices heard; after all, the media, broadcast bans, armies of trolls are in the hands of the ruling power. But the naivety of the youth, the urge to rebel against authority can lead to change.

I am not talking about Boğaziçi University or METU, I am talking about the USA, Columbia University, Emory University. Noëlle McAfee, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Emory University was one of the faculty members from the international academic community who signed the letter calling on the trustee rector appointed to Boğaziçi University in 2021 to resign. We watched her being detained in handcuffs for supporting the protests of her students at Emory University. We watched with horror the videos of other faculty members being dragged on the ground and having their bones broken by the police. What has happened to American universities, the cradle of freedom?

The protests at US Universities

The World is watching while an unimaginable force is being used on two million people trapped in a tiny piece of land in Gaza: They will either be annihilated or driven from their land. This is how we see it, but in the US, the monopoly of truth is in the hands of the government; their media, their ruling classes portray this as a legitimate war. However, university students have been organizing demonstrations for months, protesting that this is not the truth, demanding that their country should not be a party to this war crime.

These dissenting voices, which threaten the monopoly of “truth”, disturb the establishment, which summons the rectors and arrogantly orders them to silence students at all costs. In January, the rectors of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania were forced to resign less than a week after they told the US Congress that preventing student protests would be contrary to the constitutional right to free speech. Other rectors have gotten the message: To avoid being dismissed, they are putting freedom of expression aside and calling the police to campus to break up demonstrations by brutally beating students and academics, not to mention evicting protesting students from their dormitories and expelling them from the university.

My colleague Biray Kolluoğlu and I, in an article published in Nature: Human Behavior, titled “Defending the University”, had summarized the events at Boğaziçi University and concluded as follows:

“Why is this story of destruction of an Istanbul university important? What is taking place in Boğaziçi may seem too blatantly brute to be replicated elsewhere. However, the erosion of institutional autonomy and the resulting destruction of the university is already manifested in various degrees around the world. The erosion of the budgets for liberal arts programs in the US, the fate of Central European University in Hungary, the president’s office control over state universities’ administrations in Zimbabwe are all part and parcel of the same wave. Under the onslaught of not only market forces but also political forces, the university as a modern institution is struggling against huge and unruly tides. Therefore, allying with the faculty who have been not accepting and not giving up at Boğaziçi is an act of support for defending the university as we know it. ”

Similarity between Boğaziçi Protests and US protests

It still surprises us that the protests we have been organizing for more than three years and the events in the US are so similar. There could not be a more striking example of why freedom of expression is indispensable for a society. As faculty members of Boğaziçi University, we issued a letter in solidarity with American universities. In our statement, we said:

“We, the faculty at Boğaziçi University, condemn the oppressive measures adopted by university administrations across the US against peaceful pro-Palestinian and anti-war protests held by students and faculty members on campuses. We observe, with regret and concern, that in many universities the protestors’ demands for a ceasefire in Gaza and divestment of their institutions from companies with ties to Israel are met with brutal force. Many administrators took the appalling decision to let police forces armed with guns, batons, and teargas on university grounds, resulting with the arrest of hundreds of students, and the manhandling and detainment of many others and faculty members.

At Boğaziçi University, we are too familiar with the presence of armed forces on our campuses and the brutal suppression of non-violent protests. For over three years, Boğaziçi students and faculty have been resisting the take-over of the university by the government through the agency of imposed trustees and administrators, which has resulted in the undermining of academic freedom, leading to the repression of many protests by force, the imprisonment, ill-treatment, and disciplinary punishment of many students, as well as the dismissal, prosecution, or banishment of faculty members and administrative staff.

“Far-reaching politics of violence”

We consider what we have been experiencing at Boğaziçi as part and parcel of a far-reaching ‘politics’ of violence, targeting academic freedom across the world. We are deeply concerned to see that the bans on freedom of expression imposed by political powers regarding the justified reactions of the international public against war crimes committed in Gaza have also expanded to threaten academic freedom. A significant number of cancelled scholarly seminars, the cases of silenced faculty and students, and lastly, the forced termination of an international conference on Palestine solidarity to be held in Germany two weeks ago, with speakers from abroad not even allowed to enter the country, all confirm the international dimension of this threat.

We condemn the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Israeli army in Gaza, with its use of Hamas’ October 7 massacre as pretext, as well as the Israeli state’s practices of occupation and apartheid in the rest of Palestine, and stand in solidarity with the students and faculty who are, in all forms of non-violent action, expressing their democratic will and standing against university administrations which threaten to suppress the right to academic freedom.

With these concerns, we urge university administrators around the world, first and foremost in Turkey, the US, and Germany, to retract police forces from campuses, and respect principles of institutional autonomy, shared governance and transparency in academic decision-making processes. We therefore call on university administrators to assume their fundamental responsibility of protecting freedom of expression on their campuses.”