“Hands off our university,” was the cry from dozens of students and teachers at the central campus of Bilgi University in Istanbul on Saturday. A day earlier, they had learned via social media that their university was closing down. Riot police, just outside the campus, were also present in large numbers, images show.
Autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signed a decree on Friday that immediately revoked Bilgi University’s license. The private institution, which opened its doors in 1996, was known as a liberal, high-quality university. Students and teachers are looking for answers to the question of what to do next. Can students who are close to graduation actually obtain their diploma? Will teachers still have a job next week and can they complete their research?
The decree states that the more than 20,000 students and around 1,000 teachers of Bilgi University must seek accommodation at the Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts, a smaller state university in Istanbul that already suffers from capacity problems and also has a completely different range of studies. If the university cannot accommodate the students, students will be transferred to another university designated by the Turkish Higher Education Council YÖK.
In a short statement, the council said it is doing everything it can to ensure a transition for staff and students goes as smoothly as possible and will make further announcements “in the coming days”. Principal Ege Yazgan said his “highest priority” is to ensure students’ educational rights are not affected, according to a video from news site T24. He also urged the students to calm down and called on them to refrain from “provocations.”
Major economic interests
Behind the sudden closure there is probably a power struggle with major economic interests, in which the Turkish conglomerate Can Holding plays the leading role. The group of companies bought Bilgi for around 90 million dollars from another investor in 2019 and also had interests in the energy sector and the media, among others. Last year, Can Holding was branded by a public prosecutor as a criminal organization guilty of money laundering and tax evasion. Several people involved were arrested.
121 companies from Can Holding were taken over by state fund TMSF, which has been given increasing power in recent years, for example to take over and run companies suspected of financial crimes. TMSF also took over Bilgi University and a state-appointed administrator started running the university.
Despite this history, the closure comes as “a collective shock” for many students and academics, writes professor of media and communications Aslı Tunç in a message on news platform Medyascope. “Has the university to which I devoted twenty-five years of my life disappeared with one sentence?” After thirty years, the ownership of Can Holding and one stroke of the pen of President Erdoğan indeed seem to be enough to decide the fate of the university.
Bilgi is not the first university to close in Turkey in recent years, but it is the most prominent. After the failed coup attempt of 2016, fifteen universities linked to the Gülen movement were closed by decree. More recently, in 2020, Marmara University and Şehir University were forced to close their doors. Administrators were placed at many universities – political appointments that, according to critics, lead to high work pressure and declining education quality.
It is not only higher education that is being enslaved in Turkey. Numerous politicians from opposition parties are imprisoned and a day before the closure of Bilgi University, the judiciary also intervened in the leadership of the secular opposition party CHP. An Ankara court declared the election of Özgür Özel as CHP leader in 2023 invalid, forcing the return of the party’s previous leader, 77-year-old Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. The ruling is likely to lead to a new power struggle and thus to a weakening of Turkey’s largest opposition party.
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