This article provides a rare glimpse into what university students face in a war-torn country. Characterizing their dormitory’s conditions, one student quipped “that suspected terrorists in United States custody enjoyed better living conditions…the real Guantanamo is here.” Read the full article here.

The centralized control mechanism that the Yükseköğretim Kurulu, or YÖK, exercises over Turkish universities, has received considerable notoriety at home and abroad. Founded in 1982, shortly after the infamous military coup, the very existence of YÖK reflects the zeitgeist of the period when it was established. Yet, 30 years after the coup, it still stands as the major policymaking institution in the academic sphere in Turkey. Universities depend on YÖK’s approval for teaching and research staff appointments, the number of personnel to be employed, and to an extent, the content of courses. The existence of such a centralized institution means that in fact, any politically powerful group may intervene in university affairs by lobbying within YÖK. Other contributors to this blog have explained YÖK’s legal status in detail, so I do not want to delve deep into the legal aspect of the question. What I want to explain is rather the political and social implications of this control mechanism for Turkish society.

The impeachment of academic autonomy through centralized control has many drawbacks, especially when this control leads to the suppression of free and creative thought. The bloodshed caused by the political clashes between rightist and leftist university students (or in other words, different fractions of conservatives and Marxists) throughout 60’s and 70’s are still fresh in the memories of generations who lived through these days. This partly explains why in Turkey, since the 80’s, a “good” and “well-behaved” university student is identified nearly with an apolitical attitude. With the establishment of YÖK, in the name of protecting stability and keeping universities free from political clashes which were common back in the day, a hierarchical higher education system was created in which superiors have authority over those working under them. In this hierarchical system, students are the weakest link. Here is an example of what this means: In 2010, a student in Celal Bayar University protested the visit of the deputy prime minister, which bothered the President of the university. In the presence of cameras and journalists, the President threatened the student with dismissal from the school. In the next two years, the student was first suspended, then dismissed from the school. By discouraging students from asking questions and engaging in social-political problems and encouraging the memorization of knowledge, universities are reduced to the level of technical and vocational schools rather than spaces for the production of universal knowledge.

Nor is it only students who are expected to follow the rules set by bureaucrats; university professors, and even university Presidents are bound to a superior who stands above them. The OECD determined eight criteria to analyse the institutional autonomy of universities in member states. These are, whether universities are free to

(1) own their buildings and equipment,
(2) borrow funds,
(3) spend budgets to achieve their objectives,
(4) set academic structure and course content,
(5) employ and dismiss academic staff,
(6) set salaries,
(7) decide size of student enrollment, and
(8) decide level of tuition fees.

Unfortunately, in all eight areas, Turkish universities either have no autonomy or they only have limited autonomy from other state institutions.

One distinction should be made at this point: there is a serious gap between Turkish universities in terms of quality of teaching and professorial attitudes to students. As of today, there are 146 universities in Turkey. Of these universities, the top-ranking ones provide education in foreign languages, actively participate and encourage their students and personnel to participate in international exchange programs, attract academics from all around the world, and help their students and alumni get integrated into the broader world. While these top-ranking universities are more tolerant of ideological diversity and encourage critical thinking, it is difficult to say the same thing for the majority of Turkish universities, especially those in small provinces. Eventually, this situation leads to a social and cultural gap between the graduates of top schools and the rest of the society.

There is also an economic dimension to this story. A study on the relationship between university autonomy in various OECD countries and their relative economic competitiveness shows that Turkey significantly lags behind other OECD members in terms of economic innovation and performance. The researchers pointed to a positive correlation between university autonomy and economic innovation. Obviously, the growing Turkish economy urgently needs creative and innovative minds. Nevertheless, opening the way for innovative, creative, and analytical young people requires a flexible and and tolerant university atmosphere where students, rather than being punished will be encouraged to voice their thoughts.

Poland just like several other countries has been touched by dynamic changes in Higher Education (HE). These changes are a consequence of factors that are both external (globalization and EU politics) and internal (transformation post-1989 and demography). Following a global tendency, the increase of access to University made spectacular development. After the installation of a free market economy, we witnessed fast changes: former public university system (free of charges but with the selection at the entrance) was complemented by private high schools and paid studies at public universities. All this new business constitutes a precious source of income for these institutions. If before 1989, only about 7% of the population graduated with a degree (second level of HE), now almost 50% of young people are “clients” of the HE system. But the boom or even the “fashion” for studying is now gone. [On the one hand this is because the fear of obligatory military service is no longer a factor for entering university since the service became professionalized; on the other hand the number of unemployed university graduates provoke the partial loss of trust in HE as a solution to unemployment]. However, the major factor for the decrease in the number of students is demography.

Until today, both categories of colleges/universities live in a symbiotic way. Underpaid faculty from public universities survive thanks to their parallel positions at private schools. On the other hand, the private schools are able to work thanks to the knowledge and professional capital (titles of professors) of public faculty working for them. The faculty were always educated in the public system, which is still largely considered to be of better quality than the private. Unfortunately, soon we will not have enough students to maintain this large offer of HE. The war has started. The 1st October 2011 was the first day for the reform in which the Ministry of HE (MHE) declared the “decontamination of the last bastion of the communist era,” meaning of academia and the science sector.

It is worth noticing that the present Minister in the ultraliberal government comes from the private HE system. The proposed changes indicate that the competition between the private and the public sector have already started. The justification for this competition is the free market rule (the best wins). But this game concerns two very different players: public HE is composed of large institutions (56,000 students and 3,100 faculty at the Warsaw University) and provides all kind of university teaching including science (departments of physics, biology, chemistry) while the private colleges are mainly of modest size and focused on managerial teaching, humanities and social sciences. It is evident that teaching science needs more financial support than teaching management. Consequently, the public universities have to cover all expenses related to buildings, equipment and staff maintenance. Private institutions are in a different financial situation – all students pay tuition and fees, and the maintaining of buildings is incomparably cheaper. State supports financially both systems, but public universities represent the major part of the costs. It is not difficult to understand why the government would want to cast off HE, but not by erasing public HE by a simple law (it is against Polish constitution which guarantees the access of higher education to people who pass the selection) but by privatizing, as much as possible, public universities.

Symbolic attacks on public universities (as a vestige of the old regime and an environment corrupted by nepotism) took place in the Polish mainstream media which supported the liberal changes introduced by the government. This is not only the case of HE – privatization follows the direction of present government and the political changes, which had occurred in Poland during recent years, when the health system, education and transportation have all undergone a process of privatization. However, even if we are deeply engaged in such a process – this is not openly said. The idea of progressive privatization of HE is hidden behind the slogan of modernization, internationalization and a race for the highest place in the world rankings.

If several changes which take place in Polish HE are found in other countries (EU but also South America, for example) there are some interesting specificities. Sociologists like case studies and the extreme cases are always very important for understanding the hidden mechanisms which are present but invisible in an “average” case. The subject of my study (careers of transnational scientists) and extended fieldwork (France, Poland, USA) give me the basis for saying that the Polish case of HE reform is an extreme case. The Polish situation offers an important dose of absurdity and paradoxical mechanisms which destroy instead of improving the sector of HE and research. This sector has existed for hundreds of years and worked despite financial difficulties, leaving some brilliant pages in its history.

From the Polish example, I would like to show how the post-colonial effects of ‘copy/paste solutions’ influenced the renewal of the old career path of Polish faculty/researchers.

The situation of Polish faculty and researchers: taking part in the “formula 1 race” with an old horse
The insiders to academia world know why the so called “anomalies” appear. Sociologically speaking, when politicians call the phenomenon an “anomaly” a sociologist (after Becker’s labeling effects and change of perspective on deviance) see the effect of a process, which allows the appearance of such category. The first “anomaly” of Polish HE is called multi-employment. The situation is rarely present in developed countries. Multi-employment means that for example: a professor holds the position (of a Professor) at 2 universities and 1 college. This kind of hyper activity does not stem from the love of Polish faculty for accumulating teaching hours, but an adaptation to extremely low pay. The salary of an associate professor is about 2.400zl, which is 774 USD per month with cost of living higher than in Berlin (and in several places in the EU; food prices are higher than in the US and standard of living similar to an average US city). These salaries are certainly the lowest in the industrialized and developed countries if we are taking into account the years of education and the working time of faculty and researchers. The last reform has explicitly encouraged multi-employment instead of increasing the salary of faculties. This looks like quakary instead of professional therapy that might have resolved the problem.

Everyone is convinced that multi-employment (heaving three positions of teaching – means a minimum of 18 courses per week) is not a positive phenomenon for the quality of scientific and pedagogical work. It should not be allowed – we agree. We would like to have a situation similar to our German colleagues: an associate professor earns about 3,277 E – which is 4,527 USD per month – which would be a 584% salary increase. That should be changed but, to do that our politicians would have needed an idea and a clear plan how to achieve this.

In Poland 2011 the Ministry of HE did not introduce any important changes but made a lot of promises instead. Everybody expects HE teaching and research staff to work hard. In addition to the full time faculty position (210 hours per year) we should be conducting research at the “highest world-level”, present excellent and outstanding results (at the international scale) and be internationally mobile. A Polish researcher/faculty should publish in Nature, Science or the American Journal of Sociology and should be invited as a visiting professor to an IVY league university. He or she should participate in numerous conferences (regardless of the fact that we only have 100 Euros per year for this purpose). This means that we should add our own money for participation in professional events; some persons have grants but the number of grant holders is ridiculously small – especially in social sciences. We should also participate in international research projects, but how are we supposed to do that if we do not have strong support for going abroad? Even more – if somone is successful and obtains a scholarschip for doing research abroad the salary is cut to zero – in the case of faculty with family this is a difficult situation since scholarship covers only the fees of research and life for 1 person. All these expectations are to be satisfied for only $774 monthly! This is an example of outstanding performance by our ministry in human capital management!

New career path: from academic to administrator
The result of these politicies are illustrated very well by a testimony of one young, gifted psychologist supported by governmental funding, at Warsaw University Dr. Michał Bilewicz, who wrote an article published in a major Polish Journal. The title of his paper is relevant: “The academic as an administrator”. For many years this Young Scientist received his education for free (in the past it was the rule, now it is changing but typically future scientists will get their education in public universities free of tuition). The state invests in this gifted and hardworking person. When Young Scientists gets their first experiences by completing his research project (PhD), some are evaluated as “the best”. For them it is a jack-pot, necessary for entering a unique career path possible in Poland. They receive money for conducting their own project, but now it involves a shift in tasks for which they are not prepared — “from an academic to an administrator”. It is important to note that the particularity of the Polish system of division of academic work, including research, is the relative absence of management, a research assistant or a grant manager, who will take care of the administrative work. The PIs , who are usually faculty members in charge of at leasat 6 courses per week, have to manage their grant expenses as well as any administrative work (which involves a lot of work in Poland where bureaucracy is well established).

At this moment the principal activity of the Young Researcher is changing from conducting research to the administration of grants, writing the next grant projects and preparing reports. This is a very fast process (which occurs faster for “gifted scientists”) during which the Young Scientist loses contact with the bench (which means stopping work in the “wet lab” or simply no longer active at this practical stage of the research process) and become the manager and organizer of finances for scientific activity of his/her team. I should clarify that it is an excellent idea to give support to young scientists but all efforts should be made to avoid forcing them to do things that are nothing to do with their highly skilled education. If, in other sectors of collective activity, such as business, this specialization is quite normal, it is not so in science.

Should we educate the highest level specialists so that they can later become administrators? Isn’t it irrational to promote only one model of scientific career? Is it beneficial to push people to pass as quickly as possible to the next stage and to oblige a researcher to become a PI and the boss of a team? Actually new rules give young scientists a limited time to pass through each stage of career (PhD should be finished in 8 years, and after following 8 years a researcher should earn the habilitation, which I will explain later). The final goal is to create one’s own team of researchers and become a laboratory leader if a person chooses to continue to work as a scientist. This model is only viable in a context of intensive development (similar to US in the late 50s and 60s). However, this kind of dynamic development of science is simply impossible in a country like Poland today, with a government that devotes less than 1% of the GDP (next to the last place in the EU – Malta being the last on the list) to science.

If this unique model of a career is established (as is happening now) basic scientific activity will remain in the hands of PhD students and rare post-docs (in Poland we have not largely developed a system of post-doc positions)! Here we should consider the modification of knowledge production. How can we provide for the transmission of knowledge if the person who is best qualified for sharing it, is in the office filling out forms and writing grant projects instead of being at the bench where experiments take place? Does this kind of division of work guarantee progress in science? I am sure that some scientists dream about being a lab-leader and leading their own team but this is not the goal of all of them. Certainly, the scientific environment needs people who manage and organize the work of others, but it should not be forced upon people who decide to devote their professional life to science and academia. The strength of French research organization in CNRS was to offer senior researchers positions and not to oblige scientists (or faculty) to become laboratory leaders or to get habilitation. How is it possible that the politicians from the Ministery of Higher Education consider only one model of career in this area (and actually not only in this sector – imagine all managers in the factory who should also be the CEO and the president of the board! – and if not – they are evicted from the sector!!!).

For ever young and always excellent
The focus on the “young and excellent” match perfectly with the model of the “successful man (or woman)” as quasi genius: gifted and simply outstanding. He (rarely she) will have support to the age of 35. To be a hard working scientist it is not enough – one must simply be “outstanding”. I will not elaborate now on all people who made major discoveries and achievements after blowing 35 candles on their birthday’s cake. People who were never perceived as outstanding (some of them during their whole life) and despite this fact, made outstanding discoveries. It is curious, however, how the producers of the new reform justify their new rules with the European slogan „life-long training” – unless we assume that the life of a scientists and an academic finishes at 35?

Probably the solution to this tricky situation is to learn another profession. According to the new rules, we will have the following model of careers in the world of science and academia: after many years of college and university training, after obtaining a PhD, than two post-doc contracts (obviously abroad), years of work in a research laboratory and at a University as an assistant professor, we should undergo professional conversion. However, this is not a matter of fashion similar to the post-1968 period when French intellectuals went to the mountains and became shepherds. Perhaps it is a very trendy way of showing our dynamism, imagination and creativity, for example we will start by training in hair cutting and then take a job in a hear-dresser salon. In Poland this would certainly mean a better salary than faculty but a very painful job for the legs – so perhaps working as shepherds is a better plan since it is still possible to have some time for reading!

For those who succeed to measure up to all mentioned expectations – the next stage of career will be available: the process of habilitation.

Critical point in Polish faculty/researcher career – habilitation two in one – miraculous recipe or an exploding mixture?
The next “eclectic” rule of the copy/paste mechanism concerns the habilitation process. Now we are deep into the confusion of two systems practiced in the world. First, in brief, the “American system” (based on British tradition) in which after PhD the scientist is an independent researcher, and after post-docs they can apply for faculty position – publishing and doing research. Tenure is amatter for the university in which the academic work is not a concern of the state. The second system (we can call it European) is mainly a state-controlled system in which the academics are subjected to a highly complex hierarchy. Instead of strict rules regulated by complex law the state takes care of the conditions of work in which the scientist/faculty climb the following stages of career. Not all persons should go through following stages of a career but all these people are at some level (in France maitre de conference – associate professor) tenured. The habilitation was not an obligatory path – someone could stay for life maitre de conference – associate professor pursuing a whole career of researching and teaching without having the right to supervise PhD students. The reform changed this rule (accepted in other countries).

Our Ministry has put two different systems in one place – unfortunately putting faculty in an absurd and non viable situation: At present (except all “old” faculty) we have already a contracts system of hiring (1, 2, 3, 5 and rarely 8 years). This situation is unusual in the so called “budget sector” – state workers have in general unlimited contracts called “etat”. We – faculty – we lost this security of employment. We are evaluated on the publications (mostly in foreign journals – as Janusz Mucha described in his article from 2010). And we are subjected to intense competition (publishing in order to win next 3 years contract). During eight years of successive contracts after the date of getting PhD we should pass the habilitation process. The habilitation is a product of the systems in which the academic is a state worker and has the comfort of job security and good conditions of work in which such achievement as habilitation is possible to attain. The criteria of the quality of the habilitation work are tough. It is impossible to conduct two different strategies of careers – one focus on habilitation and second – being deeply involved in free competition – worrying about grant attribution, contract prolongation and publishing for points (we are Polish native speakers not English and in humanities and social sciences this factor is a huge disadvantage). Formerly, a candidate for habilitation focused on the long term project – long lasting research or writing of important work which could bring significant contribution to the discipline (this is why not everyone went through this process).

In Poland there was a big debate about the abolition of the habilitation (as in the US) but finally we have two in one. Discussion focused on habilitation and almost silently passed over the reform which seems to me of primary importance – quasi dispensation of TENURE.

Tenure -mission impossible: 30 years of work for tenure and 10% of tenured faculty
The tenure issue is frequently a topic of discussion among faculty around the world. In Poland we achieved the extreme situation thanks to the reform. Previously, as I mentioned, all faculty had a permanent contract (without stipulation of the end of service). Actually only limited contracts are offered to new faculty. The stages of career are the following: PhD student (assistant professor), Adjunct (sort of associate – compatible with French maitre de conference), than after habilitation exam (which should be taken with 9 years of the PhD examination) and several years of waiting for the position of professor – Dr Hab.X will get position of Professor Nadzwyczajny (extraordinary professor) . After several years of services and numerous publications and first of all – getting the scientific title of Belveder’s professor. Unfortunately for Polish faculty and scientists – we have also to run for the third scientific title (when in the US you have only one – PhD). After PhD – first exam and habilitation – second- we should seek to become professor called Belvederski. Belveder is the Polish “White House” and this name is related to the place where such title is awarded. Whether the title is awarded or not depends on a special commission and the signature of President of Poland who finally gives this title. The title in English is: full professor appointed by the President of Poland. The person with such a prestigious title could be nominated for Profesor Zwyczajny (Ordinary Professor). In my institution (ranked as the 1st in Poland), only 10% of faculty are full Professor and they obtained this title after 28 to 40 years after PhD! This is a tenured position.

Obviously only a few get advance to this level. According to the new reform we – faculty – will receive tenure almost at the age of retirement. No wonder that the average age of getting tenure in Poland is currently 62! Isn’t this a perfect type of a feudal society? In a so-called democratic country?

This is a huge obstacle in this world of competition especially related to the mobility of academics. When our colleagues (graduated in the same year) in the US, France, Switzerland are tenured – we have before us more than 20 years of a step by step career track composed of 7 stages in which the last 4 are professorship and only very last (which a few will achieve) is tenured!

In fact, our career consists in having short term contracts during our whole life. That means not having a possibility to take mortgage for an apartment and no job security. With this kind of contract we are even not able to take a loan to buy a PC! (which by the way costs over one month’s salary and it is very rare that a university buys any such equipment for us). This kind of condition joined with high skills and expertise is usually paid with a large salary and not one thousand dollars per month. It is perhaps useful to mention that the people who works in government offices have, in general, permanent contracts and a much better salary than faculty (if we control for a similar level of education). How can we survive this kind of restrictions? How can we speak about internationalization of HE if we have to survive in inferior conditions.

As the justification for these changes we heard that in Europe and all over the world this is a tendency now, so we in Poland are adapting our system to others. I ask – why we should always act as a post-colonial country and without criticism copying each rule from “western countries” trying to be as modern and developed as them? Why aren’t we looking at our particular context?

We have our past!
This reform is presented as if we did not have any previous achievements in HE and research in Poland. We have to consider the situation before 1989. Looking uncritically on Western successes and systems the politicians forget (or never knew?) our past and our traditions. Perhaps it is worthwhile to look back and learn what happened before WW2 in Lwow? It was one city in Galicia known as a “cradle of world level talents”. Was the activity of the scientists living in this city based only on young scientists aged 35 and less? Or was it the result of a specific milieu and team work? And what about the so-called Warsaw School? Or the Wroclaw school of mathematics? How is it possible that here we were able to develop an outstanding school of informatics or middle age historians? Or Polish school of crystalographers recognized by the whole world? Do these politicians and authors of the campaign to support female scientists, know that there were women in the first generation of Polish crystalographers? Do the politicians of HE not understand that the continuity of tradition of the Polish university and science is not limited to the Soviet period? Science is grounded in the relationship between master and disciple and this is the most solid basis for transmitting knowledge. This is why in the very difficult time of war the tradition of university teaching and even scientific research survived. This was possible only thanks to the activity of several groups of academics who were passionate about their research. Is this reform based on “knowledge”. If it is so, why we are so deeply immersed in the lack of information?

And the lion gave birth to the mouse
We had promises that our future would be better Welcome to the era of new rules – the reform is in place now. Only after the beginning of the academic year, on the 5th October 2011, 3 days before the parliamentary election, did we learn that we would get a salary increase of 9% in 2012 and almost 10% in 2013 and 2014. But since 2005 we did not have any increase of payment, so this change is only an adjustment to inflation. We are far from our EU colleagues – and the 600% increase, which would provide the necessary conditions for playing in the European court and competing with our colleagues. There is never a discussion of the conditions of work and work contracts.

Also in the past, each person who was hired at a public university had a permanent contract . No longer. At present new faculty are only offered time limited contracts.

Before a vote on the reform the Minister promised that we will have a better life (we know this kind of discourse from before 1989) but… under the condition that we will be “talented” and “outstanding”! As a sociologist specialising in the scientific careers, I know what kind of imprecise notions are contained in these adjectives. And these are supposed to be the “concrete terms” on which this reform is based. The foundations of university activity – which is the transmission of knowledge and the master-disciple relationship and all the conditions of pedagogy – are not considered.. The activity of faculty is to teach and conduct research but the evaluation is focused on research (for social scientists on publications and grants). Why is pedagogy so neglected?

Politicians forget the basis of all education and science, namely, collaboration which means sharing knowledge and recognizing diversity. Collaboration is the basis for the effective functioning of the team. In a team each person has a different role to play. It is not the place for one single speciality. This obvious statement is far from the spirit of reform. Focusing on one single category of scientists (successful and young) leads to discrimination against those who would arrive at success later. The copy/paste strategy was employed by our Ministry without adapting the rules to the environment. Also they copied different models. This is a curious option that was taken – if Poland should have similar results as US science (US scientific achievement is accomplished in HUGE part by people educated before the post-doc in other countries) why this restriction based on the age.

Copied from the EU financial strategy which supports (also but not only) young scientists Poland appears as an extreme case. Why did the Ministry not copy from the US the absence of age discrimination in the distribution of grants? Why, if we are expected to perform on the international level, should we have such local constraints, why do we have to wait for tenure until habilitation and Belveder’s professor? Why is the evaluation of grants not anonymous and why is it not based on the quality of the project only? Why are the rules which are applied here, so typical of a central state power, limiting the possibility of pursuing decent work in our specialty?

The loss of balance – the end of academia and research in Poland?
Apart from the analysis of such absurd situations and the social aspects of these kinds of trajectories, I wonder if someone has thought about the economic basis of ministerial strategies? How much does the state spend on the education of highly skilled specialists?

The recent changes are the continuity of the process which started after 1990. The polarization of salaries between HE and the science sector on the one side and new open free market of financial, business and administration institutions, on the other side, provoke an internal brain drain from the universities. Highly skilled academics took positions in private companies resulting in the feminization of faculty. Women, considered as a secondary bread winner, have been able to pursue the faculty career and invest their life in science and academia. Today comparing with the other EU countries Polish HE is among the most feminized – Renata Siemienska calls these women “winners among the losers”. Even some years ago a career in science was not an attractive professional path because of a low salary and very high expectation. A lot of young people who after MA would like to be engage in PhD program, dropped out of this career path for financial reasons. For the same resons a lot of PhDs, despite passion for research and teaching, decide not to pursue academic career.

In Poland it is almost impossible to survive with the salary of faculty or researcher only. Those who would like to raise a family have to decide who, will stay in the academia and who will “earn money for the other who is working as a scientist”. According to my study without the parental support (or the support of the partner) it is impossible to pursue postgraduate studies. This kind of situation obviously discriminates against those from lower and middle class. Science is reserved only for the rich because before being labeled as a “gifted” and “good” scientist it is necessary to do research, and to write and publish the results. Each of these activities needs support, which is not given by any institution. Parents will pay for your PC, living and books, and partner will provide the money for food and cloths. If there are children then it is a very difficult situation. At each step of scientific career without support of the family the pursuit of this highly intense and demanding activity is impossible simply for financial reasons.

Obviously in such a context a lot of us will choose the “perfect” solution, emigration. The next waves of Polish scientists we will read in Polish newspapers about “Polish scientists who are not able to publish” . They publish a lot but… under the affiliation of non-Polish institutions, because in their home country they do not have adequate conditions for doing scientific work properly.

Diversity constitutes a guarantee of survival within any environment. In the forest there are not only trees. If we destroy each plant except for oaks – the forest will inevitably die soon.. So it is with academia and science. Providing only one kind of career path for new faculty and focusing on one category of scientist (and faculty) lead to very dangerous decision. The ecology of our system, which until now provided the education of millions of people, and thanks to which we are so-well educated, will collapse soon.

“More rights for students, new opportunities for young and talented scholars, a tighter relationship of university with business enterprise and world-class science” – this is how the Polish Minister for Science and Higher Education promotes the new higher education law. When she talks about rights, however, she means the rights typical of a consumerist lifestyle. “The young and talented” sound like ageism and connote an elitist view of higher education; the aims of science become typically business-related through the “relationship with enterprise”; and “world-class science” has always been done in Poland, although it is true that this has usually taken place “in defiance of everything and everyone.”             

 In the past four years of the PO-PSL (the center-right Civic Platform and the centrist, agrarian Polish People’s Party) coalition government in Poland, the actual situation of higher education and science has not changed. During those years, there were a number of minor changes to the laws of 2003 and 2005. Therefore, in order to comment on the state of higher education and science as it is now and as it is likely to be in the nearest future, I can only rely on the official documents about the aims of the reform, the subsequent draft versions of the new law and its final text. Most of the changes introduced by this reform are to take effect from October 1 2011. In this context, I would like to analyze the aims and a few of the concrete legal “solutions” offered by Mrs. Kudrycka (the Minister for Science and Higher Education). I also want to make a few remarks about the debate about the reform.             

If we relied solely on the mainstream media, we might have come to believe that the entire debate about science and higher education focused on two issues: the proposal to abolish habilitation and the introduction of fees for students studying in more than one program (unless a student wanting to do that, would be one from the 10 percent of the “best students”). The biggest success of the reforms would have then been the 51 percent discount for rail tickets for all PhD students. Beyond the mainstream, however, a different and more important debate was taking place. It was about the aims of higher education and science. People discussed different models of academic career paths. They talked about how education and science-making will actually change from now on, that is, if they are going to change at all. Today we know for certain that the language that we use to talk about education has already changed. The debate about aims of science and of the university – although closed down by the new legislation – is being continued in social movements and its renewal  is the one positive thing in which the PO-PSL government happened to play an indirect and most certainly unintended role.        

The coalition government identified the aims of Polish science in very concrete terms. The goals of the new legislation echo the premises of the Lisbon strategy and the 1995 GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) treaty. The changes aim at increasing the competitiveness of Polish HE institutions and their attractiveness to foreign students and scientists alike. Polish universities are to be among the top twenty universities in European rankings before 2030. This shows the uncritical attitude towards “ranking methodologies” and, moreover, it takes for granted that the aims of higher education should be defined according to “European rankings.” The discourse of attractiveness and competitiveness is introduced as a compulsory measure that all universities must live up to. All units that accept these criteria may receive additional funding from a special “quality fund” and acquire a distinguished status of a National Scientific Leading-Edge Centre (Polish acronym – KNOW). Attractiveness and competitiveness are based on an assessment of such parameters (for humanities, social and life sciences) as the number of citations, Hirsch Index, the number of editors of scholarly journals. Thinking about these parameters, I find it hard not to concur with the common reproach that academia only exists – and science is only produced – for its own sake.            

When the Ministry speaks about the young and talented scholars and students, it is certain that it refers to persons no older than 35, those who receive research grants from ministerial but, more commonly, business and foundational grant programs, and the no more than one hundred students who get the “Diamond Grant” (research funding for outstanding students with a Bachelor or Masters Degree). Studies are to be designed for an elite of the “talented and hard-working” i.e. as far as I understand it, those who would dutifully adhere to the criteria of attractiveness and competitiveness. The task of schools, universities and polytechnics is to get all the others (“the non-diamonds”) to conform to the needs of a by and large fragile and temporary political and economic system.            

The opportunity – or, according to the new PO dictionary,the privilege –of free education would not be now used by students who are dissatisfied with the narrow-minded or monodisciplinary character of their studies and would like to study in two or more programs (this has been fairly common at Polish universities). Less and less provision is made for students with special needs and those requiring social help. The maintenance and the housing stipends will be scrapped. Universities will no longer receive a government subsidy for the tasks connected with education and medical rehabilitation of their disabled students. Instead, they will be getting money for making their programs fully accessible to disabled students, whatever this is supposed to mean. To put this in somewhat cynical terms, one could say that this typically consumerist attitude towards students and their problems (the vocabulary of an abstract access instead of care and attention) is fully justified because over a half of an almost two-million population of students in Poland are already paying for their studies. The new rights that the Ministry is boasting about are also consumerist. For example, from now on, a university will be obliged to sign contracts with all its students.            

 The new legislation will consolidate a situation in which there are no mechanisms in this country that would guarantee that higher education and science will be socially responsible. There are no institutionalized opportunities for social organizations and movements to influence the course of Polish education and scientific research. In the General Council of Science and Higher Education (a body which establishes educational policies with the Ministry), there will be three employers’ representatives but not one from a union or any other social or political organisation.            

From the very beginning, the government claimed that its goal was to make students ready for the needs of their potential future employers, or as it was written, for the needs of the “market.” First, the new law, however, prepares excellent conditions for the creation of new academic and teaching job positions for business representatives! Instead of an employee with a PhD degree, a university can employ two with a Masters if they are deemed to have sufficient professional experience in the area of a particular program of studies. This is supposed to testify to the government’s will to make the professional academic path faster and more flexible. The legislation, however, also allows and encourages universities to cooperate and enter into contracts with business enterprises and companies so that the private employers get to design entire courses and indeed perhaps also programs of studies. In this way, the impact of employers on the content of studies and the entire didactic process is likely to increase considerably.                        

After four years of the PO government, after the bland and shallow media debate about the new reform, with the silent withdrawal of the “green island” ethos and the diminishing chances for the meaningful shift of funds towards higher education and science, and before the new law comes into effect, it is all too easy to be pessimistic or indeed even apocalyptic. We could lament the end of universitiy autonomy and alarm everybody that higher education is being taken over by the mysterious business interests or mourn the disappearance of the Humboldtian model of research universities. I do not think this is an appropriate way to proceed. We can never respond meaningfully and decisively to the changes that this or any other law introduces if we do not know what the goals of higher education and science should be and before whom it should be responsible. For the time being, the answers that this law provides are not particularly illuminating.            

Thankfully, people are not just passively waiting to see what is going to happen. One example of this is an informal group of scholars and students who came together in March 2011 and started to talk about the reform and, more importantly, about education as we would all like to experience it. They called it the New Opening of the University (NOU). These people – and I am very happy to be a part of this group – shared a common zeal to explain how we have come to be in the place in which we find ourselves today. Why was there only minimal interest in, let alone resistance to the new law, on the part of academics? And how come our student movement is still not as strong as we would all wish it to be? We started this initiative as an informal but very well-informed and radically open space to share not only our fears, our good and bad experiences with education, but also our hopes for the future. In the short time since the second half of March, we have managed to organize a day-long workshop attended by students, academics, various unions’ representatives and all those who care deeply about higher education and science in Poland. In June 2011, NOU also organized a national conference and now its planning of an independent research project on the real state of Polish education and science is in full swing. Good things start with small steps and the New Opening of the University will hopefully be such a step but we will definitely need more of them to make our education free and emancipatory and give a bold but thoughtful answer to our government’s great “solutions.”                    

If the educational system does not serve such goals as living in an egalitarian society and ensuring the freedom of all people, how can we sum up the last four years? It seems that in the nearest future, the most important things are not going to change. Universities will stop nurturing students, giving them knowledge, helping them to think critically about the world and the self. Students will remain unmotivated by these aims. Instead, they will form students to resemble those who are already a part of the system. They will create an army of precarious workers, or, alternatively, aspiring managers who will take social inequalities for granted. A reason why this may be so is that today we are educated as if our reality was unchanging.. Meanwhile, however, with our current education we will have to live for 50 or more years and it may well happen that we will experience a different future in which we are not able to find ourselves and worse still, a reality that we are not able to understand.

Si tuviéramos que definir los elementos centrales de las demandas de los estudiantes, podríamos encontrar de manera concreta algunos ejes que si bien se reducen a cuestiones gremiales, en la evolución de la demanda estudiantil, sí se han podido reconocer importantes voces a nivel dirigencial y de bases que han señalado la vinculación directa entre los cambios pretendidos y la necesidad de realizar cambios de fondo, que evidentemente sobrepasan las demandas sectoriales.

El escenario en el que emergió la protesta estudiantil es en un Chile marcado por la baja credibilidad en la politica oficial por parte de una sociedad aunque mayoritariamente desorganizada y fragmentada, ha protagonizado importantes cuestionamientos sociales; experiencias recientes que se dirigen a confirmar esto son, el levantamiento en la provincia de Magallanes ante el alza del petróleo, las gigantescas movilizaciones, principalmente en Santiago, contra las centrales hidroeléticas a ubicarse en el sur del país – Proyecto Hidroaysén- y más tarde las aún más convocantes protestas estudiantiles que alcanzaron niveles de participación pocas veces visto en el Chile contemporáneo, más de 500 mil personas protestando por Educación.

Ante un diagnóstico más o menos compartido entre las esferas políticas y las múltiples izquierdas existentes en el panorama político de las principales universidades del país, se reconocían cuestiones socialmente graves como un Acceso y retención en las instituciones de educación superior marcado por la diferencia de clases sociales, un costo excesivamente alto de los aranceles universitarios, la falta de democracia intena – en mayor o menor medida- y la existencia de universidades que, no respetando la legislación vigente, lucraban con sus establecimientos. Se comenzó con una discusión al interior de la Confederación de Estudiantes de Chile que consideró por una parte el frenar la reforma educacional prometida por el gobierno y, por otro lado, fortalecer un proyecto educacional definido desde los estudiantes.

Se debe hacer notar varias cuestiones contextuales si es que se pretende entender los alcances y cauces de este movimiento. En primer lugar la posición de Chile como experimento neoliberal en que el papel de la empresa privada tiene una importancia tremenda y de un Estado reducido a un rol subsidiario, con un pueblo organizado sólo en algunos níveles. Segundo, la débil posición del primer gobierno de la derecha desde la dictadura y de su presidente en particular, quienes tienen una oposición política[1] débil, pero no cuentan con la simpatía de la gente. Un modelo educacional heredado de la dictadura militar, y fortalecido por los sucesivos gobiernos del centro político (La Concertación) que agrupa a miembros del Partido Socialista y Demócrata Cristiano, quienes cedieron un rol importante a negociantes de la educación en todos los níveles educativos y han ayudado a crear un sistema totalmente segregado e injusto donde hay instituciones que acogen a estudiantes con mejores posiciones económicas y otras que acogen a algunos de los estudiantes más pobres, siendo el nivel de injusticia tal que el arancel de pago de una carrera universitaria sobrepasa siempre el sueldo que obtiene la mayor parte dela fuerza laboral en Chile.

Las anteriores conclusiones son importantes, pues consideran algunos rasgos fundamentales del Chile heredero de la dictadura, pero estando esas condiciones presentes durante años ¿por qué hoy la emergencia de un movimiento estudiantil como el actual?

La respuesta a la pregunta anterior podría explicarse a partir de diferentes lecturas de un analisis mas largo y continuo en ele tiempo sobre el proceso del movimiento. No obstante lo anterior, pareciera ser que hay un proceso de maduración de las críticas al sistema neoliberal impuesto por la fuerza y un nivel de participación desde las bases estudiantiles creciente que han evitado el manejo desde direcciones cercanas a la clase política tradicional.

El escenario actual, a comienzos de Agosto, es un tanto diferente al que se podía encontrar sobre todo en el mes de Junio que es cuando se concentró la toma de colegios y universidades, y se hicieron las manifestaciones callejeras más numerosas. Pese a la debilidad mediática del gobierno, hay una imposibilidad estructural de obtener una educación que se desvincule del escenario neoliberal que nos afecta y en ese sentido la victoria estratégica no parece estar al alcance del corto plazo, pero sí en la reconstrcción del tejido social y la organización social que haga avanzar una sociedad nueva al tiempo que una educación nueva. Esto se ve en la radicalizacion de las ultimas semanas del movimiento, con luchas callejeras, barricadas y el apoyo popular reflejado en los cacerolazos del 4 de Agosto.

En resumen, tanto los estudiantes de educación superior como de secundaria han sido capaces de pasar desde demandas sectoriales a cuestionar el modelo político y económico, y en ese tránsito han sumado simpatías de sectores sociales distintos, permite prever un futuro más promisorio que antes en la potencialidad organizativa del pueblo, y si bien la institucionalidad  no ha sido rebasada de manera completa, sí existe hoy un mayor cuestionamiento a las lógicas neoliberales y a la clase política, lo que podría traer dichosas consecuencias si se afianza un proyecto revolucionario desde el pueblo organizado que pretenda disputar la hegemonía del modelo actual.

The debate on the future of Higher Education in England (the separate devolved parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland means that proposed reforms are different in each part of the UK) has hotted up with the publication of the Government’s White Paper: Putting Students at the Heart of Higher Education on 28^th June. [http://www.bis.gov.uk/news/topstories/2011/Jun/he-white-paper-students-at-the-heart-of-the-system]

This document puts the market at the centre of higher education, proposing it as the vehicle for student choice. There is now a consultation period open until 20^th September. Significantly the Government published its White Paper after the end of the final semester when all students had dispersed, while the consultation ends before the start of the new semester. The Campaign for the Public University, together with other campaigning groups, has responded by setting out its own trenchant critique of the White Paper [http://publicuniversity.org.uk/2011/07/08/an-alternative-to-the-white-paper/] and calling for a consultation among academics and other university staff and students to prepare an Alternative White Paper. This has already received much coverage and favourable comment.  [http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=416765&c=1]

In the meantime, other articles have appeared showing how the Government’s proposed reforms represent a fundamental regressive step. John Holmwood, for example, argues that it reverses the social mission for higher education that was first identified in the post second world war period and accepted until now by all governments in the UK. [http://ads.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/john-holmwood/history-of-higher-education-reform-and-coalitions-betrayal]

Andrew McGettigan shows how the proposals amount to the privatisation of higher education and involve the dissolving of the distinction between private and public education, in order to facilitate the entry of for-profit providers. It is, he says, “a reckless gamble with university education.” [http://www.wonkhe.com/?p=806]

Meanwhile, the main Trade Union for academic staff, the University and College Union, has also launched a campaign against the White Paper. [http://whitepaper.web.ucu.org.uk/]

These profound and damaging changes are all being brought about by a government with no mandate for the privatisation of higher education and for the despoiling of the social and cultural value of universities.

Guest Editors: Bob Hanke (York University) and Alison Hearn (University of Western Ontario)                                                                                                                            

This special issue of TOPIA seeks contributions (articles, offerings, review essays and book reviews) that reflect on the contemporary university and its discontents. Fifteen years after the publication of Bill Readings’ seminal book The University in Ruins and in the wake of the UK government’s new austerity budget, Nick Couldry and Angela McRobbie proclaim the death of the English university. In Italy students demonstrating against the Bologna Process protect themselves from police with giant books. On the heels of severe budget cuts and increasing privatization in the California state system, protesting students occupy university buildings, while in British Columbia and Quebec hundreds of students gather for rallies against spiraling student debt and increasing corporate influence on campus. Everywhere university systems are being eviscerated by neoliberal logics asserting themselves even in the face of economic recession. After decades of chronic under-funding and restructuring, public universities have ceded the university’s public role in a democracy and embraced “academic capitalism” as a “moral” obligation. Acting as venture capitalists, they pressure academics to transfer and mobilize knowledge and encourage research partnerships with private interests; acting as real estate developers, they take over neighbourhoods with callous disregard for established communities; acting as military contractors, they produce telecommunications software and light armoured vehicles for foreign governments; acting as brand managers, they open branch plant campuses around the world and compete for foreign students who can be charged exorbitant fees for access to a “first world” education. With tuition fees and student debt on the rise, academic labour is tiered, cheapened and divided against itself; two-thirds of classes in U.S. colleges and universities are taught by faculty employed on insecure, non tenure-track contracts. The casualization of academic labour and a plea for sustainable academic livelihoods were at the core of the longest strike in English Canadian university history. As collegiality, academic freedom, and self-governance recede from view, the university remains a terrain of adaptation and struggle.   We will need all the conceptual tools that cultural studies can muster to analyze the changing university as the foundation for our academic callings and scholarly practices. In addition to external influences such as globalization, technoscience, corporatization, mediatization, and higher education policy, internal managerial initiatives, bureaucratization, deprofessionalization, structural complicity between administration and faculty, and intellectual subjectivities must also be analyzed. All of us, no matter what our political position, must take the time to reflect on the broad questions raised by these changes. Is the site of the university worth struggling over or re-imagining? Can the neoliberal university be set against itself? Is it time for reform or exodus? What other practices of knowledge production, interpretations, modes of organization, and assemblages are possible? This special issue is designed to reflect upon, analyze and strategize about the past, present and future of the university.   In addition to these matters of concern, possible topics to further dialogue and enable further study include but are not limited to:

• analyzing and assessing the crisis of the public university
• implementing globalizations: theory, rhetoric and historical experience
• continuity and transformation in national academic cultures
• the position and role of the arts, humanities and social sciences
• university leaders and university making
• managerial theory/practice, academic ethics, and the symbolism of university finance
•  university-private sector intermediaries and initiatives; “innovation” and “creativity” as alibis for academic capitalism; knowledge “transfer” and “mobilization”
•  marketing, media relations and the promotional condition of the university
•  space, time, speed and rhythm in the network university
•  the professor-entrepreneur, research practice, and the imperative to produce
•  academic labour, tenure, stratification and precarity
•  faculty governance, unions and institutional democracy
•  the indebted, student-worker and the decline of academic study
•  scholarly disciplines and territories, infrastructure, information practices, communication and publishing
•  the scholarly community of money: grant agencies, writing, committees and adjudication
•  media/cultural production and critical/radical pedagogy
•  the development of knowledge cultures and the expansion of the commons
•  the university in relation to nearby communities and wider social movements
•  resistance, common and counter-knowledge, alternative educational formations
•  remaking the public university in Canada and in other national contexts        

                                                                           Submissions   To view the author guidelines, see http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/about/submissions#authorGuidelines . To submit papers (with titles, abstracts and keywords) and supplementary media files online, you need to register and login to the TOPIA website at http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/user/register.   The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2012. Peer review and notification of acceptance will be completed by May 15, 2012. Final manuscripts accepted for publication will be due July 5, 2012. Comments and queries can be sent to Bob Hanke bhanke@yorku.ca or Alison Hearn ahearn2@uwo.ca. For more information about TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, visit www.yorku.ca/topia.

Academic [and sociologist] Frances Fox Piven has been relentlessly targeted by Glenn Beck as a threat to the American way of life. Frances Fox Piven is not going into hiding. Not yet. The 78-year-old leftwing academic is the latest hate figure for Fox News host Glenn Beck and his legion of fans. While she has decided to shrug off the inevitable death threats that have followed, she is well aware of the problem. “I don’t know if I am scared, but I am worried,” she told the Observer as she sat in a bar on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “At the start I thought it was funny, but now I know that is dangerous… their paranoia works better when they can imagine a devil. Now that devil is me.”

For the past three weeks Beck has relentlessly targeted Piven via his television and radio shows as a threat to the American way of life, seizing on an essay that she and her late husband wrote in 1966 as a sort of blueprint for bringing down the American economy. Called The Weight of the Poor, it advocated signing up so many poor people for welfare payments that the cost would force the government to bring in a policy of a guaranteed income. For Piven, a committed voice of the left, known in academic circles but little recognised outside them, it was just one publication in a lifetime dedicated to political activism and theorising. For Beck, however, Piven is a direct threat to the US. In show after show, the rightwing commentator has demonised Piven and framed her as part of a decades-old conspiracy to take over the country that culminated in the election of President Barack Obama.

Beck’s heated language has provoked a tidal wave of death threats against both Piven and her academic colleagues at the City University of New York. The threats are blunt and – in light of the recent shooting of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords – truly frightening. Many appear on Beck’s news website, The Blaze. “One shot… one kill,” wrote one. Others are sent directly to her email address or those of her colleagues. There are so many that she has contacted the police and this week will ask her college to make a formal complaint to the FBI. Despite that real security fear, she refuses to back down. Indeed, for someone portrayed as a revolutionary communist, Piven’s choice of a meeting place with the Observer was a sly poke back at her critics: a Cuban hangout called Havana Central. It is typical of Piven. The spry, twinkle-eyed academic pulls no punches when talking of Beck. “He is a very neurotic and peculiar type of person. I don’t think he is capable of sane discussion,” she said. And his supporters? “They creep me out.” Piven joins a select group on the list of Beck’s enemies that includes billionaire financier George Soros, green activist Van Jones and long-dead President Woodrow Wilson.

Piven likens Beck to a 21st-century version of Father Charles Coughlin, the 1930s rightwing priest and radio broadcaster who many saw as advocating a US version of fascism. “It is very dangerous. Father Coughlin founded a third political party. Glenn Beck has the Tea Party. We should be worried,” she said. Beck’s conspiratorial rhetoric on Fox, which he now often backs with presentations on chalkboards and – in the case of Soros – a puppet show, might seem a bizarre stunt. But it has real-life repercussions. Last year Byron Williams stocked a truck full of guns and bullets with the stated intention of attacking liberal groups in San Francisco that Beck had mentioned. He was stopped by police before he arrived, but in a jailhouse interview Williams hailed the Fox frontman as an inspiration. “Beck would never say anything about a conspiracy, would never advocate violence. He’ll never do anything… of this nature. But he’ll give you every ounce of evidence that you could possibly need,” Williams said. That sort of statement is enough to give Piven great concern. “I am teaching a new class soon and I don’t know who is going to be in there,” she said.

However, at the same time she is excited. Beck’s attention has given her a sudden opportunity to air her political views. She has been interviewed by the New York Times, among other major news outlets, and last week she appeared on several television talk shows, including one aired on Fox’s rival, cable news channel MSNBC. Beck has, in a way, achieved what a lifetime of radical activism struggled to do: create a national platform for Piven, who is honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. She wants to put forward leftwing ideas at a time of economic and social crisis in a media landscape that usually ignores them and sees “socialism” as a dirty word. “This is really an opportunity to rein in Fox News and Glenn Beck. I don’t know if it’s possible, but I am going to try. It also allows us to assert the value of the politics that we stand for,” she said. It will not be an easy task. Beck has an entire TV network and a global media giant behind him; Piven is an elderly professor. But, for the first time in a long while, she is in demand. “At last now we have a megaphone,” she said.

Note: To understand the situation of Turkish universities in crisis, one would need to write about the overarching neoliberal policies and all the attempts at policing the resistance against them. Yet this would require a more comprehensive investigation. Here I will have to limit myself to only one of the latest examples: the decision for the so-called ‘Free and Secure University’ management by the Higher Education Council in Turkey.

I am an alumna of Bogazici University, a public university in Turkey, a country that survived several military coups whose repercussions still manifest themselves in the everyday life of the citizens. The current constitution regulating many aspects of daily life is the legacy from the latest coup in 1980. According to the constitution, YÖK (The Higher Education Council) is responsible for the planning and supervision of Turkish universities.

The task of planning and supervision of universities do not include only approving the courses and the faculties, but also intervening in campuses physically. The recent protests at Turkish universities were thus met with great anxiety by the Council. These protests have been mainly against the absence of education for minorities and the increased fees even in so-called free public universities. Following several student protests around the country, YÖK met to discuss what sort of a new management to initiate.

To this purpose, the so-called ‘Free and Secure University’ decisions were taken in a closed meeting and were sent out to all universities at the beginning of the last academic semester through the means of Security General Directorate. The president of YÖK states that these will help universities to produce knowledge in freedom and to control the security situation on their campuses. (Please note that in their words these two concepts of freedom and security are used almost as synonymous.) Only to make sure that knowledge is produced in a free environment, the president declares that their aim is to train private security guards working specifically on university campuses. As such, the ‘Free and Secure University’ decisions are taken to prevent any sorts of protest and ‘noxious’ views and to react them as immediately as possible. The decisions include, but are not limited to, the following acts:

• For campus security purposes, universities should control their entry-exit points, develop illumination systems, use cameras and if possible check fingerprints.
• To react as immediately as possible, universities should demand in advance the permission to employ policemen and/or private security guards.
• Universities should designate a specific area for policemen on campus.
• If private security guards are not adequate, formal police forces should also be able to intervene on campuses.
• For each academic semester, all university staff should have at least two meetings regarding the security situation among students.
• Students participating in protests should be followed and offered counseling services. Toward that end, counseling services should be improved and made available on campuses (which is a sharp demonstration of one of the ways to ‘cure’ the students).

Apart from the physical security, YÖK ‘helps’ to produce knowledge in a free environment in financial terms as well. The higher education system in Turkey consists of public and private universities. Whereas the public ones were considered to offer better education, during the last decade, with the increased financial support of industrial groups, private ones started to attract the good professors from the public ones, signaling that the balance will change in the coming decades. In fact, one of the reasons for permitting private universities was that the Turkish state claimed itself to be financially inadequate in meeting the educational needs. Now in 2010, the YÖK initiates the provision of:

• a larger source of credits to students who are unable to pay the fees (as such forcing graduates to work only in certain sectors where they can earn enough money to pay them back).
• ‘state-funded scholarships’ to students who would like to study in private universities (which makes one wonder where these sources then come from, if the state is financially deficient). 

The right to education still exists in the Constitution and these decisions are all claimed ‘to help’ students to have a ‘free and secure education’. Yet to me they seem to be mere evidence that the state is trying to help to train young indentured workers.