State of Emergency in Turkey: What's next for academic freedom?

On the night of 15 July, Turkey had witnessed a coup attempt by a faction within the Turkish military against the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government and the president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Alleged plotters of the stunning attempt to seize political power from the president and the government have been identified as the members of the Gülen Movement, a group inspired and led by a Turkish cleric and Islamist figure Fethullah Gülen who has been living in the US for the past 17 years.

Obviously, no one could imagine that the ongoing conflict between these two factions, AKP and the Gülen Movement, might have resulted in the bombing of the Parliament building by military aircraft controlled by coup plotters, since these two factions had remained close allies until 2013 and mutually strengthened each other.

The Opposition parties and groups in Turkey, and European Union leaders express their concerns about the steps have been taken by Erdoğan and his government after the failed coup attempt, which might be used as an opportunity for crackdown on the Opposition. Unfortunately, the latest news proves that the people were right to be paranoid. The government declared a three-month ‘state of emergency’ on Wednesday night. It suspended all obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, the deputy prime minister Numan Kurtulmuş said, and gives the government the right to expand measures that might further roll back human rights in Turkey.

Opponents of Erdoğan are concerned about the potential misuse of a three-month state of emergency by the government for a further consolidation of political power and employing repression against the Opposition, stemming from Erdoğan’s authoritarian tendencies before the coup attempt.

The aforementioned developments display a potential threat to critical voices against Erdoğan and his government in the aftermath of the failed coup. These have to be kept in my mind to be able to comment on the future of academic freedom in Turkey.

In the wake of the failed military coup, the chairman of Turkey’s Higher Education Council (known as YÖK), Yekta Saraç held an emergency meeting with 165 university rectors on 18 July. In the official announcement of YÖK’s call for the meeting, it was openly declared that the agenda  set by the council is to “clean the universities” of academics who are allegedly linked to the Gülen Movement.

In that regard, after the meeting, the Higher Education Council has asked all faculty deans across the country — 1,577 in total — to resign. Additionally, on the same day, the council asked university rectors to investigate all academicians and administrative staff in their universities “urgently” in order to reveal the ones who are Gülenists and to take action against all those found guilty. Yet, it is still unclear why university deans have been asked to resign without any official investigations being started by the council.

On Wednesday, following the call for the resignation of 1,577 deans, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported that the Higher Education Council has banned academics from work trips abroad and urged those overseas to immediately return  to Turkey. Lastly, according to the newspaper Habertürk, YÖK will remove 4,000 academics — working in state universities — from their jobs as part of the first phase of the crackdown.

Although these measures imposed by the higher education authority and the government are allegedly being justified as attempts to prevent potential future threats from the coup-plotters in universities, the crackdown implemented by the authorities makes academics worried that might turn into a purge of Turkish academia in a broader sense, and it may be argued that it is reasonable to start getting concerned when we look at the previous indicators showing the hostile attitude towards academics by Erdoğan and his government.

For a better understanding of the possible implications of these “temporary” measures that are supposedly designated to unveil academics, who are believed to be in contact with the coup-plotters, the formation and mission of Turkey’s Higher Education Council must be addressed. The council was established in 1981 — the year after a ‘successful’ military seizure of political power.

The founding principle of the council was to centralise the higher education system in Turkey and to curtail the autonomy of the universities in Turkey until the coup. In other words, the military regime maintained tight control over universities that were considered as the major threat as authoritarian military rule expanded. Since 1981, academics and university students have opposed the Higher Education Council as an anti-democratic and repressive institution, which is at the same time, a product of the military coup.

Even the AKP government articulated a discourse against YÖK to for a political mobilisation and promised to abolish such an “anti-democratic” institution representing the military coup in 1980. However, when Erdoğan and his government gained the full control over the council, it gave them the opportunity to consolidate their power over universities.

The latest incident before the failed coup that provides important evidence of the extent of the use of the Higher Education Council by Erdoğan and his government for their own purposes was the opening of investigations by the council against Academics for Peace at the start of 2016. This was a group of signatories to a statement calling for the government to put an end to the violence perpetrated by security forces in the Kurdish region, and Erdoğan immediately targeted them. His call to the authorities to take action against them ended up in a crackdown on academics in which almost 800 academics have faced action.

The Higher Education Council played a critical role in terms of opening administrative investigations to silence critical voices in universities.

Taking into account all these factors, the post-coup purge might signal a stifling of academic freedom in Turkey. Although the government’s and Higher Education Council’s subsequent purges are supposedly designed to target the coup-plotters in universities — namely Gülenists, 10 academics, who are among the Academics for Peace have already been dismissed in Van University. Ironically. while Erdoğan and his government are ‘swiftly’ responding to the attempted military coup, the purge of academics is via a council that was the product of a ‘successful’ military coup and is now at the government's service.