Where did the university come from, and where is it going?

It is well known that in Turkey there are people who cannot bear to hear of any positive development in higher education. From time to time I ask what kind of higher education level they imagine, those who, the moment a positive development or dimension is mentioned, open their most negative mouths and trivialize all the developments. For instance, the level of universities twenty years ago? Forty years ago? The Republican period that they regard as the Golden Age?

And from which angle, for example?

Whether we say in terms of the level of universitization, in terms of the number of students per instructor, in terms of the level of internationalization, in terms of the number and quality of instructors' research and publications and the citations they receive, in terms of freedom of research and expression, or by whichever criterion we may say, compared with which period can the current situation be said to be worse?

In the first 25 years of the Republic, not even a single new university was opened in Turkey. There is no development other than the existing Ottoman Darülfünun being transformed into Istanbul University. Only in 1947 could two new universities be founded, and even these universities first came to the world's agenda because of politically driven purges, for example at DTCF. That is, university meant nothing other than the imposition of an extremely ideological official view. Universities were seen as a field open to the manipulations of coup-plotters. In the following years it develops slowly, but from the early eighties onward, with the headscarf, the coefficient, YÖK as a gift of the 12 September tyranny, what kind of practice was left to us, I wonder, in the name of the university?

To which period of existence can those in Turkey who speak ill-omenedly saying "the university is finished" proudly refer? The periods since the 28 February era when professors chased out headscarved students, and when ÖSYM based all its measurement and evaluation criteria on formulas that would leave Imam-Hatip and vocational high school graduates out?

PROBLEMS OF UNIVERSITIZATION

Of course, no one can say today that universities are free of problems in their present state. All the shortcomings and flaws that are criticized or identified can today be expressed freely, and all of them can be taken into the necessary database and evaluated for improvement and updating.

Even so, I myself made the criticism regarding universitization in Turkey: This rate of universitization is excessive and may lead to problems that are very hard to remedy sociologically. Today our rate of universitization has risen far above the level we should be proud of and has turned into a flaw. The flaw lies in its having a host of harmful effects, from our employment policies to certain sectoral production systems, from our family structure to our fertility rate and our general lifestyles.

Perhaps we need to start by going back from 12 years of compulsory education and open the way to certain professions at an early age. Today it is very hard to find people to work in many professions that require no university education at all and whose earnings are several times those of today's university graduates. Look for someone to maintain an elevator, for example. You may get an appointment weeks later, if you can find one at all. Training people for such professions can give both easier and more productive results than forcing them to attend university. Of course this is a subject that should be dwelt on at length by those who know the field.

Even if our level of universitization is a problem, let us not forget that we set out on it in order to deal with other great problems. It is an undertaking embarked on in the name of creating equality of opportunity and removing the restrictions in the face of the demand for higher education in society. Another dimension is of course economic. The contributions of each university to the place where it stands, and its role in the city's environmental-physical development or cultural and economic development, were part of a development program undertaken. But now we must also understand that we are at a point where we have to deal with the impact analysis and the side effects of this program.

Let us come to the positive distance our universities have covered in internationalization, in particular what we said about the rise of Turkish universities against the fall of British universities in the QS ranking and about the drop in the share of international students in Britain behind it. In response to our positive findings about the difference Turkish universities have made, a sort of fishbone was put forward: "In many centers abroad, especially in Africa, there is a racket in which whoever pays the money looks for a way to come to Turkey as a student; it cannot be compared with the situation in Britain."

Of course, when you set a goal such as internationalization before your university, it is impossible to control fully whether every student who comes truly comes to study. But do you think this applies only to Turkey, which is almost at the beginning of the road?

Do all the international students in Britain go there only to study? Is there not a significant proportion there too who say "being a student is an excuse, Britain's very stones and soil are gold"?

That exists of course and is known, but because of the contributions of the flow to universities, at least financially, this is overlooked. Thanks to that, British universities are supposedly at a high scale among the world's universities. Moreover, it was assessed that even those who came using studenthood as an excuse contributed to the country in other ways.

In recent months, British Home Secretary James Cleverly even said that international students, by using university courses as a cheap way to get a work visa, "could undermine the integrity and quality of the UK higher education system." This in fact also pointed to a difference of perspective between the Home Secretary and Britain's education sector. Indeed, the policies that have recently leaned more toward the Home Secretary's perspective have put the British higher education sector on a tragic downward trend, and this situation has caused serious discontent in British higher education institutions.

While the concern is frequently voiced that the decline of British universities cannot be prevented unless this crisis is overcome, a government spokesperson also stated the need to strike the right balance between decisive action against illegal migration and attracting the brightest students to our universities, in awareness of the important contribution they make to Britain.

Of course there are many lessons in this tale for Turkey.