The Struggle for Academic Freedom in an Age of Post-truth

Abstract

This essay situates the struggle for academic freedom and university autonomy at Boğaziçi University within the broader framework of post-truth. Post-truth is defined as a disinvestment from long-established norms regulating what counts as true, without introducing new criteria in their place. As such, it is a state of constant disorientation. The main argument is that post-truth has a material power basis: it is neither an intellectual problem nor one that can be solved by recourse to liberal rights. By briefly showing how neoliberalism, the New Right, and biopolitical governmentality connect and reinforce each other, the essay then asks what academic freedom can signify given the new game of power. The Boğaziçi resistance, it argues, shows how defending academic freedom cannot solely be an academic matter.

Speaking Truth to Power: A Tale of Two Universities

“…One tangible result was a dossier in the journal South Atlantic Quarterly . I begin with the article by Zemet Gambetti (2022) because like Miller (2021) she examines the notion of truth in university discourse. In spirit they have much in common.…”

“…The age of post-truth in which we are now living is characterized by an “inversion of conventional syntax, the reversal of victimhood status, and the concoction of ad hominem arguments based on dubious causalities [and is] not confined to the field of electoral or populist politics alone” (Gambetti 2022: 178). Her article begins with a quote by Gürkan Kumbaroğlu, one of the three vice rectors appointed by Professor Melih Bulu.…”

“…In turn, the new rector, appointed by midnight decree by President Erdoğan, prophesied that Boğaziçi University would become an “entrepreneurship factory” under his good guidance. (Gambetti 2022: 179)…”

“…Although the corporatization of the state and the university is not new, what is new is that now, “there are no moral, legal, or logical limits to the strategies that can be employed. Power outmaneuvers truth, since truth no longer procures power” (Gambetti 2022: 179–80).…”