Republic of Scholars or Scholars of Republic? Some Remarks on the University Autonomy and Academic Freedom in Turkey

Academic freedom has generally been conceived as a normative universal principle and an immanent attribution of the scholarly enterprise. Almost every actor related to academia have a conviction that academic freedom is an essential universal value of academic work which is to be protected and sustained in all conditions. Although major practices and reflections of academic freedom embody plenty of universal aspects, others are mostly affected by local and national variables such as state-university relations and historical traditions of higher education and science. Turkey’s predicament with academic freedom has aroused considerable interest with the recent wave of the academic purge. Yet, the scholarly discussion of the topic has seldom gone beyond the description of specific events and their consequences. This paper seeks to contribute to the discussions of academic freedom and institutional autonomy in Turkey, arguing how the academic field, in Bourdieusian sense of the term, has been shaped by political and extra-scientific forces from its very beginning. It is also argued that institutional and scientific autonomy, which are often taken for granted in many academic settings, are relatively more restricted and therefore need special attention in the Turkish case.