By the state of emergency Statutory Decree No. 686, 330 academics in Turkey were dismissed from their positions on February 7. Half of these educators were signatories to the “Academics for Peace” (“Barış için Akademi
Standing at a blackboard in an Ankara park, Sevilay Celenk delivers her lecture, titled: "Resisting with Stories". Several hundred students huddle in heavy coats against winter cold to listen as she describes the fears and struggles that echo through literature across societies.
This small amphitheatre has become her unofficial classroom since she was fired from her post as a media and communications lecturer at Ankara University, one of nearly 5,000 academics dismissed following July's failed army coup.
Academics for Peace acknowleges the support of the following universities and institutions that express solidarity with them.
ISTANBUL, Turkey – Korkut Boratav has seen government purges gut three generations of Turkey's universities over the last 70 years.
The retired economics professor's father, Pertev Naili Boratav, a renowned historian, was forced out of Istanbul university in 1948 for his views. He himself was dismissed from Ankara university in 1983 after the military coup. And last week, the 82-year-old's former assistant, Nilgun Erdem, was sacked.
The regime’s growing assaults on journalists, intellectuals and academics at this particular moment seem aimed at promoting self-censorship ahead of the constitutional referendum in April.
Turkey’s academic community has been a major target of the massive purges in the wake of the botched coup attempt last year, with more than 4,000 academics expelled from universities across the country so far.
Turkey's university lecturers remain defiant, despite what they describe as heavy-handed police tactics during protests against the latest sacking of 330 academics.
When I heard the news on late Tuesday night, I did not know who to pity more than the other. I knew a few of the victims, but the first one I thought was a soft-spoken, elderly gentleman; Prof İbrahim Kaboğlu, from Marmara University, a top Turkish expert on constitution and law.
His civil courage has remained a contrast with his mild manners: he is one of the flag bearers of those who against all odds defend the value of the rule of law. Tuesday night, this senior scholar from Istanbul was ‘awarded’ by being fired, in a most arbitrary way.
The Education and Science Worker’s Union (Egitim-Sen) organised a meeting at Ankara University under the name of “no, we are not leaving” protesting dismissals of academics by the decree laws published on Friday. However, the police and the security officers did not let the academics enter the university. On the insistence of the academics and students to go in, the police intervened and arrested several protesters.
