The Council of State says, what does the university need a brain for?

It is thought that the aim of the coefficient applied at university entrance for vocational high schools is solely to prevent Imam-Hatip graduates from attending universities. The aim of today's Council of State decision may indeed be this, but the thesis that the aim of those who introduced this practice was only the İHL students is not at all explanatory when the scope of the practice is taken into consideration.

According to the threat assessment made in the 28 February period, in fact the whole of the lower classes was thought to be the source of irtica, and it was thought that the rise of irtica could be stopped by freezing class mobility. For it had been calculated that, under the conditions of that day, the human resources for the movements regarded as irtica came not only from the İHL but also from all the schools attended by the lower classes, and from the standpoint of their own perceptions they could not be considered wrong in this finding.

From their point of view there was a mobility that threatened their own oligarchic order. Urbanization and the spread of education have always been the most important sources of threat to oligarchic orders. "Irtica" was the code name for the threat to the oligarchic order of sharing. There seemed to be no remedy other than protecting through intrigues an order that had in fact been unjustly seized and for which people had not shrunk from committing murders. The real owners of power were coming up, having found a way (the way of urbanization and education) out of the lower-class areas where they had been massacred and buried. It is not an incomprehensible situation that this coming appeared to some as a "reanimation of the dead." The question that should have been asked, but nobody asked, was this: Who is afraid of a ghost? Who is afraid of a ghost other than those who bear a sense of guilt toward those whose rising from the grave they fear? If you like, you can consult ghost films or novels to obtain strong ideas about the psychology of this matter.

We are talking about a system in which the success rate of the school one graduated from also counts toward the student's success. This is a system that openly punishes graduates of bad schools, even if they are successful, simply because of the school they graduated from. Moreover, this school need not even be an İHL or a vocational school. This is also a very clear sign of how broad the class dimension of the matter, or the threat assessment, was kept.

Frankly, it is the product of an outlook that sees as an enemy not just its own people but even the children of its own people. Whoever is behind this system, there are all the signs of open enmity, of fear, of hatred in their approach.

But fear is of no use against fate. If the fear of ghosts has gripped a guilty person, no film ends without his losing whatever he has unjustly seized.

One of the arguments resorted to as a justification for the coefficient practice is that vocational high school students have already acquired a profession through the high schools they attended, and if they continue to a higher school of the same kind they would have extra points and so be at an advantage compared with those coming from general high schools. This is both false information and a false argument. First, let us correct the information: Graduates of vocational high schools have no advantage at all in continuing to universities. There may be an advantage in continuing to a two-year vocational higher school of the same type, but that is all. Even in continuing to a faculty of the same type, the high school they graduated from continues to be a disadvantage. For example, when someone who graduated from the electrical department of a technical high school wants to go to electrical engineering, the coefficient practice does not count it as the same type of school and blocks him again.

The error of the argument, on the other hand, is that the university entrance exam is made the subject of an advantage assessment. The exam is a success exam, and, regardless of who comes from what background, only the student's success must be taken as the basis. Otherwise the university ceases to be a place that those who succeed enter and falls into an immoderation of evaluation based on the milieu to which one belongs.

What this hits first is science itself. For science is, before anything else, an activity carried out with individual achievement, intelligence and brain. Science works without looking at where the brain it needs comes from. Even if the brain it needs is not nearby, it goes far away, finds it, imports it.

The Ottomans called this devşirme, and looked neither at the race, nor the class position, nor the religion of whoever had a brain. They seized the brain they needed wherever they found it. They owed their centuries-long success to this. Have no doubt that their collapse also ran parallel to their losing the criteria for valuing the brain. In the 28 February period the YÖK developed the world's most complicated system, spending all its energy to exclude the rich reserves of brain it found in its own hands. From this exclusion a part of the brain was wasted and a part emigrated.

With the coefficient and headscarf ban practices we knew that the 28 Februarists did not foresee a need for brain for this country and cared more about blood in the veins and class origin. The Council of State's latest decision has unfortunately also been an irrational decision declaring that Turkey has no need of brain.

Can you say there is no relationship between excluding the brain this much and being this far from reason?