Is our university heading towards a multiversity?

In these days when our young people who have graduated from high school are experiencing the excitement of being placed in a university, it is worth dwelling a little more on the course of the university in Turkey.

We said that Turkey's rate of universitization has covered a great distance very rapidly over the last twenty years. Besides the rate of universitization, we can also say that the diversity in university education has increasingly grown. Alongside the number of universities, which has reached 207, we also see a differentiation, each with its own particular conditions.

The university essentially signifies turning the worlds formed by knowledge into one, having all of them represented in a single objective ideal. While knowledge is being reduced to one and only, in a way that eliminates both its scatteredness and its relativity, it rests on a principle that seeks, through the university, to establish it on the same model all over the world and to achieve a standardization in all circles of knowledge. For that reason, universities founded in every part of the world also bring about a transnational organization of knowledge.

As a rule, the knowledge produced by a university located at the very center of the world and that produced by a university in the remotest corner of the world flow into a single pool of knowledge. Thus, in the university, the duality of province and center is first of all overcome in this way.

Although this is so in theory, in practice its functioning of course makes a difference. For the possibilities of access to knowledge in the environment where the university is located are completed by a social milieu and atmosphere, and this makes the functioning of the university ideal in practice impossible and creates a difference. We can say that the increase in means of communication has recently been reducing the importance of this difference with each passing day. Even so, no one can claim that this difference can be closed entirely.

Beyond this, life grows ever more complicated. There are serious differentiations between the level of development of societies, societies' expectations of the university, and the university's capacity to respond to these expectations. This differentiation also seriously changes the nature of the university. In developed countries this differentiation is felt and experienced much more, because developing industry and increasingly complex social structures make it impossible to continue with the uniform classical understanding of the university. The university adjusts itself both to contribute to this development and to be able to respond to it. In the meantime, in place of that classical uniform university, a multiversity reality actually emerges.

The multiversity is in fact a process that develops together with the way in which the classical "university ideal," that is, the ideal of bringing separated, fragmented knowledge into a unity and of capturing a holistic view of life, increasingly moves away from universal claims in the modern world, in ways that excessive specialization, market conditions and the relativity of education also feed.

The multiversity is a characterization that, by pointing to the metaphysical roots of any holistic intervention through which knowledge could now be reduced to one, pessimistically denies its conditions of validity. Each of the fragmented and dispersed points of view returns to the class, religious, cultural and functional position to which it belongs.

In a medium where such returns are dominant and decisive, provincial universities also become possible together with all the existential conditions surrounding them. As long as the provincial university exists, as long as this existence goes on interminably, hopes for the realization of the university ideal tend to diminish to that extent. Because, to simplify still further, the concept of the province excludes the concept of the university. However, when we look at all the "university" experiences that have attempted to reduce knowledge to one — since the history of the university and of science is the history of different paradigms and of practices of science and thought — we see that the university demand (that is, the demand to clothe knowledge, which by nature is relative, in a certain unity and reduce it to one) has often operated as a totalitarian demand. If that is so, the multiversity, which also includes provincialization within its own ontology, is already an actual situation -a situation operating against a university ideal.

We had said that the further massification of the university in Turkey is, to some extent, related to the pace of development and industrialization that has been achieved. While the universities opened all over Anatolia contribute very obviously to this development, the developing industry and economy also begin to expect different contributions from the university depending on its region. These expectations no longer allow universities to be institutions that, as they used to be, produce and impose truth from their ivory towers.

As this dialogical situation between the university and economic-social development forces each university to develop its own distinct identity and personality, the multiversity reality is becoming a reality of Turkish higher education.

Besides the differentiation of universities into state and foundation universities, central and provincial universities, universities that provide education in foreign languages or in Turkish, vocational schools of higher education and institutions offering undergraduate education within universities, vocational, technological, distance education and so on, the specialization universities that YÖK now also emphasizes, mission differentiation and research university practices appear set to feed the multiversity reality somewhat further. Even so, it seems that the development trend Turkey has entered will demand more, in general, both of YÖK and of the universities.

In fact, until 2007, YÖK's understanding of the university in Turkey associated centralism with a kind of national security and approached differentiation with suspicion. Society was ahead of the university and in fact demanded this differentiation. But at that time, rather than following developments in Turkey and responding to them, YÖK, out of a concern to keep them under control, not only failed to respond to society's needs but put a brake on developments in society.

Yet today the increasing specialization and mission differentiation in universities, smart specialization, and the separation of research universities, together with many other differentiations, are the inevitable result of social development and progress. This result, to some extent, also expresses the transformation of the university into the multiversity.