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The culture war roiling one of Turkey’s top universities on x (opens in a new window)
Complaints over state interference at Boğaziçi University trigger unrest that mirrors conflicts in US and Hungary
Despite the elegance of its graduation ceremonies, Boğaziçi University has been torn by unrest since President Erdoğan mandated a loyalist to be its rector in 2021 © Dilara Senkaya/Reuters
John Paul Rathbone in Istanbul
Published 7 HOURS AGO (August 19, 2025)
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At first glance, the graduation party at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University was a summer idyll, an acme of academic tolerance and conviviality at one of Turkey’s most prestigious universities.
A professional orchestra played “Boogie Wonderland” as students lounged on the lawn, while a college band on another stage thrashed out fast-driving punk to liven up the mix. Glimpsed through trees, distant pleasure boats plied the Bosphorus as it sparkled in the June sun.
In fact, Boğaziçi’s elegant grounds are a crucible of Turkey’s culture wars, home to battles that encapsulate many of the country’s travails — and that mirror disputes in the US and Hungary, where Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán are also seeking to bring elite universities to heel.
The furore at Boğaziçi erupted in 2021 after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan mandated a loyalist to be its rector, and is set to come to a head again this week.
Although Turkey’s highest court ruled last year that such presidential appointments are unconstitutional, it made the decision on procedural grounds and new government legislation, which re-established the right, was rubber-stamped by parliament in June.
This has cleared the way for Erdoğan to again name a new rector when the current appointee’s term expires on Wednesday.
“We call it the authoritarian tool kit for a reason,” said Lisel Hintz, a Turkey specialist at Johns Hopkins University in Washington. “Boğaziçi is a target as it is one of Turkey’s most prestigious public universities . . . The government has long sought to weaken and reconfigure institutions they have viewed as obstacles.”
Erdoğan’s original move overruled long-standing university practice, whereby Boğaziçi nominated its own leadership. It also broke with the electoral manifesto of the president’s ruling Justice and Development party, which promised “managerial and academic independence” for universities when it first came to power in 2002.
Student protests over the controversial appointment soon spiralled into police violence, prompting a nationwide debate about government over-reach and growing authoritarianism.
Turkish police officers detain protesters during a demonstration in support of Bogazici University students in 2021 © Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images
Faculty have since complained of unfair dismissals and falling academic standards at what is widely considered to be Turkey’s Oxford or Harvard University. Students, who when they protest are labelled “terrorists” by the government, say they are detained periodically and surveillance is constant.
Relations have now become so poisonous that, whether by accident or design, college gardeners recently spread manure across the central lawn so the rector’s critics would stand in dung if they held their regular protest outside his building.
“Boğaziçi has been subject to a hostile takeover by the government,” said Ünal Zenginobuz, a professor of economics and elected member of the senate body that governs the university — although security guards bar him from its meetings, despite court rulings to the contrary. “We were naive. We believed in ‘fluffy’ liberal values such as tolerance, like our US counterparts. And now we are all paying the price.”
At heart, the issue at Boğaziçi centres around the ability of Erdoğan, who grew up in a hardscrabble Istanbul neighbourhood, to appoint the heads of Turkey’s supposedly autonomous universities and impose his Islamist and more nationalist vision on independent centres of learning he considers elitist.
To critics, this is an unacceptable encroachment on academic freedom that mirrors the government’s tightening control on rival sources of influence. This includes the arrest in March of opposition politician and Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu on corruption charges, and the arrest of editors at the satirical magazine Leman in June after it published a cartoon that appeared to show the Prophet Mohammed.
But to supporters, the government’s involvement is a necessary corrective for what they claim is a yearning by most of Turkey’s 86mn population for a greater role in national life for Islam, long-suppressed by a western-aligned elite and avowedly secular military.
“Boğaziçi, true to its liberal traditions, always allowed its female students to wear headscarves when they were banned by the military,” recalled one former student who graduated in 2010 and, like others, declined to be named for fear of reprisal. “But there were never any prayer rooms, unlike Oxford where I have also studied. How hard would it have been for Boğaziçi to arrange that?”
Built of stone in a neoclassical style, Boğaziçi’s campus certainly conforms to the architectural caricature of an elitist ivory tower, which has made many other top universities across the world the object of conservative politicians’ ire.
Boğaziçi University is one of Turkey's most prestigious universities © Boğaziçi Üniversitesi/YouTube
As the first American university founded abroad — in 1863, by US missionary Cyrus Hamlin — it has a unique origin story that Erdoğan alluded to in a 2018 speech, when he lamented that Boğaziçi “hasn’t reached the level we desired because it hasn’t been grounded in the true values of this nation”.
Unlike many elite universities, however, Boğaziçi charges no fees. It was also bequeathed to the state from 1971, making it a pathway to success for Turks from all levels of society — including Burhanettin Duran, the Erdoğan presidency’s current spokesman, and industry minister Mehmet Fatih Kacır, both Boğaziçi graduates.
“The rector appointments are just a show of government power,” said the economist parent of one Boğaziçi student. “It would be OK if they improved academic performance, but there is no evidence of that. Instead, there has been a dumbing down of one of Turkey’s best universities, which is also a proven engine of social mobility in a highly unequal country.”
Student surveys, such as UniAr index, show that student satisfaction has collapsed at Boğaziçi since the first state appointed rector took over. Quantitative surveys of academic performance, such as Turkey’s URAP rankings, also show that Boğaziçi fell this year to 22nd place among Turkish universities from 11th in 2020.
From left: Rector Mehmet Naci İnci, Qatar’s deputy PM Khalid bin Mohammed al-Attiyah, and MP Hulusi Akar at Bogazici University, which is widely seen as Turkey’s Oxford © Sebnem Coskun/Anadolu/Getty Images
Mehmet Naci İnci, the current rector, declined to comment or to answer written questions submitted to his office. But the 59-year-old physics professor wrote a detailed defence of his administration in a heated exchange of letters with the US-based Middle East Studies Association after it criticised his tenure last year.
“The global south has exhausted its patience with hectoring lectures,” İnci wrote in his six-page rebuttal. “It should not surprise you that transformative change often meets resistance from vested interests,” he added. “Our aim is to democratise academia” and not preserve the interests of a “narrow oligarchic elite”.
Boğaziçi’s elegant grounds, and the confident manner of its students, can belie any underlying sense of division or rancour. By many measures, it also remains a top place to study. What is clear, however, is that many people on its campus are deeply unhappy and some enraged.
“My ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ tutor was simply bad,” said one 19-year-old literature student. “He devoted most of the course to Islamic philosophy, which is fine except the course was a general introduction.
“It’s also just chaotic: at our recent exams, there weren’t even enough papers to go around.”
Zenginobuz, the economics professor, fears the trashing of a cherished institution. He and nine colleagues have applied to become the next rector, although none have much hope they will be chosen from the field of 14 candidates, which includes the current rector.
They each spoke for 10 minutes at perfunctory interviews held this month. But “it was not clear why they held these ‘conversations’ as it is obvious that . . . the palace decides,” Zenginobuz said.
Asked what he thought were the chances that Boğaziçi might get a good rector, Zenginobuz replied: “at best 5 or 10 per cent”.
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