Turkey’s purge of academia
With scholars in Turkey being imprisoned in their thousands, Gavin Tracey examines the political forces driving these increasingly totalitarian policies.
By
Gavin Tracey -
November 3, 2018
On the 25th September, 2018, Sedat Laçiner, a world renowned political scientist, once described as a “rising star of Turkish academia”, and the youngest man ever appointed as a rector to a Turkish university, was jailed for 9 years and 4 months. In a letter sent to the Times Higher Education, his attorney wrote that the judge handed down the sentence before they had even read his defence. He was charged with alleged ties to the Gülen movement (followers of the exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen), despite no evidence corroborating this, as well as his denial of any wrongdoing. The only evidence brought against him was two columns he wrote for a Turkish newspaper, criticising the government’s “efforts to deviate Turkey from its western direction.”
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