For more than a year now, on every weekday at noon, academics at Boğaziçi University gather in the main courtyard for a silent vigil turning their backs against the Rector’s Building carrying posters demanding the removal of the appointed rector and his appointees, the reinstitution of rectorate elections and the annulment of arbitrary decisions such as the opening of new programs. They also have a more far-reaching demand: free, autonomous, and democratic universities in Turkey. This is a powerful call, coming from academics serving in one of Turkey’s top public universities.  

As the Boğaziçi resistance entered its second year in January 2022, a separate set of demands have started to be vocalized by another group of academics. “Foundation” university academics insist on equal pay with their colleagues in public universities. These universities, created following the military coup of 1980, are by law non-profit. However, they are de facto private universities that rely on tuition. There are currently 74 of them as opposed to 129 public universities. With a few exceptions, the foundations behind these universities have no financial depth, rendering them private businesses in need of tuition for financial viability. One pillar of their current “business model” is to attract more students, both domestic and international. The other pillar is to cut labor costs and intensify work per laborer. The great majority of foundation universities run their programs with fewer academic personnel teaching more courses on lower pay compared to public universities.

This is the all too familiar story of the global rise of the neoliberal university. However, there is a twist in the Turkish plot. Public or foundation, all universities in Turkey are subject to the Higher Education Law and operate under the Higher Education Board (YÖK), an authoritarian institution bequeathed by the post-coup 1982 constitution. Academics and students in both types of universities are subject to the same rules and regulations. But there is one fundamental difference: faculty in public universities (currently 151,791 of them) are public employees whereas faculty in foundation universities (currently 27,634 academics) are employed under the Labor Law, which regulates private-sector employees. In the past decade, case law has been gradually accumulating in which administrative courts acknowledge that academics in foundation universities also perform public service and should be treated accordingly in terms of employment rights. The Higher Education Law was also amended in April 2020, stating that salaries of academics in foundation universities cannot be less than those for equal academic ranks in public universities. Yet, many, perhaps most, foundation universities have not adjusted their pay scales in conformity with this legal amendment as a 2021 YÖK report clearly demonstrates.

Foundation university academic personnel have been complaining privately about this for some time. The tipping point came in January 2022, when the official inflation rate for 2021 was announced as 48 percent, and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) raised the minimum wage by half and the salaries of public employees – including university faculty – by about one third.  Since then, hundreds of foundation university academics have gathered around a loose solidarity group called Foundation Universities Solidarity Assembly (VÜDA Meclis). Their efforts resulted in a successful social media campaign in mid-February. The momentum of this campaign has precipitated labor organizing as well. In late February, the universities’ chapter of the progressive public employee union in the education sector, Eğitim Sen, pledged to support a legal battle in courts until foundation university faculty have the same labor and union rights as public employees.

What is the link between the Boğaziçi University resistance and the “equal pay for equal work” demands of foundation university faculty? So far, there is no link! Although many actors on both sides might individually support each other’s cause, the demands expressed do not speak to each other yet.

On one hand, Boğaziçi academics’ demands have not found a broader support base in Turkish universities except for some individual shows of solidarity. Boğaziçi activists have not yet addressed issues in other universities in their protests, either. Arbitrary appointments and increasing employment insecurity adversely affect not only Boğaziçi but public universities at large.

On the other hand, the foundation university academics’ campaign has so far focused only on economic demands. Recent statements by VÜDA Meclis, for instance, do not mention problems arising from the lack of academic freedoms, or autonomy and democratic governance, although foundation universities have long suffered from these. For instance, rector and dean appointments, and decisions on hiring and firing, while always careful in implementing the letter of the Higher Education Law, are often not based on academic, merit-based, or transparent procedures in foundation universities. It is an open secret, under the cover of formal paperwork, that political and business concerns of the university administrations or foundations prevail in top-down decisions from the opening of new programs to the admittance of graduate students.

Increasing repression of universities, especially since the failed coup attempt in 2016, explains a large part of this silence and the lack of conversation between the two groups of academics described here. Under a state of emergency declared after the coup attempt, more than 5,000 academics have been dismissed from their positions and from public service without legal recourse (including hundreds of the signatories of a declaration calling on the government to stop military operations against Kurds), a wave of politically motivated disciplinary investigations of academics was carried out, and finally, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan issued a decree, according to which he now appoints rectors himself, without any public scrutiny.

Turkey’s higher education system would require a radical overhaul to bring it anywhere close to the ideals of a free, autonomous, and democratic university. One of the tasks to start working on right now is preparing a blueprint for university reform that would be ready to consult in case a democratic opening emerges in the country. An even more urgent task is to vocalize these ideals and demands in public fora. A first step could be the joining of forces between the Boğaziçi resistance and the campaigns of the foundation university academics. After all, broadening the resistance base across all universities requires insisting on both freedom and equality.

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