Liberties In Universities

The Justice and Development Party (AKP) previously promised to remove the Higher Education Board (YÖK) as an institution because the AKP thought YÖK was a political tool to control universities.
YÖK was established one year after the 1980 coup d'etat in order to monitor and control universities using several disciplinary measures, which many academics have suffered from since.
Although the AKP's promise was one of their 2002 election commitments, those who waited with the expectation the board would be abolished have not seen their expectation fulfilled. Instead, the AKP has chosen to use this tool of political control in order to oversee universities itself.
Hundreds of disciplinary investigations have been carried out by YÖK, but two of them made the headlines of several newspapers in Turkey last week. Hayrettin Ökçesiz, a well-known professor of legal philosophy at İstanbul's Aydın University, filed a complaint with a public prosecutor's office in August 2014 stipulating that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had committed a crime by continuing to act as prime minister for three weeks after being elected president. Ökçesiz considered Erdoğan's actions to not only be unconstitutional but also to constitute the crime of “seizure of duty," which is detailed in the Turkish Penal Code (TCK).
Shortly after, his university opened a disciplinary investigation based on his complaint and in September immediately suspended his lecturing duties for the following academic year. Last week, his university informed him that he was being let go without compensation. Every academic in Turkey knows that the actions of his university could not have been taken without YÖK's consent.

Ceyda Sungur, a research assistant at İstanbul Technical University (İTÜ), is now the subject of two concurrent disciplinary investigations. Sungur is quite famous due to a photograph of her in a red dress being sprayed with tear gas by a policeman during the Gezi Park protests of 2013. This picture of the "lady in red" became a symbol of the protests and was used extensively in media coverage of the events.
At the time, everybody wondered about the identity of this mysterious woman. Newspapers later identified her after her university launched the first investigation. Last week, İTÜ opened a second investigation of Sungur after she hung a flyer at the university calling for a strike.
We remembered the AKP's promise to abolish YÖK when we read in the newspapers that the former president of the board, Gökhan Çetinsaya, was dismissed from his position and appointed to the prime minister's office as an adviser. This kind of appointment is known as "being kicked upstairs."
Previously, in March 2014, Çetinsaya said YÖK had lost its purpose and that it had become completely useless and must be dissolved immediately. In April 2014, he talked about YÖK's mentality of "interference," saying it must be changed.
In September 2014 Çetinsaya reiterated these sentiments: “YÖK was established during the Cold War era after a coup in Turkey. Today, that world and that Turkey do not exist. We cannot continue with this system anymore, and YÖK is not sustainable. We have to establish another institution responsible only for the planning and coordination of our higher education system rather than a prohibiting, tutelary and centralist tool of indoctrination and ideological conflict.”
He added that the academic community in Turkey has been “silenced." This gave the AKP sufficient grounds to terminate his position. After Çetinsaya, Yekta Saraç -- the brother of Fatih Saraç, also known as “Alo Fatih,” the director of a major TV channel famous for appearing on voice recordings that surfaced during the Dec. 17 operations with Erdoğan -- was appointed president of YÖK last week.
This appointment reveals much about the situation of universities in Turkey as a whole. Saraç's first statement about a "silenced" academic community was: “Let's not call it silenced. We can call it a ‘reluctance to speak' instead.”
The final line of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "The Great Gatsby" reads: “So we beat on, boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past.” We are far from being able to speak about freedom of expression in universities.

GÜNAL KURŞUN (Cihan/Today's Zaman)