The non-academic routines of our academic world

Academic life is a world of its own, a realm. Of course no one expects everyone living in this realm to be friends with one another. But those gathered together through a love and pursuit of truth are expected to form more friendship with one another.

In other realms, for example the commercial or political realms where people seek their own interests, it is considered natural for people to compete fiercely with one another and for real friendships not to form in the process. After all, interests conflict very easily, and as everyone thinks of his own interest, the rule is not to draw close to others, to trust, to be sincere, to befriend, but to distrust, to keep one's distance, and to appear a friend for as long as interests last. Academic life, by contrast, being by its nature the life of people who seek knowledge and truth and love it, both requires more friendship and nurtures it more.

Nevertheless, the rivalry seen in academic life can often be harsher, more hurtful and more ruthless than that seen in politics and commerce. Far from making people friends, the shared love of truth can set jealousy, envy and intrigue against one another into even greater motion.

What happens in matters that are not in the scientific field at all, such as promotion, obtaining degrees, securing a post, or administrative positions, is of course a separate subject. Friends who are as sincere as can be turning against one another over an appointment to a limited post, and trying to trip one another up, is among the most typical examples. The race and rivalry among academics to be appointed to an academic post enters between friends like a fish bone, and often sets in motion the non-academic feelings and behaviors of academics toward one another. Often, too, academics' strange interest in and appetite for academic administrative posts outweighs the efforts endured for the love of science.

It is clear that, apart from very exceptional cases, administrative office in academic life ends scientific-academic activity. It also thoroughly cools whatever love-friendship for knowledge had somehow been realized up to that point. And the rivalry of academics with one another over these administrative posts leaves neither friendship nor sincerity among them.

Let us admit that examples of this kind wear down and erode the academy considerably. It is generally very rare for academics trying to refute one another to produce the kind of work Karl Popper speaks of. That is, to try to refute a colleague's scientific theses with a critical eye because one is jealous of him or feels a sense of rivalry toward him is a very exceptional case. Even then, the more typical behavior among us is to ignore the academic one envies, cannot stand or harbors enmity toward, not to mention him at all, not to take any interest in his work.

There are many different examples in other countries, but in Türkiye, if an academic is interested in the work of another academic he does not like, he generally does not keep his objections and counter-theses at a scientific level. He does what he does in order to denounce and condemn the person he is interested in before academic orthodoxies or political-social ideologies.

An academic who does not like another academic's view, instead of producing scientific theses against him, takes the easy way out and, by claiming how that view constitutes a deviation, even a betrayal, of the existing religious understanding or the official understanding, either invites a certain ideological and power circle to lynch him or invites the political authority to prosecute him. We experience plenty of similar examples among religious theologians or secular Kemalist theologians. To take any extreme thesis put forward and, instead of producing an answer within scientific limits, immediately carry the matter into the non-scientific domain is the work of bigoted agents who have infiltrated the friends of science, and who are, unfortunately, abundant.

For instance, the dismissals or other punishments of academics who fall victim to the wrath of coup-makers or of political authorities in general in extraordinary periods, on account of their thoughts or of what they did not think, are often justified by the reports of their own colleagues. In an academic life where rivalry reaches this dimension, the products that emerge make no contribution at all to scientific life or to intellectual life; they produce only rancor, hatred and enmity. This is something that dries up the roots of friendship and love of truth in academic life.

Examples that dry up the roots of friendship are, unfortunately, available in abundance in our academic life. Thus academics who, because of their shared pursuit of truth, should in the ordinary course be one another's friends become one another's enemies.

Yet Popper's falsificationist academic can even feel affection toward the colleague or scientist whom he sets out to refute. For at the root of friendship there is a fidelity to truth. To be motivated to produce a thesis against someone's thesis within certain scientific or philosophical limits, one must take that person seriously. This seriousness is fed, to some extent, by a feeling of fidelity to a truth sensed in that thesis.

Yet the routine of our academic life is not fidelity to truth; if it were, one would feel closeness with those who hold the same fidelity. The pursuits and scientific efforts of those people would be taken into account in a friendly way, not ignored. In our case, the routine of academic life is not confirming or refuting one another, but ignoring one another or, worse, every kind of rivalry that can be displayed against other academics in extra-academic arenas.

Yet a different kind of academy is possible too, with friendship, with love of truth, with a feeling that, because of this love, makes academics feel closer to one another. When examples of this have been lived, truly magnificent scientific and academic products have emerged in the history of the academy. Let us look a little at that as well.