Bogazici University: Two Years of Resisting Takeover by the Turkish Government

Photo by Aslı Tarkan Kalaycıoğlu (2 January 2023). Photo by Aslı Tarkan Kalaycıoğlu (2 January 2023).

Bogazici University: Two Years of Resisting Takeover by the Turkish Government

By : Zeynep Gambetti, Mine Eder, Ahmet Ersoy, and Esra Mungan

The Bogazici University resistance is bound to acquire a unique place in history for being one of the longest uninterrupted struggles for academic freedom and university autonomy ever to be waged. Hundreds of Bogazici faculty members have been resisting the take-over of the university by the Turkish government for over two years now. As academic institutions all around the world (including the US) are antagonized by authoritarian politicians or debilitated by market pressures, the Bogazici example stands out as a testimony to the power of collective action in defending university autonomy and imagining a better future for higher education.

Although the Turkish Constitution guarantees university autonomy, universities across the country have been largely subjugated since the 2016 failed coup attempt. Bogazici remained partially protected until 2021. This is a highly prestigious, top-ranking public university with an English-language curriculum inherited from Robert College, an American higher education institution opened in 1863 in Istanbul. After banning internal elections at universities and acquiring the power to appoint rectors while the country was still under a State of Emergency, however, Turkish President Erdogan named Melih Bulu rector of Bogazici on January 1, 2021. Bulu was not a faculty member and like dozens of other rectors in Turkey, he was affiliated with the ruling Justice and Developent Party (AKP). In keeping with Bogazici’s long-standing democratic governance practices, faculty, students, and alumni reacted to the appointment from day one. In the first week of January 2021, the university made headlines in Turkey and abroad when the police cracked down on students and clamped shut the university gates with handcuffs. The protests have been going on uninterrupted since then.

The treatment inflicted on Bogazici brings to light the authoritarian methods used to undermine many other time-honored institutions in the country. Faced with a wholesale opposition at the university, the government’s first strategy in Year 1 of the resistance was to flood the campus with riot police and take students under custody on fabricated charges of belonging to terrorist organizations. Religious discourse was also used to delegitimize the resistance and harness conservative support. Bogazici was portrayed by government mouthpieces as alien, pro-American, not “local and national” enough, an elitist university out of touch with Turkish society. Anti-LGBTQ discourse became toxic during the first weeks of the resistance when “religious sentiment” was used as an excuse to ban the LGBTQ student club and criminalize the rainbow flag. An anti-gender equality stance was also discernable in how all upper administrative positions were filled with male faculty (mostly appointed from outside the university) in contradistinction to Bogazici’s egalitarian tradition. Along similar lines, the Coordination Office for the Prevention of Sexual Harassment was closed down on grounds that the coordinator was a “radical feminist.”

But clashes between the police and students attracted too much foreign and domestic attention to Bogazici. As a result of university-wide resistance, Erdogan retracted Bulu’s appointment in July 2021. Instead of backing down, though, he chose to appoint vice-rector Naci Inci as rector, despite an overwhelming 95% vote of no confidence against him by faculty. Only three Bogazici faculty members were willing to collaborate and Inci, a professor at the Physics Department, was among them.

In Year 2 of the resistance, the university administration resorted to bureaucratic maneuvers and unlawful tactics rather than sovereign acts of repression to demotivate professors. Internal elections for administrative units (deans, department heads, and institute directors) were snubbed, and formal procedures and democratic decision-making principles were systematically violated. Three full-time and several part-time faculty were arbitrarily dismissed and two professors were suspended on contrived disciplinary charges and banned from entering the campus. Classes of more than twenty retired and emeritus professors were canceled. Several centers, including the Byzantine Studies, European Studies, and Peace Education and Research centers, were driven out of their offices. Scores of academics are currently under disciplinary investigation for having opposed the rector. Against the will of departments and in flagrant disregard for merit-based recruitment processes, the rector started hiring unqualified personnel and teaching staff, all of whom have ties with the government. When the Higher Education Council removed three deans from office in January 2022 without citing any legitimate justification, this allowed the rector to have full control over the Senate and Executive Board.

Withstanding all this, professors have not ceased to unite around the rallying cry: “We do not accept! We do not give up!” Given the level of repression in the country, their main repertoire is symbolic rather than antagonistic. In a show of persistence, they have been holding vigil dressed in academic gowns, with their backs turned to the rectorate building in the main campus square every single workday for two years now. All twenty-nine departments and three institutes at the university stand in solidarity in taking legal or administrative action to restrain or thwart the illicit moves of the rector. Supported by a cohort of lawyers, faculty are also fighting a legal battle. They opened more than fifty lawsuits on a wide range of issues, challenging the top-down appointment of the rector, the deans, and new faculty members as well as the establishment of news schools and faculties. 

Aware that defending academic freedom and university autonomy requires much more than defending a campus, Bogazici faculty members also proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the public higher education system. Ahead of the 2023 presidential and general elections, they called on opposition parties to pursue radical reforms aimed at liberating universities from government tutelage. 

Although the struggle for Bogazici hasn’t been able to trigger similar forms of resistance in other universities in Turkey so far, it has mustered enormous support from the public at large. A recent poll showed that eighty percent of those informed about the Boğaziçi resistance believed the protests are justified. The support owes in large part to the generalized dissatisfaction in Turkish society. The AKP’s popularity is declining and the economy is in a deep crisis.

When all protests are either preempted or repressed by force, one university that stubbornly continues to defy authoritarianism becomes a symbol of hope for wider societal and political changes.

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]