Not letting go of moderation, and YÖK's equivalence issue

Being measured in criticism as well as in praise is a sound path that reason and common sense teach a person. It is also a piece of advice, a command, given to us by our Prophet. Perhaps tomorrow you will be reconciled with those you criticized without measure, so that you will still have the face to look at them; or perhaps tomorrow you will fall out with those you praised without measure, so that you need not be ashamed of what you yourselves said.

Yesterday, watching Ali Babacan's speech at the Deva Party Congress, frankly I was only saddened. As if he had learned opposition from the worst model, the CHP; as if competing with them, recognizing no measure at all, and moreover recognizing no measure at all in lashing out at his old friends. "Let Erdoğan stop boasting about what we and our friends did," he says. From whichever side you look, it is a statement only to be ashamed of. Without Erdoğan, what could those "friends" have succeeded in doing? If they consider what they did to be of their own making, who will they be of any benefit to from now on? Who among those friends was more capable, more visionary, more experienced than Kemal Derviş? What was Derviş lacking, and what did those friends have in excess, I wonder? Have you learned Erdoğan's role that easily?

Babacan also had a remark about health workers: "A portion of our health workers are now leaving this country. While it is very hard to work even under the current conditions, there is still an administration trying to bring new hardships," he was saying.

Of course every kind of constructive criticism should be made on improving the working conditions of health workers in our health system. After all, the system rests on the happiness and satisfaction of its workers. Systems with workers under unbearable conditions, whose rights and satisfaction are not looked after at all, do not work in a healthy way anyway. But to say that the current situation is forcing health workers to flee Turkey is a great injustice. It is always possible to find better conditions or opportunities and try to take advantage of them. But presenting this as a general trend is an unjust smear on Turkey's health system today.

On the contrary, I personally observe the existence of a serious demand, which I wrote about earlier in this column, to work in Turkey's health system, moreover from the US and Europe. What makes Turkey advantageous is the extraordinarily strong health infrastructure it has built especially in recent times, and the fact that this is now recognized and known throughout the world. In this respect Turkey is a very serious health tourism center, and this aspect is growing ever stronger. One of the areas in which Turkey is strongest in the world at present should not be smeared so easily; on the contrary, it should be regarded almost as a national achievement, and everyone needs to stand by it.

However, from the reactions that came to me when I expressed these thoughts on social media, it is clear that there is a very serious problem especially with YÖK's equivalency procedures, which is a matter from which even the US doctors who want to work in Turkey, whom I myself have in mind, suffer. These doctors, all very well trained in their fields and working at important US universities, were saying that the most important problem they faced while working on a system that would make Turkey a center where not only ordinary foreign patients but especially complex, chronic and severe patients requiring specialization would be treated was the equivalency process, whose bureaucratic procedures are very heavy, slow and uncertain in outcome, which confirms the reactions that came to me.

On this occasion it must be said that the internationalization that Turkey has recently experienced, especially in our universities, runs parallel to Turkey's economic and political opening to the world. There are already more than 200 thousand foreign students in our country, though this "foreignness" is in fact an inappropriate word for the concept of a university. The university, as its name already says, is the name of a process in which the concept of foreignness can be overcome. There is no foreignness in a university, because knowledge is universal, but the truth is that the more people there can be from other countries and cultures, the more the concept and ideal of the university is realized. That is another debate. But what concerns us here is that the equivalency body, which works to ensure the compatibility of our universities, internationalized so rapidly and on such a scale, with the other universities of the world, does not have a corresponding speed and flexibility.

From many of the messages or real requests that came, it is clear that there is a serious problem of slowness and senselessly rigid rules. Here is an example that I know very well and have experienced. Someone I know with a doctorate, whose file I could comfortably grant a professorship degree without feeling any risk given their publications, international recognition and academic-scientific standing, cannot work now, because the institutions from which they received their high school and undergraduate diplomas are not recognized, so they are not even counted as a bachelor's graduate. I know that this person could easily obtain a doctorate abroad. And this is not the only example. A very respected name who served for many years as a tenured professor in the US is currently able to work at a university only with a doctorate degree.

On this matter, the time has long since come for YÖK to issue a new ruling in keeping with Turkey's growing role. Even among asylum seekers, a great many highly educated people have gone to Europe or Canada, either because equivalency was not granted to them or because they were worn out by a great many procedures.

It is not that there are no problems in some of the equivalencies obtained from other countries. There is also very serious data on how debased this matter has become in some countries or universities. Of course some criteria are needed to distinguish these. Moreover, one circumstance that complicates the matter is that the number of people who take the easy way on this and resort to this route is greater than the real cases.

Because I personally know of those who resort to a thousand and one kinds of political intercession to have the diplomas of fabricated, back-alley institutions that they somehow obtained counted, I still do not abandon caution in my recommendations. But Turkey also has a great need to sift out the real cases, which are nonetheless very numerous, and integrate them into the system. Of course, what takes priority over that is redressing the grievance of those who apply.