Do places of scientific production, campuses, lead to academic ghettoization?

After higher education policies that for many years had practically resisted university building, the new policies adopted toward advanced university building gained great speed in Türkiye in the first stage with the establishment of at least one university in every province. The effect of at least one university in every province, which has gradually come to be felt more and more, is that the university has become part of the routine of a city's daily life. Admittedly, paradoxically, as it becomes routine, the degree to which it is felt also begins to decline; it becomes accustomed, becomes an unavoidable dimension of life. Universities are becoming the most important institutions of all our medium and smaller-scale cities. They begin to determine everything from the city's consumption habits to urban services and spatial arrangements. We said that one effect of this is to make the university ordinary, perhaps to bring the university down to earth, to plant its feet on the ground, to bring it together with life. It is inevitable that this makes science, the scientist, even the places of scientific education, a little more ordinary for city life, a part of life. Perhaps formerly, for people living outside the central provinces, the perception of the university served more to the claim of being ideal in proportion to its distance. In proportion to the scarcity of universities, the number of professors was also very small, and of course, in proportion to their scarcity, their prestige was higher, and the claim of the old professors and faculty members to enjoy this prestige and to look down on society from a somewhat higher place was also higher.

There are many signs that the politics which used the university in Türkiye from the beginning as an institution of tutelage over society designed the whole institution, with its faculty and students, as a place that would make one feel privileged. The resistance displayed against university building cannot be explained only by the inadequacy of the country's economic situation. It was inevitable that those with a vision of comprehensive development would consider university building an indispensable field in any initiative in this direction. But it appears that a vision or will of comprehensive development never formed at all. The small institutions that existed must have been deemed sufficient as a field that those holding power could control. The calculation of "let it be small, as long as it is ours." And this smallness was maintained, thanks to security walls that were hard to reach and get through, together with a claim to a greatness that was not at all proportionate. Our universities, with big, huge university buildings and professors whose prestige is extremely high within the country but who are nowhere heard of in international, universal circles of knowledge.

This contradictory situation was practically engraved in minds through the spatial arrangement of the university as well. The campus is, all over the world, a spatial arrangement of university educational areas in which everything centers on the learning activity conducted in classrooms. At the center of the university administration, the canteens, the dormitories, the landscaping is in the end the classroom where teaching takes place. But the question of where the campus, that is, this large shell that houses the classroom, stands within life, the city, society allows very important differences to be seen between the idea of the university in Türkiye and the general idea of the university. Is it necessary to be this far from society in order to put advanced ideas before society or to produce knowledge that opens horizons and paves the way? In campuses entered through gates with identity checks, in classrooms, libraries, even refectories that cannot be entered by anyone who is not a student or faculty member, what kind of knowledge production, what kind of synthesis of ideas does this isolation between knowledge and life lead to?

Considering the position of university campuses within the general structure of the city, it is as if a rupture between the world of science and the ordinary flow of life had been deliberately desired. I mentioned before that the architecture of universities, and especially campus designs, has the air of a city in itself. Far from the city, separate from all of the city, it rests on a structure that claims "self-sufficiency" and is quite isolated. Especially if the scientist lives in lodgings inside the campus area, he can live for weeks without making any proper contact with the city he is in.

This type of structure suddenly tears the nests of science away from the other areas of life. To enter a university, you go through several procedures that cut you off from the rest of the city. First of all, you must be prepared to cover a long distance. Then you must explain to the security forces stationed at the gate of the university campus what business you have in the campus area. This double process gives the feeling that in entering the field of science you leave the normal sphere of life behind.

In the West a good deal of discussion is carried on about this style of university campuses. Concerns are often voiced that a campus layout so isolated from the public, the city and other areas of life will also have a reflection on the science produced, and may cut science off from life.

Even so, in none of the universities of the many countries I have visited so far is there a kind of "main gate" like ours, asking for identification at the entrances to the university or questioning what business you have inside the university and turning you away at the door if you do not give an explanation.

A significant part of the world's highest-quality universities are in any case part of the city. In passing from one street to another you do not even notice that you have entered the university grounds. To benefit from the various units of the university, especially its libraries, you do not need to be a member of the university. Perhaps to take books out on loan you may need to be a student or university member, but nobody interferes with coming and going and with benefiting there.

You may wish to follow the course of whichever professor you like. For this you may need to get permission not from the university administration but only from the professor of that course. This situation makes entering and leaving universities so easy for the public that even to speak of a problem of establishing the university-public relationship is nonsensical. Universities in any case belong to the public. The university would be only too glad for everyone possible to benefit. The more people can come and benefit, the more real the university's quality of being a university becomes. When knowledge is taken from the university, the university's total knowledge does not decrease. On the contrary, it increases further. Neither the religion nor the identity of one who wants to benefit from the university is looked at in any way. An indicator that the university's mission is working at full capacity is the plurality and richness in the identities of those who benefit from the university. The university works according to the principle of inclusion, not exclusion.

In short, one must dwell on this structuring of university campuses, which has turned into a kind of ghetto of students and academics, necessarily closing itself off from the rest of the city.

Against the mission of bringing the university down to the world achieved by the establishment of a university in every province, what dimension does the spatial arrangement of campuses add to scientific-philosophical thought, to scientific production? Is this not a question worth asking in the name of developing the idea of the university?