Homo Academicus

Let me say right away so that readers do not form a mistaken perception. The title carries no gender implication. As is known, because of what is happening these days at Boğaziçi University, there are those who have reached the point of almost thinking that the university stipulates LGBT as a condition. University autonomy, scientific-academic freedom, even freedom of thought are presented almost as something that will not be realized without recognizing, indeed without living, LGBT-İ. Presented is hardly the word; there is an attempt to impose it.

Why are they not separated from each other? Why is academic freedom wrapped in the packaging of LGBT-İ specifically in the case of Boğaziçi? What format has academic life at Boğaziçi University taken, that it has come to produce a gender culture and life far beyond Turkey's average, a very different one?

As I said, the title in fact has nothing to do with this subject. Homo Academicus is the name of the famous book of the famous French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in which he made academic circles a subject of study.

There is no doubt that university members, by their professional occupations, form a distinctive type of community with the perspective and personality this profession provides them. What happens when this community, which by its nature makes every area of life an object of research and an object of its own knowing, itself becomes the subject of science? As to what type of personality forms in these institutions, where scientific knowledge and practice are expected to be produced at the highest level, we occasionally experience very interesting events.

For example, an article by my teacher Hasan Ünal Nalbantoğlu of the ODTÜ Sociology Department, whom we lost exactly ten years ago, bore the title "Absent-minded Thales, Alert University Inc." With this he drew attention, on the one hand, to the incident involving Thales, one of the Greek philosophers, who, accustomed to constantly looking upward because of his interest in the heavenly bodies, failed to notice the pit in front of him and fell in, leading to his tragic death. Of course, Nalbantoğlu did not stop there. In contrast to Thales, who, in the name of a so-called search for truth, "with his eyes constantly wandering up high," represents a break from the realities of society, he pointed to the increasing corporatization of the university, and the transformation of academics into employees of companies with their eyes on high wages and earnings from industrial-technological production, as another extreme.

Is there no in-between; is academia condemned to these two extremes? Why should it be limited to the options of either this or that?

The contradiction of an academia, of knowledge that objectifies everything, that supposes it knows everything and, with the arrogance this knowledge affords it, increasingly remains ignorant of everything, is in fact the summary of Bourdieou's work. There is a saying that historians generally write the history of everything but are reluctant to write "the history of history" or "the history of historians." Academics too like to objectify others but are not at all ready to be objectified. After all, was it not the poet İsmet Özel who said "tell me"? "Tell me, how many people are there, in this whole wide world, who go as far as seeing their own skeleton in the mirror?"

Bourdieu was showing academics their skeletons in the mirror he held up to them. He was explaining that being an academic, being a man of science, does not in itself give a person the privilege of being right, the prerogative of representing the truth. On the contrary, he depicted that academics, with the circles of truth, discourse communities, conventions and habits they form, build a separate world whose miracles are self-attested. Within this world there is of course also cut-throat competition, envy, and the most banal, most archaic gossip atmosphere. The late Hüsamettin Arslan, whom we lost three years ago, had also examined Turkish examples of this environment, in the doctoral dissertation he wrote, under the heading "epistemic community."

The physical conditions of a university member's feeling privileged are largely provided by campus life. The campus is far from the city; the buildings of the faculties and departments are arranged according to the internal hierarchy of the academic departments. The life practices formed, from the academic to the student, are also not for producing or according to the routine flow of life. After all, it is specially designed for study. According to one's worldview, this physical environment becomes an environment where, in what remains outside of people's education life, attitudes and behaviors are displayed through which they can feel their own identity, difference, even privilege more. Things that cannot be lived in normal life, things that cannot be said, are lived here. The campus is not a real-life place; it becomes a heterotopic place that is lived temporarily, but in which, of course, a person's personality and all subsequent human tendencies can be sown.

Entering and leaving campuses is possible with security measures and ceremonial passages. As far as I know, calculating the drawbacks that withdrawing into so much of an ivory tower can create, these passages have been thoroughly blurred at universities in the US. For that reason you do not even notice the transition between campuses and the rest of the city. They are so intertwined. Harvard and MIT are like that too. Yet in our country the border between campuses and the rest of the city is like a national border. You pass from one country to another, as it were, that much.

Of course privilege and hierarchy are produced both among the departments within each university campus and among different universities. For example, there is such a thing as being a Boğaziçi graduate, an ODTÜ graduate, a GS graduate, an İTÜ graduate.

The remark "first get the score to win a Boğaziçi place and then let's talk," made to Selçuk Bayraktar, who has signed Turkey's most source-of-pride scientific-technological breakthroughs of recent years, because he joined these debates, by a person who has had no share from the university he attended other than these claims of privilege, of course deserves an entirely separate evaluation in this context.

Of course the real issue is not that Bayraktar is in a position to get far more than that score. It is what the academic world they live in makes some people drink and fly on. What do people drink in those environments that they begin to see themselves so far above others?

Do the obsessions with looking down come from there too? Why, for example, does Selçuk Bayraktar, though he has a far better education, intelligence and proven success, not deign to resort to this language?