University sociology

One of the most important features of Turkey's most advanced, tradition-bearing, old universities is that they form a distinctive identity and make their members feel it. This sense of identity and belonging also creates a distinctive sense of privilege because of the height of the score demanded on entering that university. This sense of superiority, based on IQ, has a far more insurmountable side compared to other grounds of stratification.

In today's world, transitions between economic classes, strata based on regional differences, even ethnic strata are not subject to insurmountable barriers. You earn money, you jump a class. You migrate, you cross geography. By belonging to certain professions, your status changes and improves. But it is not possible to overcome stratification based on IQ. Because it is almost a difference based on scientific data, an undisputable, objective and insurmountable one. For that reason it is far more merciless.

In fact this finding, that is, this finding and critique of stratification based on IQ fetishism, was made in the '90s by Ömer Laçiner about the Fethullah Gülen structure. He had pointed to the different possibilities of conflict that a structure moving toward IQ-centered stratification there could lead to.

The superiority that some university circles imagine for themselves on the basis of the score they got in this sense, if only it remained within their own imagination; but as it is fed by different mechanisms in society it turns into an untouchable ideology. What goes entirely unnoticed in the meantime is that admiration for one's own intelligence in fact blinds a person over time to the views, manners and wisdom of very ordinary intelligence. That is why it can be inevitable that these ideological environments, into which the most intelligent people are recruited and brought, over time make those people very ordinary and even drop them behind average intelligence. But so long as the brand of the community one belongs to remains above that ordinary intelligence, one continues to maintain one's privilege despite all the regression.

One of the mechanisms feeding the ideology is the business world that favors graduates of certain universities. For example, in full-page job advertisements in newspapers, the staff sought are required to be graduates of this or that school. We know that an important part of university education is in fact completed in the field. No school experience that is not supported by good experience in the field is complete. But as the business world especially prefers graduates of some schools, it continues to grant them a privileged chance to develop themselves. It is of course inevitable that those who can use this chance develop themselves much better in good fields, and this ensures that the legend keeps reproducing itself continuously.

We had mentioned the remark of a certain person, in the intoxication of the very superiority that his alma mater imagines for itself, saying "first get the score to win a Boğaziçi place and then let's talk," directed at Selçuk Bayraktar, who joined the debate on what has happened at Boğaziçi University with a social media message.

As is known, Bayraktar is a name who in recent years has brought Turkey honor worldwide and made a truly unprecedented contribution to Turkey with his inventions in the field of the defense industry. With the İHA and SİHA he developed, he has successfully written the Turkish brand across the skies of Syria, Libya and Azerbaijan. At the firm of Bayraktar, who, with the software and technological production he is still developing, has made ordinary for Turkey achievements that until recently could not be imagined of Turkey, at least 800 engineers work. What most caught my attention among the qualities of these engineers is that they are engineers from all of Turkey's universities. In a short interview I had with him precisely to ask the logic behind this, he says: "We never have a search along the lines of whether in particular someone is from ODTÜ, Boğaziçi or İTÜ or not. In fact we do not even have a habit of keeping an inventory on this matter. In the interviews we conduct, what matters to us is that the person is suited to the work we will do. Sometimes of course this can be someone from any university in Anatolia, and we employ without ever looking at the university the person graduated from."

In the end, just as there is employment from a great many Anatolian universities, there is a very colorful employment picture, from the aforementioned important universities and from many universities of the world, and the productions in question come out of this picture.

The motive guiding these employment preferences is determined by a work-focused search, purged of every kind of ideology. There is no doubt that this approach in itself, and the productivity that emerges as a result of it, is a subject that should be assessed very well in terms of the sociology of the university and, of course, business logic.

Incidentally, let us remind that in the 2020 competition of the Teknofest events, again led by Selçuk Bayraktar, in which all the universities took part, Karabük University was the one that broke the tape. This in fact gives signs that the center-periphery difference in academic performance and production is no longer an insurmountable difference at all. The haste that some central universities display in maintaining their own privileges, and moreover in fields not academic at all, must be assessed in this context too.

In an environment where this contradiction stands out plainly, people will increasingly ask this question as well: What is the contribution to Turkey of a university with such a claim to privilege, compared with the other universities over which it puffs itself up and claims superiority? Now this question rings ever louder in their ears: What are you good for?