1Historical Legacy

The founding of secular institutes of higher education in Turkey was based on the 1924 law for the Unification of Education, which centralized education throughout the nation. To implement the centralization process, the US philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey was invited to Turkey in 1924 for a three-month visit to advise the Turkish government. For Dewey, freedom of inquiry and freedom of education were inextricably linked to social change. Dewey considered academic freedom essentially a social issue, since the freedom of teaching and learning was intimately bound up with the success of democracy. Indeed, he coined the phrase: “Since freedom of mind and freedom of expression are the root of all freedom, to deny freedom in education is a crime against democracy” (Dewey 1987, 378). Even if his visit to Turkey did not result in the desired outcome, Dewey’s views may have helped shape the Turkish government’s decisions regarding the modernization of education (Büyükdüvenc 1994).

The establishment of Istanbul University, which replaced the Ottoman Darülfünun in 1933, was a major accomplishment in the reform process. Yet it is impossible to imagine the secularization of Turkish universities and the establishment of new disciplines, from psychology and philology to entire branches of the sciences, without the flight of mostly Jewish academics from Germany to Turkey in 1933. Émigré scholars indeed played a central role in the formation of the intellectual, secular elite that dominated Turkish universities for decades – the same elite that has now come under attack (Konuk 2010).119

Exile, critical thinking, and academic freedom are deeply connected within the historical context of German and Turkish universities. There is irony in the fact that scholars now flee Turkey when historically Turkey has been a host to scholars fleeing Europe. Turkey is being Islamized and scholars are leaving the country in great numbers. By the same token, Western Europe is concerned about its own secular status. If the historical example is anything to go by, Western Europe’s ability to host the current exiles from Islamization might hinge on a renewed commitment to secularism, or at least to religious pluralism.

In the modernization of Istanbul University, the reforms were part of a national agenda that linked its success to its capacity to overcome cultural differences between East and West. Humanist worldviews were preserved and transformed as the core of European culture in Turkey, at the same time that these views were simultaneously under attack by fascism in Europe. During the postwar period, however, humanists lost the kind of influence that they once enjoyed. If there had ever been a window of opportunity for the democratization of cultural politics, this was now effectively closed by autocratic leaders, anticommunist campaigns, attempts to subvert secular education, and a series of disastrous military coups.120 During the transition from a single-party regime to a democratic multiparty system in 1946, Turkey’s humanist project ground to a halt.121 The minister of education, Hasan Ali Yücel, who spearheaded the humanist reforms, came under increasing criticism. The system of village institutes that he had introduced for the training of primary school teachers and promoting a rural intellectual elite was branded a communist breeding ground (Sakaoğlu 1993, 99). Yücel himself was accused of passing off communism as humanism. Conservatives blamed him for using the cultural reforms to create a Greco-Roman basis for Turkish culture (Çıkar 1994, 79). In response to this smear campaign, Yücel mounted a lawsuit on the grounds of slander. He eventually won, but he nonetheless retired from his official duties in 1947. The translation project that was an essential part of the humanist culture reform and had facilitated and coordinated the translation of hundreds of Western classics into Turkish ended in 1950 (Sakaoğlu 1993, 106; Çıkar 1994, 59). Before he retired from his position, the minister of education ensured universities the basis for academic freedom by granting them autonomy.

The concept of autonomous universities and intellectual freedom that Yücel introduced did not survive for long, however. It was first interrupted by the military coup of 1960; in the aftermath of this coup, the movement of 1968 further affected Turkish universities. The reason for Turkish student protests of this era was not an effort to de-Nazify universities, as was the case in Germany, nor to protest the Vietnam War, as in the United States: it was dissatisfaction with overcrowded universities and the curtailment of the freedom of speech. In 1968, only eight public universities provided higher education for a population of 35 million Turks. Deniz Gezmiş, a law student at Istanbul University who became a revolutionary political activist, embodied the spirit of the late 1960s. Because of his involvement in an armed struggle against the state that involved robbery and the taking of hostages, Gezmiş was brought to trial and received a death sentence. His struggle against imperialism and his execution in 1972 turned him into a martyr.

In the 1970s, the young theater actress Emine Sevgi Özdamar left Turkey for Germany in self-imposed exile. She would later write short stories and novels that elaborated in varying ways the contamination of the Turkish language by military and state violence. Her literary texts echo with the philologist and Holocaust survivor Victor Klemperer’s reflections on the Nazi appropriation of the German language. It is once again an irony of history that Özdamar turned away from the Turkish language after emigrating to Germany to embrace the language of exiles and Jewish writers such as Brecht, Kafka, and Else Lasker-Schüler.122

In Turkey, the student protest movement continued throughout the 1970s and became increasingly threatening to the Turkish state. Despite Deniz Gezmiş’s execution, campuses continued to be a breeding ground for the leftist protest movement until the military coup in 1980, which had even graver consequences for the pursuit of knowledge and free speech that questioned the very foundation of the nation-state. As a result of this military intervention, Turkish universities lost the autonomy that they had been granted in 1946. In 1982, the Council of Higher Education (YÖK) was founded in an effort to centralize and better control Turkish universities. Thousands of activists, students, and intellectuals were imprisoned, disappeared, or driven into exile in the 1980s, many of them to Germany. When in the 1990s the process of democratization began once more, writers and scholars sought to raise the veil that had been cast over Turkey’s religiously, ethnically, and linguistically diverse past. Once this Pandora’s box was opened, momentum increased in academic pressure to lift the ban on the Kurdish language and to face the atrocities of the Armenian genocide. Sociologist Fatma Müge Göçek considers the “pockets of public space not controlled by the Turkish state” at this time as signs for the advent of the new era toward a “post-nationalist period” (Gocek 2006, 98).123 Hopes for a lasting post-nationalist historiography and the diversification of knowledge production were soon challenged by the government’s reaction to the Gezi protest of 2013, which challenged the plans of the AKP government to resurrect Ottoman barracks in one of Istanbul’s rare parks close to the iconic Taksim square. The Gezi protest was arguably the single most important act of civil disobedience in Turkey’s recent history, and was a turning point for Erdoğan’s successful establishment of the AKP’s neo-Ottomanist vision. Since then, various forms of state decrees have fostered a climate of self-censorship among writers and journalists, contributing to the increasingly conservative and religious tenor of cultural production.

2Purge and Exodus: Academics for Peace

For many years, Turkey represented a bulwark in the struggle for liberal humanism in the Middle East, but during the past two decades, new forms of Islamism have emerged in Turkey as a reaction to this secularism. As a result, Turkey’s powerful secular tradition has been gradually dismantled. The nationalist underpinnings of secularism in Turkey and the interpretation of French laïcité into the Turkish constitution are undoubtedly problematic. Yet, however critical one might be of the interpretation of secularism in Turkey, it is important to recognize that the recent rise of religious fundamentalism and the politicization of Islam has put a stay on the secularization of Turkish society and has profoundly impacted academia.

The erosion of secular education could be observed as early as 2009, when the Turkish Scientific and Technological Research Council (TÜBİTAK) censored an issue of the science journal Bilim ve Teknik that discussed Darwin’s theory of evolution. The council fired the journal’s editor, arguing that the Darwin issue was “too controversial” for the country’s political climate.124 Since then, TÜBİTAK and other academic and educational institutions have come under even tighter control by the AKP government.125 In 2017, the government announced that the theory of evolution was to be dropped from school curricula, after the chair of the Board of Education – a theologian appointed after the coup attempt in 2016 – insisted that the topic is both inappropriate and too controversial to be taught to Turkish students. In its stead, the Board decided to expand Islamic education in schools,126 and, with this decree, suddenly and dramatically curtailed the pursuit of scientific knowledge in Turkey. The government continues to systematically eradicate the secular foundation of Turkey’s democracy and along with it, academic freedom – a cornerstone of any dynamic society open to the advancement of knowledge.

One group presently targeted for persecution in Turkey is a collection of 1,128 scholars known as Academics for Peace. These scholars appealed to the Turkish government to stop the atrocities against Kurdish civilians in the winter of 2015 and signed a peace petition in January 2016 entitled “We will not be party to this crime.” The petition asked the government to find ways of ensuring lasting peace and demanded to stop the massacre and exodus of civilians. President Erdoğan denounced these signatories of the petition as “pseudo-intellectuals” and charged them with supporting terrorism. Criminalized by the Turkish state, 70 of these academics were placed in police custody, and three were imprisoned. To date, 498 scholars have not only been dismissed from their positions, but also banned outright from practicing their professions at any institute of higher education in Turkey.127 All signatories of the 2016 peace petition were immediately cut off from state funding and since then have had either limited or no means of pursuing their research. Self-censorship and the threat of the professional ban also affect scholarship and teaching at Turkish universities more generally. By forcing all deans to withdraw from their positions in July 2016, issuing a travel ban, and canceling passports of scholars and their spouses, Turkey is in violation of both academic freedom and the freedom of movement and travel guaranteed by international human rights law. Since academic freedom is not a right protected under the Turkish constitution, its enforcement is contingent upon each university’s pledge, as a member of the European Universities Association, to uphold the right to teach and research. To date, 62 universities in Turkey have become members of the EUA and as such committed to the values outlined in the Magna Charta Universitatum.128 Yet since the commitment is not legally binding, violations of the principles have no legal ramifications. Instead, hundreds of scholars who were dismissed by government decrees are reported to have applied to the European Court of Human Rights.129

Since early 2016, numerous Academics for Peace signatories have left Turkey. To date, approximately 150 have sought refuge in Germany. Exiled scholars have been threatened with withdrawal of their Turkish citizenship and, consequently, statelessness. Some scholars who have been banned from their professions and remain in Turkey are likely to undergo a process of ‘inner emigration,’ a contested concept historically applied to German intellectuals under fascism, which tries to capture the ambiguity between open resistance and the need for self-preservation. The current flight of academics begs the question of how to respond to the crisis other than in humanitarian ways. In the concluding section, I investigate what Edward Said once termed the “executive value of exile.” What, we might ask, is the redeeming feature of exile today? Is there something we can learn from the past? How can we respond in ways that help curtail the rise of anti-academicism and populism in the world today?

3The Figure of Exile: We Refugees

In 1943, Hannah Arendt warned that outlawing the Jewish people in Europe was “closely followed by the outlawing of most European nations. Refugees driven from country to country,” she wrote, “represent the vanguard of their peoples—if they keep their identity.” In Arendt’s essay, the assimilated Jew who constantly looks for approval is the counterpart to the “conscious pariah,” who was at the vanguard of his people (Arendt 1994, 119). Traditionally, the figure of the ‘refugee’ is not necessarily associated with that of the ‘exile.’ It is as if, following a class division, we imagine the refugee to be less educated, and the exile (or the émigré, as they were also commonly termed) to have valuable cultural and intellectual capital. Arendt’s essay begins by stating: “In the first place, we don’t like to be called ‘refugees.’ We ourselves call each other ‘newcomers’ or ‘immigrants.’” She points out that the refugee has commonly been understood as “a person driven to seek refuge because of some act committed or some political opinion held.” According to Arendt, the Jewish community rejected identification with the refugee because “we committed no acts and most of us never dreamt of having any radical opinion” (110). While criticizing this apolitical stance, her essay acknowledges the changed meaning of the term ‘refugee’ and tries to restore the identity of the Jewish refugee by connecting it to the image of the “conscious pariah.”

In 1993, during the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, Edward Said took up the question of the intellectual in exile, and presented his well-known Reith Lectures, which explored the concept of displacement and the condition of marginality. Said’s interest lay less in his present than in displacements caused by the revolutions, fascism, deportation, and genocides of the first half of the 20th century, and in the great masterpieces that Adorno, Auerbach, and Naipaul generated in exile. In Said’s view, exilic displacement allowed the intellectual to be liberated from his or her usual career or prescribed path. While Said did not deny the challenges and hardship of exile, in a vein similar to Arendt’s he emphasized the condition of marginality as a potential asset to the intellectual. To Said, “the exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of the conventional but to the audacity of daring, and to representing change, to moving on, not standing still” (Said 1994, 64).

For many contemporary critics, exile represents a state of critical detachment and superior insight that is supposed to arise when intellectuals are expelled from their homes and forced to take up residence elsewhere. This line of thought, however, too readily reduces ‘exile’ to be merely a metaphor for ‘uprootedness’: disconnected from his or her social and political context, the exile is granted the potential for cultural transfer and transnational exchange. Too easily does the exilic condition acquire almost utopian possibilities. Suddenly unencumbered by his or her background, the exile emerges instead as a new mediator between systems, a perspicuous commentator on both the endogenous and exogenous. To me, this view of exile distorts the historical record, diminishing the existential plight of those who are expelled even as it elevates the individual case to a general paradigm. Against this view of exile qua detachment, I propose a condition of multiple attachments. The task, then, is to investigate these attachments and tease out their implications both for the individual and for the respective societies at large. Rather than merely salvaging the positive in the exilic condition, we need to ask what it means to go into exile and what arises therefrom.

In 1995, around the same time that Said published his Reith Lectures, Giorgio Agamben also revisited Arendt’s essay, writing an article that used Arendt’s original title, “We Refugees.” Here, Agamben shows no interest in the question of the intellectual in exile but discusses the status of the refugee. He sees the refugee as “nothing less than a border concept that radically calls into question the principles of the nation-state and, at the same time, helps clear the field for a no-longer-delayable renewal of categories” (Agamben 2018, 117). Agamben’s reevaluation of the status of the refugee is informed by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the outbreak of ethnic violence in former Yugoslavia. Rather than idealizing the potential of the refugee – Arendt’s “conscious pariah” – Agamben calls for reconstructing “our political philosophy beginning with this unique figure” (114).

Perhaps our task today is to reconstruct our idea of academic freedom and the role of universities via the figure of the refugee academic. By inquiring into the ways in which we have conceptualized exile and the exilic intellectual, throughout the 20th century and into the present, we create opportunities both to understand the conditions that have brought us to this juncture, and to reevaluate the premises of our profession. Exile studies has long been associated with the exodus of Jewish writers, scholars, and artists from Nazi Germany. Investigations into the conditions of exile and its far-reaching consequences for the arts and humanities continue to engage scholars who are interested in displacement, diasporic communities, memory studies, or the Holocaust. Although comparative approaches are encouraged by longstanding initiatives in both Germany and Europe at large, the main aim is to shed light on the unique conditions of mass expulsion by Nazi persecution. Building upon the research and methodologies developed in Europe in the field of exile studies, it would be timely to expand the field beyond 1945 and acknowledge, for example, postwar Germany as a country of exile.

As part of restorative justice for the crimes committed during WWII, the West German constitution introduced the right to asylum in 1949. Towards the end of the Cold War Era, West Germany granted asylum in increasing numbers, among them writers, journalists, and scholars who fled the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the 1980 coup in Turkey. Those who found refuge in Germany and elsewhere in Europe created diasporic networks to support political resistance in their respective home countries. The establishment of the Institut Kurde de Paris, the recognition of the Armenian Genocide in some European countries or the flourishing of a transnational Kurdish literature is a case in point. So far, exile studies has on the one hand neglected to recognize the refuge of Middle Eastern literati, scholars, and journalists in Europe and on the other not connected to refugee studies or the larger field of migration studies in the 21st century.

Following Vanessa Agnew, a transnational approach that connects historical experiences of forced migration to the present is one that promises to build knowledge and link experiences of contemporary refugees from the Middle East and North Africa to those of Europeans displaced in large numbers during the 20th century. Agnew stresses the significance of “fostering awareness of historical continuities and a commemorative culture around forced migration” (Agnew 2017, 9). Exile studies would benefit from historicizing the experience of forced migration and differentiating between the refugee as recognized under the 1951 Refugee Convention, the asylum seeker, internally displaced person (IDP), stateless person, and returned refugee. If exile is to remain a useful concept to characterize critical distance to imperialism and authoritarian nation-states, each case of exile needs to be contextualized within the framework of asylum legislation, immigration policies of the respective host countries, and the reasons for forced migration. Historicizing the figure of the ‘refugee academic’ that has been called exile, émigré, refugee, expatriate, conscious pariah, or, as is the trend now, simply a person ‘at risk,’ might shed light on the uneasy marriage between nation-states and universities.

The current ‘brain drain’ from Turkey and the Middle East demands that we rethink the paradigms for exile studies. Connecting exile studies to the burgeoning field of refugee studies promises to overcome the conventional class divide that these assume, and to produce further insight into the ranges and reasons of forced migration. Since the study of intellectual exile in the 21st century necessitates the wider study of refugees and other forms of forced migration, joint networks to connect exile studies with the field of refugee studies are called for. Such an approach encourages inquiry into the forced migration of the intellectual and the political activist, as well as the politically disenfranchised and illiterate. Questions about issues such as the transfer of knowledge, the formation of diasporas, the definition of exile, and the building of transnational political networks are imperative to responding to increasingly Islamist, populist, or other authoritarian states.

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