The University of Nostalgia, or nostalgia for the old university

Whenever the university is brought up, vague complaints begin from every quarter that the university has gone off its path. The overall objection that has arisen, that the numerical developments taking place in the name of the university cannot be considered a very beneficial development for the university ideal, evidently shows that an idea of an "ideal university" exists in everyone. In fact, when the expectations about what this ideal university is are examined a little, nothing emerges but a familiar nostalgia or an idealized mission loaded onto the institution of the university.

The criticisms that so many universities opened, and so many university teachers and students whose numbers have increased, have not put forth a notable performance in the name of the university ideal evidently also presuppose, with these numerical developments, a deviation from an authentic state they take as a reference for the university.

A deviation from which state? Let us ask, if you like.

In the periods when the number of universities was deliberately kept small, and an elitist arrogance-tutelage over society was sought to be maintained through this, were greater performances put forth in the name of science than today? What was more advanced or more authentic about a university that academic circles could be joined, instead of through scientific capacity, entirely through political-ideological connections and entirely through a system of sycophancy, compared with today's?

In a university environment where the headscarf or being a vocational high school graduate was seen as an obstacle not to becoming an academic but even to becoming a student, and where for a long time the whole academy could be occupied with this alone, what kind of scientific discovery, what kind of scientific production can be recalled?

In universities where the sole purpose of the coefficient barrier placed in the way of even entering as a student served as either an ideological (irtica, reactionism) or class (vocational high schools) barrier, what kind of scientific activity, invention or production is recalled and missed?

To be a little more explicit, it is not that there are no problems that the numerical abundance now being experienced in the field of the university can cause. But we have no reference established in the past by which we could take these problems as a deviation, a regression, from a much better level of university.

From the beginning the university in Türkiye was thought of as an ideological apparatus. The crudest possible ideological mission, not a scientific one, was loaded onto Istanbul University, opened in place of the Darülfünun closed in 1933, and onto its DTCF.

From 1933 on, the mission of being the state's ideological apparatus was loaded onto universities in Türkiye, and they played this mission in the crudest way with their number, which was only three until 1950 anyway. It is well known with what kind of intervention and purge the slightest attempt at doing science ended at the DTCF in 1948. Then the ideological climates of 1961, 1980 and the 28 February period. The events in which university deans went on headscarf hunts and set up persuasion rooms for headscarved students are all practices of this "old university."

The deviation from the university ideal that we hear of so often today because of the speed and multiplication of university building has no real reference that can be shown in the history of the university in Türkiye. When one goes to real examples, it can only be shown that the university is in fact in a state of continual development. Moreover, the reference of these criticisms cannot be real examples but only hollow nostalgic feelings. Today universities, in terms of both their teaching capacity and their capacity for scientific research, publication and production, show a very great difference in development, whatever comparison one resorts to.

Incidentally, though somewhat different from ours, such nostalgic feelings have always been decisive in criticisms of universities in Europe and America as well.

Here, from the very beginning, the tension has been decisive between the university as a medium for the knowledge production of teachers and students devoted solely to the search for truth, and the models that try to respond to the conditions of the state, of life or of the market. The subject goes all the way back to the opposition between Bacon, the famous philosopher of the Enlightenment, whose approach saw knowledge as power and therefore as a weapon strengthening man against nature, and the philosopher who seeks truth far from this instrumentality. For Cardinal Newman, who thought of the second kind of university and with this philosophy took part in the founding of the University of Dublin: "Knowledge has the sufficiency to be its own end. The formation of the human mind is such that every kind of knowledge, if it is truly knowledge, is its own reward."

This approach was in fact one that would not tolerate the university's societal or market-oriented utilitarian organizations and its massification either. According to Newman, "a university education aims at raising the intellectual quality of society, developing the public reason, purifying the national taste, providing genuine principles for popular enthusiasm and fixed aims for popular passions, bringing breadth and comprehension to the ideas of the age, facilitating the functioning of political powers, and bringing refinement to the relations of private life" (Clark Kerr, Üniversitenin Kullanımları, İstanbul: Küre Yayınları, 2016, pp. 25-26).

What Newman wrote defined the mission of the 19th-century German universities, which emphasized a high moral philosophy. But in a short time this understanding of the university was replaced by universities under pressure to respond to demands for research, for making life easier, for improving society, for meeting the needs of industrial society. Instead of discovering the truths contained in nature, it was necessary to make it say by force (torture, Bacon) what we wanted, and to produce new things. In place of the scientist who approached learning with a holistic philosophy came those who are specialists in a particular field.

Newman's universal, broad-horizoned human being had in fact already vanished within this university practice. In his place the American University, which with all its pragmatism trains specialists who try to respond to the needs of the market and society, developed as a more dominant model. Moreover the American university has been in vogue throughout nearly the whole of the twentieth century, all over the world, as the most dominant university model. But this university in fact has nothing to do with the search for truth, with what most of us dream of as the "ideal university." Indeed, this university too has always been under the charge of "deviation from the university ideal."

Yet the university has always lived this tension from its first day of foundation. Already against the free-thinking settings of Socrates or Plato's Academy, the educational practices of the sophists, who perhaps represent today's market universities, had begun to be institutionalized.

Today universities have not remained with the philosophy with which they were first founded, and throughout history they are continually changing, because the world in which they are situated is changing. The most deeply rooted universities of Europe and America, Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, Berlin, Dublin, are also changing in parallel with, or in reaction to, developments in the world. In Germany, because of the difference it put forth from the beginning, the university ideal did not give as high a premium to massive university building in society as the US or England did, but now it does so even less under the pressure of an aging population.

In short, the university, which changes as the world changes, always produces also a nostalgia for "old universities." The difference between Türkiye and the world on this matter comes before us as an entirely different subject.