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The Marketization of Higher Education in Turkey (2002–2011)
Abstract
The neoliberal transformation of higher education is a process that has been occurring across an area far wider than Turkey, especially in the last decade. The most dramatic example of this is the Bologna Process administered by the European Union (EU) but covering 49 countries1 under European Higher Education Area (EHEA), of which Turkey is a member. This makes it impossible to analyze and criticize the neoliberal phenomenon within a framework that takes into account the prominent Islamic element in the politics and ideology of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) as the main determinant of the transformation of Turkish higher education system. Such an approach would have to view the transformation in a country-specific light and would fail to explain the reason for the similarities between the policies proposed by international actors and those policies carried out by the AKP.
... The AKP's pro-Islamic reshaping of education fits into its neoliberal economic agenda, which has embedded the commodification and privatization of education (Kurul, 2012;Önal, 2012). In Turkey, privatization takes various forms in the field of education: (1) contracting and outsourcing to the private sector has increased the number of private schools; ...
Crime rates in Turkey have surged dramatically, contrasting with the crime drop observed in Western countries. Despite this upsurge, there has been a lack of criminological analysis on this rise. This article, for the first time, offers Institutional-Anomie Theory to explain the crime rise phenomenon, by scrutinising Turkey’s integration into the globalized market economy since the 1980s and its repercussions on the polity, family and education. It argues that over two decades, the pro-Islamist and pro-market political power has precipitated an institutional breakdown which stems from shifting towards authoritarianism, reconfiguring the family as an economic–productive unit and redesigning the national education to promote entrepreneurial skills and competition whilst instilling Islamic values. The unique blend of neoliberalism and political Islam has cultivated a distinct form of entrepreneurialism and consumerism, which we suggest should be considered to be influencing crime rates in Turkey and thus corroborates a globalised version of Institutional–Anomie Theory.
... Changes in the HE Act in 1992 allowed the establishment of foundation -private -universities in Turkey to meet increasing demands for higher education. Marketization, privatization and internationalization all contributed to the massification of HE (Onal 2012;Cosar & Ergul 2015). Massification is evidenced in the gross tertiary enrolment ratio in Turkish HE, increasing by almost 90% since 2000 (World Bank 2023). ...
The drive towards English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in universities in non-English-dominant countries can generate heated debates, yet the drivers of EMI are still not fully understood. This position paper argues for transdisciplinary participation in order to shed new light on the drivers of EMI. Transdisciplinary participation is conceptualized as engaging with theories, methodologies and practices in other disciplines in order to approach a topical issue in a new way. We exemplify transdisciplinary participation as bringing together applied linguists and those involved in academic governance to re-theorize the rise of EMI as linked to steering at a distance governance reforms that have swept across the European higher education sector since the 1980s. Showcasing three cases from across Europe, we argue that steering at a distance may shed new light on the drivers of EMI. At a more general level, we highlight how disciplinary positioning shapes the creation of knowledge.
... 5 It is also under these conditions that neoliberal austerity rules became prevalent in Turkey: in 1981, a new Higher Education Law (2547) was ratified and HE services, which until then were seen as a public domain, became redefined as semi-public services. This resulted in an increase of private universities with higher tuition fees in the whole sector (Önal, 2012;Aslan, 2013). Upon the amendment of a related law in 1984, so-called non-profit HE institutions appeared on the scene (YÖK, 2014). ...
Towards a Global Core Value System in Doctoral Education provides an evaluation of changes and reforms in doctoral education since 2000. Recognising the diversity of academic cultures and institutional systems worldwide, the book advocates for a core value system to overcome inequalities in access to doctoral education and the provision of knowledge. Building on in-depth perspectives of scholars and young researchers from more than 25 countries, the chapters focus on the structures and quality assurance models of doctoral education, supervision, and funding from an institutional and comparative perspective. The book examines capacity building in the era of globalisation, global labour market developments for doctoral graduates, and explores the ethical challenges and political contestations that may manifest in the process of pursuing a PhD.
... 5 It is also under these conditions that neoliberal austerity rules became prevalent in Turkey: in 1981, a new Higher Education Law (2547) was ratified and HE services, which until then were seen as a public domain, became redefined as semi-public services. This resulted in an increase of private universities with higher tuition fees in the whole sector (Önal, 2012;Aslan, 2013). Upon the amendment of a related law in 1984, so-called non-profit HE institutions appeared on the scene (YÖK, 2014). ...
... 5 It is also under these conditions that neoliberal austerity rules became prevalent in Turkey: in 1981, a new Higher Education Law (2547) was ratified and HE services, which until then were seen as a public domain, became redefined as semi-public services. This resulted in an increase of private universities with higher tuition fees in the whole sector (Önal, 2012;Aslan, 2013). Upon the amendment of a related law in 1984, so-called non-profit HE institutions appeared on the scene (YÖK, 2014). ...
Bu yazıda önce akademik özgürlüklerin ve ihlallerin uluslararası literatürde nasıl ele alındığına göz atıyor, Türkiye'deki tarihçesine değiniyor ve günümüzdeki durumu özetliyoruz. Daha sonra, akademik özgürlük ihlallerini - psikoloji disiplini ve bölümlerine etkileri örneğinde - daha yakından ele alıyoruz. Sonuç olarak, nasıl özgürleşebileceğimize ilişkin birlikte durum değerlendirme, düşünme ve alternatifler üretme çağrısını yineliyoruz.
The year 2015 was a turning point in the history of migration to Europe due to the so-called migration crisis that emerged under the influence of wars, war-like conflicts, and anti-democratic authoritarian regimes in Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. These historical phenomena led to unprecedented threats to human rights, in-cluding academic freedom and freedom of expression, which resulted in the fleeing of schol-ars to countries in the Global North and the West, with their liberal regimes. The forced migra-tion besetting intellectuals also included representatives of feminist and gender studies, who were targeted by authoritarian regimes due to the latter’s symptomatic anti-gender policies and discourses. In the general context of forced intellectual migration from the Global South and the East to the Global North and the West, this paper focuses on scholars in the field of feminist and queer studies fleeing from Turkey to Germany after 2015. Special emphasis is placed on their experiences of both risk and inclusion at German universities following the scholarships awarded by academic-humanitarianism actors. The aim of the paper is to shed light on gendered and epistemic inequalities that are experienced by scholars in the wake of the neoliberal higher education system.
This paper explores discourses on and around internationalization as a reflection of the contemporary development of Turkish higher education. It analyses policy documents published by the Council of Higher Education (henceforth the CoHE), academic and media articles over ten years. By examining these texts through a combination of policy framing analysis and (critical) discourse analysis, the study explores how discourses on and around internationalization are framed by policy-makers, academics and media commentators. The study concludes that policy-makers’, academics’ and media commentators’ understanding of internationalization is not solidified into a clear-cut and homogeneous definition and that internationalization is often quantified with references to student and academic numbers. In fact, the discourses on/around internationalization reflect aspects of global trends towards the marketization of higher education and significantly of Turkey's economy policies.
This chapter explores the possibilities and pitfalls of resistance against and under authoritarian neoliberal regimes in the case of the dismissed Barış için Akademisyenler (Academics for Peace, BAK) in Turkey, who were punished for daring to speak publicly about the ongoing gross human rights violations committed by security forces in Kurdish cities. It outlines the trajectory of the authoritarian neoliberal regime with a focus on higher education, as this trajectory has played a crucial role both in the dismissal of the BAK and the recent attacks on academia. The chapter provides a picture of the state of emergency period, which was significant in granting the regime the capacity to rule through decree-laws. Drawing on the findings of the fieldwork of the Türkiye İnsan Hakları Vakfı (Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, TİHV), the chapter deliberates the stigmatisation practices regarding the dismissed BAK and debates resistance under this authoritarian neoliberalism through the collective struggle of the BAK.
In January 2016, 2212 academics have signed a petition to criticise human rights violations in Kurdish cities, and faced grave consequences as a result. By presenting the experiences of six dismissed signatory academics, this article aims to show the effects of authoritarian neoliberal policies on higher education institutions. After demonstrating the AKP government’s response to the petition, it accounts for the ways in which authoritarian neoliberalism in Turkey responds to its critics, the strategies that it employs to discipline critical academics, and its effects on these individuals and on the Turkish academia as a whole.
Neoliberal policies have been imposed all over the world with the saying "there is no alternative" to save the world economy from the crisis environment since the 1970s. As a result, state structures and policies have been reshaped under the influence of neoliberal policies. With the neoliberal transformation, education was restructured in line with the demands of international actors such as the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). As far as Turkey is concerned, until the 1970s controlled financial regulations, inflation, political instability, acts of terrorism, and such issues had started to block government policies. After 1980, the political instability in the economy and the problems experiencing in Turkey, caused the neoliberal transformation. In this sense, the purpose of this paper was to examine the concept of neoliberalism and neoliberal policy reflections on education in Turkey and trying to find out some arguments which have been arguing by educational scientists and policy-makers since the neoliberal oppression on education was started to implement.
This article provides an analysis and discussion of the impacts of neoliberal, religiously conservative educational policies on early childhood education (ECE) in Turkey. After an introduction, the article is presented in four sections. The first section provides an overview of neoliberal, religiously conservative policies in the Turkish educational system since the 1980s. The second section presents a brief history of ECE. The third section reports on the impact of neoliberal, religiously conservative education policies on ECE, especially focusing on the last decade. The fourth section concludes with a discussion of the way in which ECE in Turkey is being approached as an economic and ideological education institution troubled by inequalities, rather than as one with a firm basis of equal rights in education.
The main purpose of this thesis is to critically analyse the convergence of political Islam and neoliberalism in Turkey. By doing so, the research aims to construct a Gramscian historical materialist account as opposed to the mainstream centre-periphery relations approach. The mainstream centre-periphery relations approach takes the state and civil society as antagonistic autonomous entities. This consideration brings us where the Turkish politics are perceived as a terrain of conflict between Islamists and secularists. The centre-periphery relations approach has four shortcomings. First, the state and society are considered separately. Second, the market and the state; and the economy and the politics are considered separately. Third, as considered separately, the theory takes civil society as automatically progressive. Fourth, the social relations of productions are neglected. This thesis argues that the Islamists versus secularists dichotomy is not sufficient enough to explain the complexity of contradictions in Turkish politics because of the given four shortcomings. Therefore, a more complex theory where the antagonism is considered within the class struggle is needed. Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, passive revolution and most importantly the integral state provides a new window in this respect. The Gramscian historical materialism offers a holistic understanding for the relationship between the state and society, the market and the state, and the economy and the political. As part of the hegemonic struggle, civil society can be on either side of the struggle therefore it is not considered as automatically progressive in Gramscian historical materialism. As a historical materialist approach, Gramscianism considers the social relations of production as the crucial element of the analysis. The pre-2002 periods (before the Justice and Development Party came into power) were already researched by Gramscian scholars. Therefore, the neoliberal restructuring in Turkey during the Justice and Development Party era is the focal period of this thesis. There will be a specific focus on the cases of urbanisation, education, and the mass media. The conceptual framework of state-society relations is the analytical basis of this study. Overall, this thesis offers an alternative reading of the rise of political Islam in Turkey.
[The article had no abstract; the following text is drawn from the Introduction and Conclusion.] Higher education has become a terrain for marketization agendas. Since the 1980s universities have been urged to adopt commercial models of knowledge, skills, curriculum, finance, accounting, and management organization. Neoliberal strategies for higher education have the following features: all constituencies are treated through business relationships; educational efficiency, accountability and quality are redefined in accountancy terms; courses are recast as instructional commodities; student-teacher relations are mediated by the consumption and production of things, e.g. software products, performance criteria, etc. These general tendencies are manifest in diverse ways across geopolitical contexts: the 'information society' as a paradigm for ICT in education; the World Bank 'reform agenda' for the self-financing of higher education; Africa, where higher education is being forcibly marketized and standardized through financial dependence; North America, where some universities attempt to become global vendors of instructional commodities; Europe, where state bodies adopt industry agendas of labour flexibilisation as an educational model, in the guise of technological progress; and the UK, where ICT design becomes a terrain for contending educational agendas. This analysis can inform counter-strategies, especially the following elements: demonstrating links among neoliberal forms; linking resistances across constituencies and places; de-reifying Information and Communication Technology (ICT); and developing alternative pedagogies.
The following article is adapted from David Noble's new book, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education , just published by Monthly Review Press. Noble, a professor at York University, should need no introduction to MR readers. For the past three decades he has established himself as one of the great scholars and historians of technology, demystifying the subject and placing technology in the necessary social and political economic context. His publications include America by Design: Science. Technology, and The Rise of Corporate Capitalism (Alfred A. Knopf; 1977), Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), and The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and The Spirit of Invention (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.
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The decade of the 90's has seen a remarkably consistent worldwide reform agenda for the finance and management of universities and other institutions of higher education. What is remarkable about the consistency is that there are such similar patterns in countries with such dissimilar political-economic systems and higher educational traditions, and at such dissimilar stages of industrial and technological development. Thus, there seem to be similarities among countries that have patterned their higher educational systems after Continental European, British, American, Soviet, or eclectic models. There are similarities among countries greatly disparate in wealth and in political-economic systems. And there are similarities in the reform agendas of countries whose higher education systems are elite or universal,, predominantly public or private, or relatively wealthy or staggering under austerity.
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