Is the CHP's university horizon as wide as Tanju Özcan's?

An important consequence of the universitization that has been increasing at great speed in Türkiye in recent years is the parallel increase in internationalization at universities. Frankly, this field holds a very important place in Türkiye's strategic planning, and it should. The policies put forward in this area have within a short time brought Türkiye into competition with the world's leading countries in the field of international students.

Higher education is, after all, regarded all over the world as an economic sector as well, and everyone tries to increase their share in this sector. To that end, those who are ambitious in this field try to make their countries attractive to international students in order to increase their share. The first thing to be done for this is of course to increase the capacity and quality of their universities, but they also try to make the cities in which the universities are located livable, student-friendly, and especially international-student-friendly.

In essence, admitting international students also provides an important motivation and compelling force for a university to become aligned with its universal mission. For international students or instructors constitute a very powerful channel that in practice realizes an opening to the universal pool of knowledge. For students who graduate without having met, in their whole lives, anyone other than their own compatriots, anyone who speaks a language other than their own or has a different culture, a deficiency of universality is inevitable in practice.

On the economic or sectoral share, according to a report prepared by Prof. Dr. Talip Küçükcan, the global higher education economy is worth 370 billion dollars. The US earns more than 40 billion dollars from the 1 million international students it hosts. The UK earns 25 billion pounds from the 600,000 international students at its universities. Türkiye, with the initiatives it has undertaken in the last decade in this regard, has managed to raise its share of international students above 300 thousand.

We can say that this means an export of the higher education Türkiye produces, but much more important is that, through international students,

1. the opening of Türkiye's universities to the universal,

2. the operation of very powerful and lowest-cost possible public diplomacy channels through cultural contacts established with other countries,

3. the people trained here provide Türkiye with important diplomatic, cultural and political opening opportunities all over the world (almost all of these students first learn Turkish through TÖMER and then receive their education in Turkish).

4. especially our Anatolian cities too become internationalized in this way, and their own economies are opened to the outside through student-parent traffic (students studying at Anatolian universities can at the same time work like mission officers for trade with their own countries).

All these potentials are of inestimable value for operating Türkiye's existing production, export and outward-facing soft capital. Regardless of who is in power today, it is a path that must be followed for a stronger, richer and more effective Türkiye.

However, it is also seen that for some time a very serious counter-move has been working as outright sabotage against international students. The campaigns that began with anti-immigrant sentiment and manifest as disgusting racism also target international students. Blind anti-immigrant sentiment is bad enough in itself, as it coincides with an inhuman discourse. But there could be no better demonstration than this example that this evil increasingly has a self-harming, self-poisoning effect.

Anti-immigrant sentiment does not actually arise because the negative effects of migrants on the national economy or daily ways of life have been experienced. Most of it develops and grows by being lured into a campaign, a discourse. But this attitude, already harmful enough in itself, increasingly extends to seeing every international investor and every student as a migrant, turning into a complete hate speech, negligence and error.

Bekir Berat Özipek, who drew attention to these dangerous developments in Serbestiyet under the title "Now International Students Are Also Targeted," says that "at a time when Türkiye is in economic difficulty, although the figures on how many billions of dollars the losses amount to, together with those who leave Türkiye or give up investment and go to other countries, differ, all point to a heavy economic cost." But he adds that there is something even more important than this: "we should not think that what Türkiye has lost in terms of its human and cultural cost, in terms of its regional and global position and goals, is more bearable. In terms of its consequences, it is impossible not to see what kind of harm these campaigns of attack and incitement to crime will do by blocking Türkiye's path."

With his discourse against immigrants that falls within the scope of crimes against humanity however you look at it, the new promises that Tanju Özcan, Mayor of Bolu, announced the other day should be a new test that the CHP, which won an important success in local governments in the recent elections, has to deal with, shouldn't they? Özcan has listed the measures he will take against international students, whose numbers at Abant İzzet Baysal University he complains have greatly increased (whereas he should have been proud on behalf of the city's university and investigating possibilities of cooperation with the rector to develop it further).

Especially against the increase in the number of students coming from Africa, saying "It is not clear whether these are students or not. It is not clear whether they are involved in crime there, it is not clear who they are," this fascist mind, which openly incites people against African students, is unfortunately a freshly elected mayor of this city. In a normal country, someone who made such statements could not escape being prosecuted for openly insulting people and inciting violence and hatred against people. Describing as dangerous enemies the African students whom the US, Britain, Germany and France are in fierce competition to attract more of, Özcan did not neglect, among the measures he would take against them, to say "we will make an astronomical increase in bus tickets."

From here we notify prosecutors that this scandalous attitude constitutes a serious threat to Türkiye's national existence, to its economic and political interests, and even to its security.

And we ask the CHP too: Is this your university policy? Is this the horizon you envision for universities? Is this your understanding of humanity? If it is not, are you aware of the danger this understanding holds for Türkiye?