Academic freedom ‘completely restricted’ under Erdogan

According to the Free to Think 2026 report by Scholars at Risk (SAR), the country remains in the bottom 10% globally for levels of academic freedom, with its ranking categorised as “completely restricted”.

Behind the dismal rankings lies a systematic restructuring of higher education governance over the past 17 years, which was further entrenched on 1 July 2025, when the Turkish parliament passed a sweeping omnibus law that granted the president sole authority to appoint rectors at both public and private foundation universities.

The move effectively overturned a June 2024 Constitutional Court ruling and has cemented the executive’s power to install university leadership without input from the academic community or adherence to standard eligibility criteria.

For researchers examining Türkiye’s political transformation under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which included a switch to an executive presidency in 2017, the legislative shift is part of a broader process that the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) describes as “epic autocratisation”.

According to a GIGA 2026 report – co-authored by Lisel Hintz for the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and Hakkis Tas, a research fellow at the GIGA Institute for Middle East Studies – the Turkish government has leveraged the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt to build a robust system of clientelism, expanding the state apparatus to bind citizens to the regime.

Within higher education, this translates into a potent form of political engineering.

Ilter Turan, a professor at Istanbul Bilgi University, notes that university autonomy has historically fluctuated in Türkiye, expanding after the 1960 military intervention and narrowing again after the 1980 coup.

In the early years of Erdogan’s rise to power, he was viewed optimistically in the West as someone who might embrace a widening of human rights, as he sought membership of the EU. One of his early moves was to overturn a contentious headscarf ban in Turkish universities against opposition from secularists.

But he soon moved to exert control over the Council of Higher Education (YÖK) and, after the 2016 coup attempt, ordered a mass purge of academics and abolished rector elections at public universities – and began appointing them himself from a choice of three recommended by YÖK.

In 2018 he took full control through a presidential decree, removing the need to even consider a selection put forward by YÖK.

Analysis in a chapter by Brendan O’Malley in Neo-Nationalism and Universities: Populists, autocrats, and the future of higher education (Johns Hopkins, 2021) by John Aubrey Douglass, identified Erdogan’s assault on higher education to that point as meeting five out of six criteria identified by Douglass as associated with illiberal democracies and three out of five subcriteria for an authoritarian regime.

When Erdogan appointed a political loyalist as rector of Bogaziçi University in January 2021, tensions boiled over with student and staff protests met by a severe police crackdown, and in 2024 Turkey’s Constitutional Court (AYM) ruled that the 2018 decree giving the president sole authority to appoint rectors was unconstitutional, citing violations of university autonomy.

That reversal came after Türkiye fell to 164th out of 179 countries in the Academic Freedom Index.

A blip on road to more control

But for Erdogan it proved just a bump on the road to even tighter control over universities in 2025 with the passing of the omnibus law, which bypassed the court’s ruling, giving the president power over appointments of rectors at both public and private foundation universities.

In May this year university autonomy hit a new low when he revoked the licence of liberal independent Bilgi University half way through the academic year, although he reversed the decision after three days of protests, as reported by University World News.

Erdogan’s motive for controlling universities is to neuter them as potential sources of opposition or critical thought, analysts say.

“The president attaches importance to two characteristics in candidates,” Turan explained in exclusive comments to University World News. “First, he wants them to be completely loyal to him. Second, he wants his rectors to convert the institutions to religiously conservative institutions where no criticism of government policy is heard.”

Turan argues that this push for loyalty often comes at the expense of academic achievement. He notes that many appointed administrators come from other, often lesser, institutions and have no publication records.

“They often do not know what research is, why it is important and why you need a liberal environment for good research,” he added.

The chilling effect and campus violence

This top-down centralisation has generated a profound chilling effect across campuses, with the government explicitly targeting institutions that boast longstanding traditions of autonomy, such as Bogaziçi University, Istanbul University and Middle East Technical University (METU).

The threat to institutional survival is palpable. On 21 May 2026, Erdogan directly intervened in the sector by decreeing the closure of Istanbul Bilgi University, citing an “inadequate” education quality provision.

Though the decree was rescinded days later following domestic and international outcry, SAR reported that the university had recently obtained standard quality accreditations and said the closure justification appeared to be a pretext illustrating how the state operates to expand its influence and narrow the space for dissent.

For individual academics, the consequences of dissent are severe. The SAR report highlights the case of political scientist Emrah Gülsunar, who spent 36 days in prison over a social media post discussing the legitimacy of seeking foreign support to overthrow dictatorial regimes – a topic he maintained was strictly within the bounds of his academic discipline.

Students face a harsh reality, where peaceful demonstrations are frequently met with physical violence and detention.

According to the Education Under Attack 2026 report, police forcibly dispersed students protesting at METU in Ankara with pepper spray, plastic pellets and water cannons in March 2025, resulting in the detention of at least 20 students.

The repression continued weeks later at Bogaziçi University in Istanbul, where police allegedly used excessive force to detain at least 97 students who were protesting an on-campus event. Furthermore, SAR documented instances where private campus security and ultranationalist groups were permitted to attack student organisers.

In one notable incident in April 2026, members of the ultranationalist Grey Wolves group attacked Ege University students, leaving multiple students hospitalised, with private security reportedly allowing the attackers back onto campus to assault students gathered outside the hospital.

Brain drain and the spectre of mediocrity

The domestic consequences of this highly politicised environment are becoming visible in the movement of academics and students abroad.

Turan paints a bleak picture of the sector’s future, warning that the academic standing of Turkish institutions is likely to suffer in the long run.

“Qualified academics of the proper age try to find employment abroad and leave the country,” Turan said.

“Good students of Turkish institutions also try to pursue graduate degrees at institutions abroad with the hope of staying abroad afterwards. Administrators promote not achievers but those who are politically proper and often simply obedient to their superiors.

“Mediocrity prevails in the system. But it does not seem to bother anybody,” he added.

This outward movement of Turkish students is visible in international student mobility data. According to recent figures from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the number of students from Türkiye studying in Germany rose by 15.6% in a single year, from 18,084 in 2023-24 to 20,900 in 2024 and 2025.

Türkiye now ranks among the top three source countries for international students in Germany. Moreover, DAAD surveys indicating that two-thirds of international students plan to remain in Germany after graduation, the figures provide further context for Turan’s concern about the long-term loss of highly educated talent from Türkiye.

This exodus is compounded by the broader economic and political environment. The GIGA report, citing Turkish Statistical Institute data, records the emigration of 1,322,719 Turkish nationals over the period following the 2016 coup attempt through 2025, with a net outflow of 284,852 after returns. It notes that the outflow is highly skewed towards educated and better-off Turks.

International cooperation vs isolation

Beyond the domestic arena, the erosion of university autonomy poses significant risks to Türkiye’s cross-border higher education partnerships and international research cooperation.

Nate Schenkkan, director of research & learning at Scholars at Risk, notes that Türkiye is not isolated from higher education networks. There continues to be strong demand to study in Türkiye from various countries, especially where there are strong cultural or diplomatic ties. The country also maintains relationships within European structures, including the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and Horizon Europe.

“However, Türkiye’s lack of strong alignment with European and global standards, including for university autonomy and academic freedom, continues to put a ceiling on its ability to take advantage of these mechanisms,” Schenkkan told University World News.

“For instance, the country is excluded from certain Horizon Europe projects because they are considered sensitive for European security. Political control of the higher education system, like in Türkiye, will cause some partners to limit collaboration.”

Schenkkan also warned that the environment could make it harder for Türkiye to retain scholars.

“The other risk for Türkiye, in terms of international cooperation and cross-border collaboration, is that it will act as a training ground for other countries, sending its scholars abroad, instead of retaining them within the Turkish system where their research would have greater benefit for the country,” he said.

He attributed this in large part to persistent economic mismanagement but also to the lack of academic freedom.

“It is harder to recruit and retain scholars, Turkish and non-Turkish, in an environment where they have to watch what they write or say, both inside and outside the classroom,” he added.

Schenkkan also highlighted the contradiction between the current political climate and the government’s global ambitions. Erdogan has stated a goal of having some Turkish universities rank among the top 100 in global rankings by 2029.

“This seems improbable at the moment,” Schenkkan said, pointing to research showing that limitations on university autonomy and academic freedom suppress research productivity. This, in turn, can dampen performance in rankings that use publications and citations as measures within their methodologies.

Accreditation as the final safeguard?

The question of whether Turkish universities can maintain international trust rests partly on the functioning of independent quality-assurance mechanisms.

According to a March 2026 announcement by the Turkish Higher Education Quality Council (THEQC/YÖKAK), 143 universities held full or conditional institutional accreditation. The stated target is to bring all universities that have produced graduates into the institutional accreditation framework by 2027.

As the government continues to tighten its grip on university administration, the resilience of these quality-assurance mechanisms will be severely tested.

University World News reached out to the Turkish Council of Higher Education (YÖK) for comment on the international concerns regarding university autonomy and the new appointment procedures but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

For Türkiye, the challenge is therefore not simply whether its universities can expand their international presence, but whether they can do so while maintaining the academic autonomy, research conditions and institutional trust on which that presence depends.