Erosion of Academic Freedom and University Autonomy

Reports by the Varieties of Democracy Institute and Scholars at Risk indicate an unmistakable correlation between the rise of authoritarianism and the erosion of academic freedom and university autonomy (Darian-Smith Reference Darian-Smith2025a, 40). Since the turn of the decade, even the very concept of academic freedom has been equivocated by right-wing parties around the world, such as Poland’s then-governing Law and Justice Party, which redefined academic freedom as “a principle guaranteeing all worldviews and types of beliefs equal access to expression within the university space, with the expression of conservative and national values deserving of particular protection by the state” (Bucholc Reference Bucholc, Lyer, Saliba and Spannagel2023, 119). Similar conceptual shifts are noticeable across Europe and the United States, where appeals to academic or institutional “neutrality” are increasingly mobilized to constrain dissenting speech and suppress critical inquiry (Darian-Smith Reference Darian-Smith2025b, 136; Kapczynski and HoSang Reference Kapczynski and HoSang2024).

In the United States, professors are increasingly concerned that what they say in class could jeopardize their employment. In conservative states, boards of trustees, under pressure from elected officials, restrict how instructors can discuss issues of race, sexual orientation, and gender identity; presidents, administrators, and lecturers are removed for violating state laws; and universities are forced, through financial and legal blackmail, into agreements that grant the federal government undue political influence over academic programming, hiring, and admissions (Kamola Reference Kamola2024). Comparable battles are unfolding in Hungary, where former Prime Minister Victor Orbán pushed Central European University out of the country, banned gender and women studies programs, and redirected public funding toward regime-aligned scholarship while “gatekeeping” critical research (Jafarova Reference Jafarova2025, 1; Petö Reference Petö2020). In India, Russia, and Turkey, scholars are periodically prosecuted under antiterrorism laws, and erratic and arbitrary sanctions, surveillance, and disciplinary investigations foster self-censorship in research, teaching, and public engagement (Baser, Akgönül, and Öztürk Reference Baser, Akgönül and Öztürk2017; Lewis and Lall Reference Lewis and Lall2024).

The criminalization of dissident speech has reached a global scale, with 2024 standing out as a particularly notorious year, in which students and faculty across the world—notably in the United States—were assaulted, arrested, and criminally charged for calling for peace in Gaza amid Israel’s genocidal war, with riot police brought onto campuses in a marked escalation of attacks on academic freedom (Butler Reference Butler2025; Darian-Smith Reference Darian-Smith2025b). A growing number of universities have adopted vague and expansive definitions of antisemitism endorsed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, further stifling critical inquiry and policing expression on Israel/Palestine that they deem polarizing. The resulting mood resembles China’s “seven unmentionables” policy, which outlaws the public discussion of ideas, such as constitutional democracy and civil society, deemed perilous by Xi’s central government (Douglass Reference Douglass2021, 29). Although the specific content of the “unmentionables” varies across political contexts, what remains constant is the impossibly high bar authorities set for speech to qualify as nonpolarizing and therefore acceptable.

A paradigmatic case of democratic erosion, Turkey has experienced sustained executive aggrandizement and institutional decline since the latter half of the 2010s, while its universities have become a “battlefield marked by political oppression of dissident scholars, repression of critical thinking, and economic precarization of academic labor” (Altuğ et al. Reference Altuğ, Arslanalp, Çıdam, Gökarıksel, Toktamis and David2024, 120). Governing continuously since 2002—first as prime minister under a parliamentary system and then as president within a consolidated presidential regime—Erdoğan has amassed sweeping executive power, instituting a new order “structured around the unity of leader, party, and state, and based on total erosion of intermediary groups and institutions” (Yılmaz Reference Yılmaz2020, 266); entrenched his Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) influence within the judiciary and state bureaucracy (Çalışkan Reference Çalışkan2018; Levitsky and Ziblatt Reference Levitsky and Ziblatt2019); and used that influence to exercise control over higher education institutions through mass purges, forced resignations, arbitrary academic promotions or downgrading, and disciplinary investigations (Altuğ et al. Reference Altuğ, Arslanalp, Çıdam, Gökarıksel, Toktamis and David2024; Gambetti and Gökarıksel Reference Gambetti and Gökarıksel2022; Hünler Reference Hünler, Lyer, Saliba and Spannagel2022).

The autonomy of higher education in Turkey had long been compromised by the top-down governance and undemocratic practices of the Higher Education Council (YÖK)—a legacy of the post-coup 1982 constitution—which the AKP government has used to align universities with the official state views (Özdemir-Taştan and Ördek Reference Özdemir-Taştan and Ördek2020). Because Article 130 of the constitution confines academic freedom to activities that do not threaten the state’s existence or national unity, and because YÖK has historically exercised strict control over higher education, Erdoğan has faced little difficulty in subjecting universities to systematic discipline, surveillance, and restructuring (Hünler Reference Hünler, Lyer, Saliba and Spannagel2022, 152).

A particularly notorious infringement on academic freedom occurred in 2016, when more than two thousand academics signed a petition urging the government to end state violence against civilians in the country’s Kurdish regions that were then under curfew and an extended regional state of emergency. With direction from YÖK, universities initiated disciplinary proceedings, and criminal investigations were launched against the signatories, leading to the dismissal of hundreds of “Academics for Peace,” as the signatories of the petition came to be known, and the criminal indictment of more than eight hundred faculty for allegedly disseminating propaganda for a terrorist organization (Human Rights Foundation of Turkey 2020, 2).

The subsequent two-year nationwide state of emergency placed academics in an ever more precarious position: thousands were purged, had their passports confiscated, and were rendered unemployable within higher education (Biner Reference Biner2019; Sertdemir Özdemir Reference Sertdemir Özdemir2020). Fearing administrative and judicial investigations, many faculty reported feeling “threatened and under pressure” while preparing course materials or lecturing in class (Binbuğa Reference Binbuğa2024, 7–8; Özdemir-Taştan and Ördek Reference Özdemir-Taştan and Ördek2020) and became increasingly reluctant to address topics “already stigmatized as dangerous,” such as “the Kurdish issue, the Armenian genocide, militarization, and gender and queer studies” (Hünler Reference Hünler, Lyer, Saliba and Spannagel2022, 156). Even so, this climate of fear did not eliminate intellectual resistance altogether. Many dismissed academics initiated “campus-less” movements and “street academies,” continuing to produce and share knowledge grounded in principles of equality, freedom, and solidarity that had been excluded from official university spaces (Özdüzen Reference Özdüzen2019, 34; Sertdemir Özdemir, Mutluer, and Özyürek Reference Sertdemir Özdemir, Mutluer and Özyürek2019, 248).

A pivotal legal shift during this period came with a state of emergency decree that granted the president the authority to appoint rectors without an election and another one that reduced the eligibility requirement for rectoral candidates from having served five years as a full professor to only three. These changes paved the way for the controversial appointment of Bulu to Boğaziçi University. Traditionally, the president would appoint one of the two candidates who received the highest number of votes from the university’s academic staff. Under the new legal framework, however, Erdoğan, who had previously shown relative restraint toward Boğaziçi University, was able to bypass this custom and install a party loyalist as rector (Binbuğa Reference Binbuğa2024, 8). Unelected and widely regarded as unqualified, Bulu was an outsider to Boğaziçi’s academic community, which had long operated according to a distinctive model of decentralized self-governance coordinated through a complex web of administrative committees—a model that was central to the university’s academic excellence and distinguished it as one of the few remaining examples of multicentric and horizontal governance in Turkey’s higher education landscape. His appointment overrode these internal mechanisms with a clear intention to exert control over knowledge production and dissemination at a university long known for its independent and critical voices.

Up to that point, Boğaziçi had been able to retain relative autonomy and preserve a vibrant associational life (Altuğ et al. Reference Altuğ, Arslanalp, Çıdam, Gökarıksel, Toktamis and David2024, 124; Turam Reference Turam2015). Its participatory campus life had generated numerous political campaigns, from advocacy for Kurdish citizens’ right to education in their mother tongue (2001) and women’s demand to be able to wear the headscarf on campus (1990s–2000s) to condemnations of the racist assassination of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink (2007) and the unsafe labor conditions that led to the death of 301 workers in a fire inside a coal mine (2014). During my time as an undergraduate student there, between 2009 and 2014, on any given day, I would pass by groups demonstrating against the private enclosure of public spaces on campus, the next war in the Middle East, prevalent sexual violence, state violence, state-sanctioned sexual violence—the list goes on. On the day of the Roboski airstrike in 2011, when 34 Kurdish civilians were massacred by the Turkish air force, 34 Boğaziçi students performed a die-in on the campus’s central plaza, their bodies framed by white chalk lines, leaving behind a “crime scene.” Every year on the anniversary of the 1997 postmodern coup, which precipitated the resignation of a prime minister who led a party that could be seen as the proto-AKP in its Islamist conservatism, Boğaziçi students would perform a “funeral prayer” to say a prayer for democracy. All this is to say that student protest has always been part of the university’s institutional culture, and the administration and faculty have treated it as essential to academic freedom, maintaining a police-free campus when most other universities relied on law enforcement to preserve order (Turam Reference Turam2021)—an institutional culture that set the stage for the university to become a microcosm of the struggle against the AKP’s escalating assaults on higher education and political dissent.

The University Handcuffed: Crisis and Resistance at Boğaziçi

After Erdoğan’s appointment of Bulu as the university’s new rector in early January 2021, mass protests erupted across the campus, led by faculty and students, to which the government responded with severe violence. A large number of police officers, equipped with tear gas, plastic bullets, and water cannons, arrested demonstrators gathered in front of the rector’s office and fastened handcuffs to the gates of the campus. A crude visualization of AKP-style authoritarianism, the dangling handcuffs only fueled the resistance. The following morning, acting on arrest warrants issued by the Istanbul prosecutor, police raided students’ houses before dawn, breaking down doors and walls, using excessive force and, in some cases, sexual harassment. According to Human Rights Watch’s report (2021), the videos and images from the protests showed “students with broken teeth, faces covered in blood, and several police officers kicking protesters who were not attempting to resist arrest.” As solidarity protests soon spread to other universities and cities, drawing broader public participation, the heavily armed police patrols and riot control vehicles surrounded the Boğaziçi campus in a siege that would last for more than a year (Altuğ et al. Reference Altuğ, Arslanalp, Çıdam, Gökarıksel, Toktamis and David2024, 127).

The militarization of the campus space and state violations of students’ right to peaceful assembly can be understood as expressions of what Mert Arslanalp and Deniz Erkmen (Reference Arslanalp and Erkmen2020, 948) call “mobile emergency rule”: a mode of governance that relies on “the extremely temporary and localized practice of suspending or limiting constitutional rights via administrative orders in the name of public order, to prevent or repress challenges without enacting a total suspension.” These measures often take the form of complete bans on collective gatherings issued by local authorities, using the discretion granted by existing legal frameworks, and justifying the suspension of the constitutional right to assembly under the pretense of protecting public order, as in the case of a state of emergency. As with earlier bans issued during the Gezi resistance and demonstrations against the replacement of elected Kurdish mayors, the crackdown on the Boğaziçi protests was given a veneer of legality in the absence of any judicial will or capacity to review administrative decisions quickly. The Boğaziçi episode was thus merely a banal manifestation of “the new normal” in which “ordinary, routinized legal measures”—uneven across time and space—“give way to or become rearticulated in the state of exception” (Gökarıksel and Türem Reference Gökarıksel and Türem2019, 176, 179).

In addition to these banal and mobile techniques of emergency, the AKP government also intensified its defamatory campaign, portraying protesters, students, and faculty alike as terrorists engaged in criminal activity. This, as Boğaziçi professor Zeynep Gambetti (Reference Gambetti2022, 181) succinctly puts it, was a method of “disorientation,” transforming the truth to the point of permanent modulation: “Every word we utter returns to us in reverse: we say democracy, they say mobbing; we say freedom, they say terrorism; we say difference, they say deviance” (182). In the face of such disorientation, the Boğaziçi faculty refused to “accept the new power game and relinquish the principles of democratic governance” (181). Instead, they transformed the campus through communicative and embodied practices of resistance, including Sunday evening online forums, daily vigils in front of the rectorate, and weekly digests delivered at the Friday vigil summarizing the “state of the authoritarian offensive and the resistance against it” (Altuğ et al. Reference Altuğ, Arslanalp, Çıdam, Gökarıksel, Toktamis and David2024, 135). Through these practices, the campus became an “alternative space of visibility, (im)mobility, and audibility,” countering the “regime of sensibility” the university administration sought to impose through the securitization of campus life (135).

Cast as targets in Turkey’s domestic war on terror—a war that had suppressed Kurdish armed resistance and parliamentary politics and now functions as a broader campaign against all forms of political opposition—Boğaziçi faculty and students subverted the state’s defamatory narrative, reappropriating negative labels as badges of defiance and affirming that they “would not acquiesce,” they “would not give up” (“ Kabul etmiyoruz, vazgeçmiyoruz ”). Not giving up required a complex toolbox of strategies: at times, faculty members took legal action, both for concrete gains and to “register [the resistance] to the legal archive” (137), and mobilized institutional mechanisms such as the faculty senate to push the “illegitimate administration further toward illegality” (136); other times, recognizing the limits of legal remedies, they developed “practical support systems,” activating alumni networks and building transnational solidarities (Gambetti Reference Gambetti2022, 185).

Meanwhile, with the support of the faculty and alumni, students continued to organize peaceful demonstrations despite police brutality and mounting detentions, while establishing Instagram and Twitter accounts, launching YouTube channels—most notably, pols302—and creating their own television platform Boğaziçi TV (Altuğ et al. Reference Altuğ, Arslanalp, Çıdam, Gökarıksel, Toktamis and David2024, 132). Countless videos circulating on social media captured students singing, dancing, and chanting with courage, rage, and love. These videos echoed the youth-led aesthetic practices of the Gezi resistance, revealing both new alliances across diverse political affiliations and a profound political thinking that intervened critically in state power (Turam Reference Turam2021, 590). As with Gezi, if on a less monumental scale, the Boğaziçi resistance generated an abundance of creative and intellectual activity, encounter, and engagement that sought to restore the university’s autonomous public life through cross-ideological alliances. Reflecting the university’s history of protest and joining forces with the faculty resistance, the student mobilization underscored, to borrow from Ece Cihan Ertem (Reference Ertem2025, 9), that “academic freedom is not a static condition but a living, relational achievement, continually redefined through struggle.” Although the struggle is unlikely to end anytime soon, outliving the cohorts that initiated it, the memory of resistance has inscribed Boğaziçi as a place where freedom of assembly persists even under authoritarian repression.

Writing Crime into LGBTQ+ Life on Campus

One month into the protests, Boğaziçi students expanded their repertoire of dissent by putting together an on-campus art exhibition. In response to the call made by the organizing committee, nearly 300 works in various forms—photographs, illustrations, and paintings—were delivered to the BOUN Sergi (Boğaziçi University Exhibition) to be exhibited at various locations across the university’s South Campus on January 22, 27, and 28, 2021. One of the exhibited works displayed the image of the Kaaba, the most sacred site in Islam, with the ancient mythological figure Shahmaran—a half-woman, half-snake creature found in Middle Eastern folklore—at the center and four LGBTQ+ flags in the corners. It was titled Yılanı Güldürseler (To Make the Serpent Laugh)—a play on the title of a renowned novel by Yaşar Kemal, Yılanı Öldürseler (To Crush the Serpent), which tells the tale of a femicide. The artwork, according to the wall text below it, was a meditation on misogyny, institutionalized religion, and the struggles of Anatolian women (through the figure of the Shahmaran), as well as a critique of how gendered society alienates individuals from their sexual selves (through the artificial placement of LGBTQ+ flags, which were out of sync with the work’s overall aesthetic structure; “Tartışmalı Kabe Resmi” 2021).

The use of queer and mythological symbols surrounding the Kaaba quickly provoked a controversy within and beyond the university. Some conservative students posted photos of the artwork on Twitter, claiming that it was an insult to Islam. Soon the work became a central concern of state authorities, who uniformly condemned it as offensive and unacceptable. The interior minister denounced it as a “perversion” imposed by “the West, which does not comply with our values or with these lands” (Kaos GL Reference Kaos2021, 1–2). A chief adviser to President Erdoğan declared that “neither freedom of expression nor the right to protest” could justify the piece, adding that it would receive “the punishment it deserves before the law” (Hajjaji Reference Hajjaji2021). In a press statement, the Istanbul Governor’s Office informed the public of searches conducted at the Boğaziçi University Fine Arts Club and the LGBTİ+ Studies Club, announcing that “various posters and banners used in demonstrations, along with LGBTİ flags, were seized,” despite the fact that the flags did not constitute evidence of any crime (İstanbul Valiliği 2021).Footnote ¹ The Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office demanded that seven students be sentenced to one to three years in prison on the charge of “provoking the public to hatred and hostility” (“7 Students” 2021). The minister of justice expressed support for the prosecutor’s office, calling the students “shameless individuals whose hearts have been corroded by hatred,” and the presidency’s director of communications described them as a “rampant minority seeking to normalize perverse ideas and ways of life under the guise of freedom, equality, and human rights” (Tar Reference Tar2021).

These statements were hardly unexpected, as they reflected the AKP’s vilification campaign against LGBTQ+ individuals and movements that it routinely associates with moral deviance, terrorism, and Western cultural imperialism (Unal Reference Unal, Hakola, Salminen, Turpeinen and Winberg2021). This rhetoric escalated when Turkey in 2021 withdrew from the Istanbul Convention (Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence) by presidential decree, which was justified on the grounds that the treaty promoted homosexuality. Since then, Erdoğan has increasingly framed LGBTQ+ existence—which he outright denies by arguing that “there is no such thing as LGBT in Turkey”—within an authoritarian-securitarian discourse, constructing gender-expansive groups as “estranged from traditional social values and norms” and members of an “imaginary terrorist assemblage” (Yetiş and Özdüzen Reference Yetiş and Özdüzen2024, 3).

Against the backdrop of rising state homophobia and transphobia, the organizers of the BOUN Sergi, as well as queer and trans students on campus, became targets of a coordinated stigmatization and criminalization campaign. Bulu, the appointed rector, shut down the LGBTİ+ Studies Club; four students were arrested, two of whom were jailed pending trial. In the weeks that followed, more students were detained for holding rainbow flags and protesting those detentions. By March 2021, the situation had reached such levels of recursive repression that, as one reporter wryly summarized, “students protesting the detention of students protesting the detention of students investigated for carrying LGBTİ+ flags were also detained” (Yıldırım Reference Yıldırım2022). Simultaneously, the Turkish state’s homophobic discourse further entrenched a presumed incommensurability between Islam and homosexuality—a presumption whose analogs are trafficked in Western homonationalist formations that articulate “civilizational disjunctures between Europeans and Muslims,” contrasting a tolerant, gay-friendly West with a sexually repressive Muslim world (Puar Reference Puar2007, 20).

Challenging this presumed incommensurability and Erdoğan’s denial of LGBTQ+ existence in Turkey, Boğaziçi students did something unexpected: the more that the university administration and the AKP government targeted the “non-normative” and “non-binary bodies of queer students and those deemed ‘dangerous,’” the more they foregrounded LGBTQ+ symbols and themes in their protests (Altuğ et al. Reference Altuğ, Arslanalp, Çıdam, Gökarıksel, Toktamis and David2024, 134). The more bans that the administration placed on LGBTQ+ activities and events, the larger the participation in these activities and events. Stigmatization by the state provoked precisely the opposite response from the larger student body, which developed a renewed attentiveness to operations of heteronormativity/heteronationalism and experimented with innovative practices of solidarity. This, to some Boğaziçi members, was perplexing. For example, during a panel on the crisis on campus, as Berna Turam (Reference Turam2021, 607) recounts from personal experience, a former Boğaziçi faculty member suggested that the “resistance would be better off and have more leverage to negotiate with the AKP if [the students] used national symbols, such as the Turkish flag, rather than the LGBTQ flag.” For Turam, albeit well-intentioned, this was misguided advice, since it “fail[ed] to understand [Boğaziçi’s] politics, its strength and resourcefulness,” which were grounded in an embrace of “all liberties”—that is, “no minority is left behind, whether it is LGBTQ, Kurds, or Armenians” (607–8).

Turam’s critique gracefully leaves aside the former faculty member’s misplaced faith that the students could gain more leverage in negotiations with the AKP or the exclusionary nature of the Turkish flag itself vis-à-vis ethnic minorities, and it aptly captures Boğaziçi’s democratically oriented politics. At the same time, there is another possible interpretation of the students’ decision to make LGBTQ+ symbols the emblem of resistance. In addition to embracing all groups’ freedom claims, Boğaziçi students, in my view, purposefully identified with the marginalized, making the minoritized particular (resisting LGBTQ+ students) stand for the universal category (all resisting students) and hence destabilizing the accustomed dynamic between a superordinate (universal) and subordinate (particular) identity.

This reflected not a rejection of identity politics but instead a profound understanding of how often minority groups’ demands and desires are not admitted to the status of the universal or their inclusion is conditioned by curtailing those elements that the majority considers excessive or distractive. As Turam’s anecdote shows, some community members indeed had concerns that the visibility of LGBTQ+ symbols and performances might overshadow the movement’s more general and popularly accepted demands. These concerns reflected significant disagreements among faculty not only across the nationalist/non-nationalist divide but also over how the resistance ought to be organized—a question that, in some respects, reproduced the hierarchical relations between faculty and students amid the joint struggle. The students’ insistence on the centrality of LGBTQ+ rights and freedoms to the movement, in this context, evinces what I would describe as a radical politics of solidarity, rather than merely the liberal ideals of inclusion and pluralism—although these ideals were certainly at play. I make this claim taking into account both the courage such insistence required and the intervention it enabled into the organization of public attention, making the university community and society at large more attuned to the distinct forms of oppression to which LGBTQ+ groups are subjected.

An illustrative case of such radical democratic politics of solidarity is the short video performance, to which I turn next. The performance takes up the question of the controversial artwork from the BOUN Sergi, Yılanı Güldürseler , at a time when even the speaker of the main opposition party, known for its secularist ideology, described the work as a “despicable provocation” and called for punishing those responsible for its production and exhibition (Tar Reference Tar2021). While most reactions to the controversy were, at worst, persecutory and punitive and, at best, avoidant or indifferent, the performers in the video do something entirely different: they share their frank and divergent opinions about the work (instead of ignoring the controversy altogether in hopes that it will go away before creating too much distraction), and they oppose the calls for punishing their peers, in defiance of the legal and coercive state apparatuses. The next section construes this performance as both a model and a demand for democratic life on campus.

On the Virtues of Not Consenting and Political Friendship

In early February, the student collective pols302 released the video clip “Even though We Think Differently about the Artwork…” on its YouTube channel; it quickly gained traction on social media (pols302 2021). Active primarily during 2020 and 2021, the collective alludes in its name to political science courses at Boğaziçi, which are typically designated with the prefix “pols”— although “pols302” does not correspond to any departmental course. Its online presence includes a range of video content, from informational sessions on academic opportunities for political science undergraduates to interviews with leading scholars in Turkey about academic freedom and the Boğaziçi crisis. The group is also known for short, provocative video performances, one of which features a diverse selection of high-achieving students who recount their academic and professional aspirations before expressing grief for themselves and their country: “I no longer feel that my voice is heard, or I am wanted in my country. I am sorry for my country.” In another, a dozen students appear one by one to declare that they “will not look down”—in reference to the police command (“look down and move along”) imposed during the protests against Bulu’s appointment—before naming others who should look down instead: “those appointed as trustees, disregarding merit,” “those who treat their own country’s citizens as terrorists,” “those who view the university’s diversity of ideas and culture of debate as a problem,” and “those who have placed the campus under siege.”

Together with the channel’s informational material, these clips hint at why the collective might have chosen the name “pols302.” Each clip functions as an aesthetic performance of direct action with pedagogical force, inviting critical engagement in debates over shared public concerns. More specifically, the clips stake a claim to “voice” by urging audiences to rethink “who can speak, when, in what capacity, for whom, with what legitimacy, in what tone,” offering resources for democratic politics and theory that complement the department’s official curriculum (Norval Reference Norval2009, 297).

The video about Yılanı Güldürseler , adopting a similar format to the collective’s other short clips filmed on campus, features a sequence of students, this time appearing in pairs to reflect on the polarizing artwork. With each exchange, viewers are presented with shifting perspectives that invite sympathy or skepticism toward the piece. Some self-identified practicing Muslim students explain that they found the artwork hurtful to their religious sentiments, whereas others, who do not specify their faith, prioritize freedom of expression over those sentiments. These disagreements, however, do not preclude a shared understanding that the governmental crackdown on student dissent and artistic expression was unjust. Each speaker, accordingly, concludes by stating, “I do not consent to the demonization and detainment of university students for their identities.” The video closes with individual students calling either for the release of their friends or for Bulu’s resignation. Its description on the YouTube page stresses Boğaziçi’s singularity as a space where “all kinds of ideas and viewpoints can be expressed freely” and where “democratic practices of living together, in difference and disagreement, have been internalized,” while rejecting “outside interventions into the university” and the “detention of students on the basis of their identity.”

What enables the video to be particularly effective is the withdrawal of consent by religious students—or, more precisely, the reminder that such consent was never granted—in light of the government’s attempt to prosecute the student artists and organizers for “public humiliation of the religious values adopted by a section of the population” (Tar Reference Tar2021). Given the high-level vitriol surrounding the exhibition described earlier and the various social media responses that wished for God to bring ruin and disgrace on performers, all the students appearing in the video, particularly the pious ones, took significant personal risks by being associated with a controversy on which even those sympathetic to the Boğaziçi resistance hesitated to comment. In this atmosphere of intimidation and fear, the pious performers’ courage to appear publicly alongside their nonpious peers clarifies the renewed contours of polarization in Turkish politics. Although chasms between religious and nonreligious citizens persist in social life, the primary axis of political antagonism in present-day Turkey is “the defense of a deeper democracy versus authoritarianism,” separating opponents of the governing AKP from its loyalists (Turam Reference Turam2015, 10).

Complementing the shifting political landscape is also the irony, perceptively noted by Turam (Reference Turam2021, 599), that Boğaziçi University was the “biggest defender of freedom of religion and the right to wear a headscarf when the secularists in power banned the headscarf on university campuses” in the 1990s and 2000s. That the same institution was being targeted by Erdoğan’s Islamist government underscores the genealogy to which the pious and nonpious performers’ solidarity with LGBTQ+ students should be traced. Refusing any assault on the university’s free and inclusive environment, and standing with LGBTQ+ students, the video performers fulfill a responsibility, inherited from earlier generations, to intervene and protect university members from external political pressures. At the same time, the religious performers’ act of not consenting also communicates a from-below rejection of Erdoğan’s monopolistic claim to know and dictate what is best for his citizens, particularly the “good” Muslim ones, and of his oft-cited titles—knowing, caring, elected—that supposedly authorize him to govern by decree in the name of the people. In this sense, the video articulates a dissenting subjectivity that interrupts the Erdoğan regime’s claim to embody the general will, asserting a politics of disidentification voiced through the refusal not in my name.

Although the discussion around the artwork in the video—whether it is offensive or not, whether it should be removed or remain in the exhibition—is predictably framed around religious sentiments, these sentiments do not alone determine how religious students approach the work. One student wearing a headscarf, for instance, identifies as a practicing Muslim who “enjoys freely expressing her Muslim identity on campus”; she notes that she “was not hurt by the images used in the artwork,” which she regards as “an exercise of freedom of expression.” Another says he was hurt by the images yet pauses to contrast the government’s harsh response to art involving queer images with its silence in the face of homophobic speech. Two others emphasize that the state’s repressive response cannot be justified by their religious sentiments or personal discomfort; nor is it conducive to generating the care, attention, and respect they hope to receive from their peers. Even as all but one religious student express being offended by the artwork and “demand attention from their peers to their religious feelings,” they uniformly insist that such much-needed attention cannot be compelled through autocratic state action.

Meanwhile, students who do not identify as religious are, unsurprisingly, not offended by the artwork. Their comments instead underscore the importance of artistic freedom and critical thought. Some articulate the power asymmetry between a hegemonic identity (Muslim) and a minoritized one (queer), whereas others reject the use of religious values as appropriate criteria for evaluating a work of art. Nonetheless, many of these nonreligious students express a candid willingness to engage with criticism and objections voiced by their religious peers. One pointedly stresses that he finds “expressions of discomfort natural within the university” yet firmly refuses “the targeting of [his] peers from without.” Ultimately, what all students in the video seem to call for, as one practicing Muslim student puts it, is an open space for “collective deliberation, reflection, and mutual understanding” where everyone can voice their “discomfort, disagreement, and even anger at each other without descending into hate speech” and can seek redress.

Together, the student speeches in the video clip not only register a powerful refusal of the authoritarian closure of public life but also gesture toward what a free, reflective, and difficult conversation could have looked like, had it not been forestalled by the government. They do so by modeling a form of political friendship that is foundational to collective life, one that Aristotle (Reference Aristotle, Jowett and Davis2000, 1280b13; Reference Aristotle, Ross and Brown2009, 1155a23–27) identifies as essential for a stable and flourishing political community. This form of civic friendship is built among strangers who, without fully knowing one another, share a political community and, in doing so, communicate thoughts and exchange judgments about the good and the bad, the advantageous and the harmful, the just and the unjust (Aristotle Reference Aristotle, Ross and Brown2009, 1170b12–14; Frank Reference Frank2005, 175). Such friendship cultivates the virtues necessary for citizenship and for living together with difference, such as, in Danielle Allen’s (Reference Allen2004, 121) phrasing, the ability to locate a “midway point between acquiescence and domination.” Virtue in citizenship, as in all other virtues, requires citizens to act with moderation by neither conceding entirely to others’ wishes nor seeking to domineer them. Such virtue is not, as Çiğdem Çıdam (Reference Çıdam2021, 30) clarifies, a quality inherent to communities that possess certain moral unity or a precondition for political friendship; it instead constitutes and sustains political friendship as an ongoing activity of learning how to negotiate conflicting desires and interests and how to “come to an agreement with regard to what is considered a common concern” (Çıdam Reference Çıdam2017, 381).

The Boğaziçi students in the video, by sharing in thought, deliberation, judgment, and understanding, enact precisely this orientation toward a common concern—the government’s repressive encroachments on the university—without dissolving the pluralism that animates their collective voice. Indeed, it is precisely the heterogeneity of their opinions and sentiments that gives their solidarity its force. The performers neither undermine their differences nor disavow the conflict generated by the artwork. One religious student, likely articulating a shared disappointment, suggests that the collective democratic struggle on campus would have been better served had the organizers of the exhibition more carefully considered the sensitivities of all university constituencies, including practicing Muslims. Meanwhile, some others seem to understand the struggle as also concerning the very right to display art on campus that some may find discomforting. Viewing the video, one can empathize with religious students questioning whether artistic freedoms need to be exercised in ways that cause harm or friction, just as one can understand those who ask what the point of having freedoms is if they are never practiced. The performers invite audiences to grapple with precisely these questions while insisting on an open space in which they can be voiced freely—a space where students with divergent perspectives contest and hold one another accountable and where they listen and learn from, challenge, and collaborate with one another. Their commitment to holding open a space for debate on controversial and painful issues—a space that renders the remainders of campus politics visible and is thus imbued with the possibility of compromise and repair—underwrites their political friendship and propels them to engage in direct action in defense of their right to a democratic education.

Let me further unpack what I mean by a democratic education. In dialogue with Aristotle’s account of political friendship, Allen argues that in a perfect world, citizens would be able to reach an agreement on all matters with relative ease. This, as we have seen with the Boğaziçi exhibition, is not the case with the world we inhabit, the imperfect one, where people are not always of the same mind nor do they have a priori answers to questions of justice or public good. However, the problem with an imperfect world, according to Allen (Reference Allen2004, 124), lies not simply in the diversity of opinion or the incompatibility of desires but also in the emotions like disappointment and frustration that such divergence generates. The question at the heart of democratic politics, then, turns out to be how to manage these emotions. Political friendship, for Allen, is key to this question. Because in cultivating friendship, members of a political community learn how to build trust, as well as “how to respond to betrayals of trust” (Allen Reference Allen2004, 127). With its demand for “compromise and sacrifice,” political friendship, as Jill Frank (Reference Frank2005, 162–63) describes, is a “continual project in action and in speech” through which parties deliberate over “who will need to compromise, how, and with respect to what” without predetermined answers.

The most significant aspect of the pols302 video, in this respect, is the fact that it ultimately withholds a definitive answer to the question of what should be done with the controversial artwork. While the videoclip clearly affirms that students should not be subjected to moral vilification or legal punishment for their artistic expression, it does not resolve the conundrum of whether the artwork should be considered harmful and removed from public display or defended as an uncensored exercise of artistic freedom, regardless of religious sensibilities. Rather than offering closure to these ethical and political questions, it provides something more valuable: a glimpse of what might have transpired had the campus debate been allowed to unfold on its own terms. By presenting, side by side, divergent views on a contentious issue, students invite us to imagine the many different directions that an inclusive, uncoerced public discussion could have taken.

In terms of those possible directions, one might imagine some discontented religious students, after conversations with other nonreligious and religious peers, reconsidering the offense that they initially took from the artwork. Conversely, one could also imagine nonreligious students deciding to prioritize their peers’ sensitivities over their own investments in unconstrained artistic expression. Or, perhaps in a more likely scenario, neither group would change their opinion about the meaning of this particular artwork, yet both would find ways to repair their damaged relationship over time by reciprocating each other’s losses—a practice Allen (Reference Allen2004, 123) describes as a continuous “distribution of burdens and benefits”—and attending to the frustrations generated by the frictions of public life. Even though disagreement and, at times, being on the losing side are inevitable in public life, practices of political friendship may help render loss bearable and restore trust. The speech acts of Boğaziçi students in the video hint at this possibility. In their joint voice against the vilifying discourse and punitive measures of AKP officials, one may discern the groundwork of mutual trust and reciprocity. As students display confidence in one another, despite their feelings of offense or injury, they affirm a commitment to intentional listening, mutual care, and concerted action—practices that help navigate inevitable disappointment and frustration in reparative and generative ways.

To be sure, thinking with Juliet Hooker’s (Reference Hooker2016) critique of Allen, one should remain attentive to the question of whether some groups might be disproportionately bearing the burden of loss. For example, given pervasive heteronormativity, homophobia, and transphobia, which are reinforced by both Islamic and secular discourses, one might ask whether the vision of political friendship presented here risks demanding repeated sacrifices from sexual minorities, overlooking historically constituted inequalities that are further intensified by the AKP’s current autocratization pressures. It would indeed, as Hooker (454) argues, be unfair to expect already subordinated groups to make additional concessions “at the expense of their own interests and claims to justice.”

Yet, these concerns are not entirely absent from the video. One student juxtaposes the AKP’s promotion of homophobic discourses with the offense it takes at artistic expression deemed incompatible with religious values—a contrast that, to him, makes the student arrests all the more unjust and indefensible. What he asks of the creators and defenders of LGBTQ+ art, then, is not acquiescence but active listening and responsiveness. Such a demand keeps alive, rather than undermining, the promise of attentiveness to differently situated experiences of religious, political, and gender groups under the AKP’s authoritarian rule. It also resists preconstructed binaries that cast religious and secular life, Islam and homosexuality, as mutually exclusive, envisioning an exit from inherited false alternatives within which the disparaged and the privileged take turns (recall the university community’s earlier resistance to the secularist headscarf ban).

In this sense, students in the video, realizing a core function of the academy, “develop new accounts of justice and freedom” in response to historical inequalities and present exigencies “that compel our thinking” (Butler Reference Butler2017, 859). Their work of cultivating trust and reciprocity clarifies what makes political friendship political. Rather than a readily available resource that precedes politics, as some communitarian readings of Aristotle may suggest—Çıdam (Reference Çıdam2021, 31), for example, places Allen’s account in this category—political friendship names the laborious, ongoing, and thus fragile practices through which individuals “relate to one another, come to an agreement as to what they held in common, and act together without losing their distinctiveness” (175).

In sync with the broader faculty and student resistance, the video, built on a continuous exchange of ideas and collective decision making, reenacts embodied deliberation and debate, cohabitation and cooperation—practices rendered increasingly arduous within the suffocating political atmosphere of campus and society at large. It not only radiates hope amid the AKP’s authoritarian treatment of universities and widespread violations of rights and freedoms but also demonstrates how universities can, and often do, function as laboratories of democracy—democratic politics understood not merely as institutions or procedures but as habits of perception and practice that attune participants to one another and to the ways their relationships are complicated by inequality, disagreement, and conflict. Universities, the video underscores, are laboratories of democracy because of, not despite, the space they create for confrontation, protest, and dissenting speech, whether such speech is directed against governments, university administrations, faculty, or students.

Within such spaces, students learn through experience and encounter, participating in what might be called a pedagogy of collective action—a pedagogy that opens the possibility for different groups to see one another and the world they share in new and critical ways (see Pineda Reference Pineda2021, 20; Woodly Reference Woodly2021, 16). They uncover misconstrued binaries, invisibilized realities, and contradictions that structure political and social life; experiment with new forms of citizenship, sociality, and solidarity that are otherwise rendered imperceptible; and are prepared for “the practice of democracy, specifically deliberation and legislation, but also informed judgment” (Butler Reference Butler2025, 436). Too often overlooked in discussions of campus protest are precisely these “provocative” and “pedagogical” dimensions of direct action (Terry Reference Terry2015) that enable students, as political friends, to “govern their relations not only under cooperative conditions but also in the face of conflict” (Frank Reference Frank2005, 162). Such practices of self-governance defy authoritarian portrayals—advanced by figures such as Erdoğan or Trump—of campuses as sites where students, threatened by one other, are in need of state protection.

It is no surprise that autocrats seek to dismantle students’ habits of association by shutting down student organizations or repressing campus assemblies. As Aristotle’s political writings remind us, friendship among citizens is what tyrants fear most. After all, what brings a tyrannical regime to an end are citizens cultivating mutual trust, appearing in public, and acting collectively with courage and confidence. Whereas a tyrant would seek to sow enmity and distrust among citizens to prevent them from uniting against him, people generate power through association, sharing, and reciprocity (Aristotle Reference Aristotle, Jowett and Davis2000, 1314a13–29; Boesche Reference Boesche1996, 72; Jochim Reference Jochim2020, 177; Sokolon Reference Sokolon2006, 84). Demonstrating these lessons in practice, the Boğaziçi resistance exemplifies a civic bond that generates power from below. This is not to deny that some students supported Erdoğan’s appointment of Bulu or the swift response to the art exhibition but instead to highlight models of relating across difference and coalition-building as antidotes to authoritarian politics. Presenting one such model in an aesthetic register, the pols302 video manifests a radical politics in action, in the sense that Barbara Smith uses the term; that is, “trying to make coalitions with people who are different from you” (Smith and Smith [1981] Reference Smith, Smith, Moraga and Anzaldúa2002, 139).

By associating with others who hold divergent political views, ethical orientations, and religious sensibilities, the students in the video assemble a radical vision of democratic politics grounded in both disagreement and shared concern. This vision can harbor dissent and questioning because it treats them not as forces that tear people apart but as “characteristic of the bonds holding [people] together,” presenting difference not as antithetical or inhibitive but as essential to a reflective “solidarity of strangers” (Dean Reference Dean1996, 8). As such, it is precisely what needs revitalization in the current global moment of authoritarian capture. Universities may resist authoritarianism, pols302 shows, by finding ways to perform the rights that are under threat—above all, the right to critical thinking and speech—and to do so with others, as a communal activity, in defense of the “polyphony of life lived together,” with courage, creativity, and commitment (Scott Reference Scott2022, 16).