Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday ordered the closure of a top independent university with liberal leanings in the middle of the school year, according to an official decree.
The decree, published in the official journal, revokes the operating licence of Istanbul’s Bilgi University, which has more than 20,000 students from Turkey and abroad, and whose researchers are renowned in their fields.
The closure was effective immediately.
As grounds for the move, the edict cites a law allowing for the closure of a private institution if “the expected level of education and training… is insufficient”.
Turkey’s Council of Higher Education (YOK) promised to take “the necessary measures” to ensure the students at the social sciences university, who were due to sit end-of-year exams in June, “suffer no harm”.
YOK did not say whether other institutions would take in the students in the coming weeks, nor how they would complete their academic year.
“An institution built with 30 years of effort was effectively shut down overnight,” Yaman Akdeniz, a Bilgi professor of law, wrote on X.
“The constitution is clear—universities are established by law, and their closure can only occur by law as well. But who cares?” he said. “In an era without justice or fair trials, it seems the next item on the agenda was to shut down an entire university… We will never remain silent in the face of this lawlessness.”
A court-appointed administrator has run the university since last year, after its Turkish parent company was caught up in a money-laundering and tax-fraud sweep.
Founded in 1996, Bilgi is known for its liberal politics.
It takes part in the European Union’s Erasmus exchange programme and welcomes many European and international students every year.
