The university brought down to earth, or the university in the ideal?

One aspect, or consequence, of the extremely rapid expansion of universities in Turkey over 21 years is that at least one university has been established in every province. In many provinces there is now more than one university, and many universities have almost become purely university towns. This in itself constitutes a very important dimension of the sociological transformation we have lived through over the last 22 years. For the founding of a university affects a city's entire life and way of life, and in many new cities it constitutes one of the most important areas of employment.

We are not speaking only of the academic and auxiliary service staff provided within the university. Without doubt, a social transformation is also under way, one with effects in many areas through the development of university campuses, the gradually and constantly growing number of students, the rising share of out-of-town students among them, and the transportation, communication and interaction between the campus and the city. It can be said that, throughout the history of the Republic, universities have thus become one of the actors of the most comprehensive modernization, social change and development, particularly in provincial cities.

In earlier times, the economic burden of most cities with populations under one hundred thousand was largely carried by the military units stationed in them. For that reason, one of the most popular demands voiced through politicians was that a military unit be established in the city or, if there was one, enlarged. It was expected to have the effect of setting up a smokestack-free factory in a city's economy.

Yet universities fulfill this effect on a far wider scale and in far more places.

Of course, the subject cannot be treated only in terms of its contribution to the city's economy. It also makes a very serious contribution to the city's cultural, folkloric, demographic and urban dimensions. Through the history, geography or literature departments founded in cities, drilling begins into the cultural or historical memory of a city that was never studied in ordinary times and so could not be explored in depth.

Today, in the history, geography and literature departments of the universities of almost every city, that city's history is being excavated in an ever finer manner, all the treasures a city holds above and below ground are being brought to light, and this makes a serious contribution to the overall self-awareness of the whole country. On the other hand, universities take part in studies on the agricultural, geographical, underground or surface resources of the city, and set in motion, through innovations, the development of regional crafts, industries, mines or cultural productions.

If at first you pay too much attention to the complications that such rapid university expansion may cause, only the negative sides of the matter are seen. Yet a university, in the city where it is founded, begins to fulfill all these functions as well, not of course from the first day, but over time, as it matures. That people should feel a certain alarm at rapid foundings and numerical increases is of course entirely natural. That people react to this speed at once with "but where is the quality!" is only natural, but it is a reaction far removed from seeing the historical course as a whole.

Having spoken of the contributions of universities to a city's sociological development, we must of course also look at what effect so much university expansion has had and will have on the very idea and quality of the university. Particularly these days, what is the situation for students who have won the university they dreamed of for years, for which they devoted themselves with great sacrifice, love and excitement, and who have made their choice of the university where they will study?

Without doubt, we can say that for the whole of society the most important effect of the appearance of a fast university system that has reached everywhere is that it makes the university ordinary, perhaps brings the university down to earth, plants its feet on the ground, meets it with life (down to earth). But however ordinary it has become, however close it has come to our doorstep, for students who have covered and won such a long marathon with ceremonial seriousness in order to attend a good university, the university must above all create an expectation of a change of place. For example, there should be a spatial order that distinguishes the university space, the campus, from the high school. Or should there? This question is critical, because in interviews with large numbers of students in some sociological studies, students said that they saw no serious difference between high school and university spaces. The university space therefore plays no serious role in forming in them an awareness of being in a different place. Should this be regarded as a problem for the university experience or idea?

The most important manifestation of university expansion is that it has virtually carried the university to the doorstep of broad segments of the population who had difficulty going to university. The fact that a university has been established in every city has also removed, for the student who wins a place, the necessity of a radical exile, of a spatial rupture or a new beginning, of an educational journey. The universities established in Anatolian cities draw the great majority of their students from their own cities or from very nearby ones. Moreover, a high rate of university expansion may perhaps also be holding back the feeling of being admitted to university education as an exceptional distinction among one's peers. In the end, everyone who wants to has somehow been able to attend university.

The question to be asked here, of course, is whether university education should give this feeling of exceptionality. After all, was it not this sense of exceptionality that created in people a sense of the privilege of enlightenment and constantly nourished a feeling of despotism over the rest of society? Did not the inverse correlation that some sociological studies have found between university education and the development of democratic values stem partly from the propensity of minimal university expansion to produce enlightened despots? If this finding can be confirmed, it can also be said that high university expansion will be more inclined to raise a more modest, more egalitarian human type, more disposed to democratic values.

Still, does it not hold back the quality of the university when a university, which requires one necessarily to change cities in order to study and to bear a long and yearning exile, has come almost to the vicinity of one's home, closing that ideal distance, that remove, of the university?

All of this is of course open to debate. After all, we are speaking of the constantly changing effects of a living institution in a dynamic society.