Erdogan’s War on Academia Extends to Turkey’s Top University
The picking of a loyalist as caretaker to lead Turkey’s most prestigious university reveals Erdogan’s longstanding push to totally subdue the academic landscape.
The appointment of Melih Bulu by the president as the new rector of Istanbul-based Bogazici University, Turkey’s most elite college, and the subsequent mayhem that followed on Monday has once again revealed that the war on academia is far from over. The battle between students and the anti-riot police in Istanbul, when seen from the prism of the country’s recent political context, had indeed a prologue. The fall of Bogazici University is predestined when the new executive presidency went into effect (in summer 2018) after the enactment of a constitutional referendum that bestows the president with Sultan-like powers that include appointing and removing rectors, regardless of the procedures followed by college councils to nominate or elect a rector.
What afflicted Bogazici was set out long ago when Turkey’s current system turned the president into some form of an elected monarch with near-absolute powers, with some limitations imposed by the dynamics of Turkey’s internal realpolitik. It was a presidential decree that sealed the fate of former Robert…
