Tuesday, January 11, 2011

If this were Kamil Pasha I guess I would label this story as another example of Turkey being the "country of no"—-whatever that means.

But I think the story does call attention to the flimsy state of educational rights in Turkey—as well as to the precarious state of professors at private universities, who seemingly can be fired at whim by the administration of the universities where they work.


Protesting students and faculty at Istanbul's Bilgi University

But university students in Turkey seem to be getting a bit more aggressive lately about standing up to the government and their own universities. And this is something that seems to transcend the currently accepted political ideologies of the day, and includes not only efforts by students to wear headscarves, but also a series of more recent protests relating to violent police tactics against students.


"Aferin, çocuklar!"

Here's an excerpt:

The controversy that erupted over student Deniz Özgün’s final thesis, “The Porn Project,” which included footage of two people having sex, led to the dismissal of three lecturers at Bilgi. Professor İ.D., who was the former head of the Visual Communication Design Faculty, and scholars A.P. and A.A.A. were fired Jan. 3 by the school administration, which also filed criminal complaints against them with a prosecutor’s office since pornography is a punishable offense under Turkish law.

The management announced these actions via e-mail and then shut down every e-mail account belonging to staff in the VCD Faculty and blocked all websites related to the faculty. This was done to block the creation of a unified stance on the issue, protesters said Monday.

On Jan 4, police raided the E1 Building, searched the rooms of the academics and copied the contents of their hard drives. Computers in the faculty’s computer lab were searched by the management and their hard drives were removed. Bilgi management then announced Jan. 7 that all final exams were cancelled apart from the final theses, something that was criticized by students and scholars as a violation of educational rights.

Turkish academics who talked to the press typically spoke out against pornography-related projects and research taking place in an academic setting. “It is not the place of a student to question academic freedom; that is an academic’s job,” Professor Oğuz Adanır, head of the Cinema Television Faculty at İzmir’s 9 Eylül University, told daily Radikal. Speaking to the same publication Sunday, Professor Sevda Alankuş, the dean of İzmir Ekonomi University, said she would try to stop such a project if it were proposed at her school.

Here is the rest of the story.