Cinema and the university in Bingöl

At the beginning of this month, for the second leg of the marathon of the 4th International Short Film Festival organized in Siirt by the Anatolian Culture and Art Council Association, chaired by Baran Mayda, we are in Bingöl. The Bingöl International Short Film Festival, the first of which took place in December 2017, was held for the third time this year.

As in Siirt, 245 films from Türkiye as well as from different countries took part in this festival, 110 of them foreign films, and once again Iranian directors broke the tape. On the occasion of the Siirt Film Festival I had recently written The Relatively Long Story of the Short Film. To this story we can again add, in Bingöl, the 5-day enthusiastic meeting of university students and the public with artists, the workshops, seminars, screenings and talks.

For me, having observed yet another new stage in the development of the university, and not only Bingöl University but many universities in the region, and having recorded very gratifying and exciting developments, was an experience that made the festival a festival and completed it.

As an academic who has authored sociological studies on the contribution of universities to the country's development in Türkiye, I have followed the development of universities in Türkiye closely from the beginning. I can say that the university landscapes I see today, especially in the East, regarding the meeting of academia with the city, industry, folk culture, literature and problems, are far beyond what I imagined years ago.

WHY WAS THERE RESISTANCE TO UNIVERSITIZATION IN THE OLD TÜRKİYE?

While it was always accepted in theory that the university plays a key role in Türkiye's modernization, in practice there was an incomprehensible resistance to universitization. Part of this resistance was perhaps due to economic inadequacy, but it is also clear that a far more important part was related to the management or control of the elite stratum. University education is, after all, the most important source of elite production, and increasing this source in an uncontrolled way could have turned into a mechanism that makes elite production in society uncontrolled and takes power out of hand.

The coefficient practices aimed at determining who could and could not enter universities, the headscarf ban, and the strict controls on where universities or departments would be opened were all related to this fear.

But if we return to the beginning, a significant part was undoubtedly also related to the scarcity of economic resources. The resources that could be allocated to universitization in particular and to education in general were scarce. Looking at the distance covered in this regard since 2002, one can see, in all fairness, what kind of choice was made in resource allocations.

The number of universities, which was 76 in 2002, has reached 207 today, and there is at least one university in every province. There was serious criticism of impossibility and difficulty regarding the universities opened especially in the east. But no one was saying this was easy anyway. The work was truly hard, and in the landscape we encounter today one sees with what great sacrifice this difficulty was overcome. Not merely signboard universities were established in every province; universities with campuses, buildings rising in the city's most beautiful, most aesthetic, lush green forest, have now come a long way.

On my way to Bingöl I stopped by Muş Alparslan University. I remember very clearly where Rector Prof. Fethi Ahmet, and before him Prof. Dr. Nihat İnanç, began in developing the university, and I also see the point the university has reached today.

WE ARE IN A NEW PHASE IN ANATOLIAN UNIVERSITIES

While Bingöl University has become a fully equipped university with 10 faculties, 5 institutes and many research and application centers, the university campus, with its wonderful library, social spaces and green areas, has acquired a magnificent beauty where living comfort is climbing to ever higher levels.

Rector Prof. İbrahim Çapak, who explains that they no longer experience any shortage of lecturers in the faculties or departments established, in fact portrays on this occasion that the universities established in Anatolian cities since 2007 have reached a new stage. It was thought that the most important difficulty these universities established at first would encounter would be a shortage of teaching staff, and indeed this shortage was real at the beginning. Yet today in none of these universities has the shortage of teaching staff fallen to anything but almost nonexistent levels.

The desired number of teaching staff has been secured in almost every field. Moreover, these teaching staff do not lag behind central universities in quality either. For example, Bingöl University rose last year from 27th to 16th place among 95 state universities in the URAP (University Ranking by Academic Performance) ranking. The same performance is seen in the faculty members' Web of Science-indexed publications. Siirt University had also recorded this performance rise earlier.

Therefore we can say with ease that we have today reached a new stage for Anatolian Universities. Universities have now passed the establishment-construction phase and are focused on the quality of their universities, their expertise, and the contributions they can make to the country's development, to art, science and philosophy. From here a very hopeful horizon for Türkiye's future is visible.

All of the campuses we tour in Anatolia today, each of which adds beauty and quality to the city's beauty and makes important contributions to the city's urban development, had winds blowing in their places fifteen years ago. All of these are the expression of serious investments in the country's development.

One of the most important places that those who ask what has been done in this country for 20 years should turn and look at, in all fairness, is these campuses and the educational basins in which the scientists who fill them were raised. These are without doubt places to be looked at when it comes to the country's national wealth reserve.