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After cracking down on media, is Turkey going after academic freedom?

With a new regulation, Turkey’s private universities that are deemed as enemies of the state by the masters of the state may soon be confiscated by the state.
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On Nov. 19, Turkey’s Official Gazette, where every new law gets published to become valid, published a bizarre amendment to the regulations of the Council of Higher Education (YOK). This government institution, established by the military after the 1980 coup, controls all Turkish universities, even private ones, as one of the icons of Turkey’s highly centralized and unabashedly overbearing state system. But now the YOK will have even more power, the Official Gazette announced, for it will have the authority to close down private universities if their administrators “execute or support activities against the state’s indivisible integrity.”

This means, in more practical terms, the private universities that are deemed as enemies of the state by the masters of the state may soon be confiscated by the state. The new regulation says such universities will not be closed down, but only taken over by the YOK, which will appoint new administrators and put it under an existing state university. It is a polite way of saying that they will be confiscated.

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