Captain's Log #5

Unlike the summer of 2024, I hardly enjoy being in Germany this time. I always feel homesick and miss a lot of things back in Ankara. I miss my old room, the cozy corner with all the books and all the memories I had in there. I know it was only 4 years, and it was mostly sad and depressing, but still, I always felt so secure being in there. I was always enjoying my alone time; it was just the external stuff making me stressed all the time. Here I am, currently dealing with lots of paperwork nowadays. It took me a while to find an apartment in Göttingen; I basically spent my first 3 weeks homeless by staying here and there xD. This is all my mistake, though. As someone who had been to this city in the past, I should have known about these issues already and therefore prepared for these shit beforehand. Since I found an apartment a bit late, I couldn't register myself with the city municipality (or Rathaus). Which made everything even more complicated eventually. I couldn't open a bank account right away. Even worse, I almost could not apply for the student scholarship/loan given by the Turkish government (KYK). For almost 2 weeks I was like a ping pong ball: go here, go there, come back to here... In order to apply for this scholarship/loan, they need to confirm that I am a student even though abroad. They do this through the consulates, which is fair, but the consulate, of course, demands a shit ton of documents to be able to issue a student confirmation document for me. One of these documents was the city-registration (Meldebescheinigung), which I did not have because I had not found an apartment. So I had to take care of this consulate thing before the scholarship/loan deadline. Anyway, I took care of this on the very latest day at the very latest hour. It was one of the most stressful 2-3 weeks of my life, I dare say. Eventually, they gave me a loan and not a scholarship, of course. though it is interest free and we are a country of inflation, so my debt to the government will devaluate quite a lot in the next years xD, this is always the case.

Protests and Academic Hierarchy

Even though I am still in contact with most of the academic staff and friends from Hacettepe, I am no longer officially affiliated with them anymore. I miss that dynamic chaotic and stressful environment. The weird thing is, I never thought I would. The main reason why I decided to continue my education at Göttingen is because of the group I am working with at the moment. Otherwise, I was quite happy being in Ankara, I still miss my daily life routine in there. I highly doubt there is any other city in the entire world as unique as Ankara in its own way. Ankara always looks boring to everyone when they visit the city for the first time. I have up to this day do not understand what is so special about there but there definitely is something that you cannot comprehend enough to explain with words. Maybe it's because I was born there, I don't know... Whatever, I have realised that I never talked about the rushed period of march-april-may, the times when the protests took place. I will not talk about the protests and politics in Turkey but I still need to summarize for the non-Turkish audience who may not be familiar. Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul and the strongest opposition figure against president Erdoğan, was arrested in March 2025 on sweeping corruption and “political espionage” charges that many observers describe as politically motivated. All these happened just as he was emerging as a potential presidential candidate, triggering nationwide protests and a major political crisis. Believe it or not, all these nationwide protests started as a university student movement. Prior to İmamoğlu's arrest, his university degree was revoked by Istanbul University, which would siqualify him from running for president under Turkish law. On march 19 in the morning, students at Istanbul University succesfully breached a police barricade. Considering the atmosphere of fear that is created after the failed coup attempt in 2016, this movement was something we had never seen in quite a while. All the videos went viral in social media, the same day in the evening, Istanbul aside, in Ankara, especially the students of METU and Hacettepe initiated gatherings in the campuses to march the Kızılay square alltogether.

Kızılay square, Ankara.

That day, more than 80% of the crowd gathered in Kızılay square was made up of students from Hacettepe and METU. All the members of the political parties seemed so small next to the students. The protesters marched to the ministry of justice in Ankara that day. This was the first day of protests. In the following days, the amount of people gathered in squares went up dramatically. It had now become a nationwide protest. I too was exposed to the famous tear gas, many times. I never had the courage to encounter the riot police directly, so I rather wanted to help the protester folks with a home-made carbonate solution spray which helps to reduce the pain caused by the tear gas. Of course I wore my lab coat and went around with a picture of the "Medic" from Team Fortress 2. Many young people were able to recognize this reference, though, I got many weird stares from middle-aged and old people xD. There are many things to go through about the protests as I was actively involved in them, but for now, for this entry, I will just cover the parts that took place in Hacettepe's Beytepe campus, where I studied. It is worth mentioning that we had almost no classes for a month. We always had a set of police buses and a few TOMA -the armoured police water cannon vehicle.

This is what a TOMA looks like. We had either one or two of these waiting at the entrance of the campus for like 2 months.

These armoured water cannon vehicles were always patrolling around and waiting at both main entrances of the Beytepe campus of Hacettepe. We also always had a bunch of police vehicles. For each protests that we gathered for, the university's private security forces (yes that's a thing) were trying to profile each student involved in the protests. Right now, there are still many students under formal investigations by the presidency of the university. The university administration itself is also aiming students in these manners, of course. Why? I will cover soon. Some of the students are even facing risks of losing their right to continue their education. During the protests, many students got taken by the police from their homes/dorms, and went under detention. These detentions, in some cases, ended up with arrests. Though, in most cases (almost all), they let you go with a travel ban so you can't leave the country. At the moment there are countless students with a travel ban in Turkey.

METU A1 entrance, Ankara.

Hacettepe SE entrance, the so called "entrance B", Beytepe campus, Ankara.

Protesters are also not always right, they are also human after all. During the protests, we were not able to have classes because the Governorship of Ankara had ordered the shutdown of some of the underground metro stations in the city, the ones that were used by protesters to gather at some places. The Beytepe metro station was being shut down in late afternoon because students were gathering in the campus later to use the metro to go one of the areas where protests took place. Due to this commuting problem, and the ongoing strikes/boycotts in the campus, we had problems having classes regularly. Students saw this as an opportunity to finally complete the courses they normally would fail. It was no longer about politics or whatever, students kept wanting online examinations for courses. Of course no one phrased it that way but it was obvious that this request was in question only because they wanted to pass the courses through cheating. We even had a voting in one of the lectures for this and I was the only one in favor of having them the conventional way, the normal way.

Although it is worth stating that, these were not normal times. Everyone in the campus had their faces covered all the time to prevent profiling by the police and the uni security forces. The same goes for METU as well. This request regarding online examinations were not out of nowhere. During the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquake (7.8Mw), which killed at least 60 thousand people and flattened the whole city of Antakya, we had a whole semester held online, just like the covid times. This was a nationwide decision made by the authorities because they wanted to use the student dormitories as a place of shelter for the people left homeless due to earthquake. Thanks to this online period, many students including me boosted their GPA a lot, people had not forgotten this and wanted to have something similar during the protests as well. Hopefully that did not happen again.

YÖK

The university tradition in Turkey is not developed enough to handle crises like this by its own. My experience at Hacettepe does kind of represent the system in the whole country, since in Turkey, the higher education system is centralised, and all the administration related stuff takes place through the Council of Higher Education (YÖK). This council oversees every single university in Turkey, and they can decide who is going to become the uni president. Since the members of this council is appointed by president Erdoğan, every university president is de facto appointed by Erdoğan basically. This might seem weird, even as it is looking right now, but I want you to think about the possible problems this kind of absolutism in administration might raise. First of all, a politically appointed university president, or "rektör" as we call it in Turkey, can and will appoint other people to important positions as they see fit. No one can raise a voice against these kinds of decisions if the appointed people do not have the necessary merit to be there. This doesn't apply to administration only, the rektörs can assign not only the deans of each faculty, but the department heads for each program as well! Therefore, you can think of this as President Erdoğan changing the whole higher education hierarchy in each university in Turkey from the highest to the lowest end. He only needs to assign the people at YÖK, and his goons can handle the rest for him. In the past, Erdoğan even made a personal choice on this decision-making process for his favourite candidate, Melih Bulu, to be appointed as the president for the prominent Boğaziçi University of Turkey. This then caused mass protests made by students and the academic staff. The crisis went on for a while; in the end, they had to appoint someone else. Not because the protests had succeeded, but apparently, Mr. Bulu turned out to be a man of plagiarism haha. Who would have thought, right:D? In the past, I have listened to this bullshit argument by Prof. Celal Şengör in whatever the TV show or YouTube video it was in, where he claims that these decisions/appointments by YÖK are actually a necessity, since universities would become more political inside if there were elections for choosing the university president/rektör. I don't understand why he points this out as a problem, though. If he thinks that the institutions and universities in Turkey are so new that they lack the required tradition to handle these situations on their own, I would then point out to the fact that they would never develop a tradition if you do not make them responsible for their own decisions and everything. Being responsible for yourself is always a great way for improvement. Otherwise, people will just blame the guy in top for literally everything and then move on, this same arguement also applies for national elections I guess. I always heard from many different professors in Turkey that they stopped trying to make things better, because they feel that it is a hopeless situation, and the whole system is fully corrupted. So if there is something absurd going over in the department, e.g., some sort of events or decisions that would affect the quality of the education or the research output, they just do not care. At the moment, Hacettepe University's Geology department is in risk of losing some of its labs and office rooms due to unknown reasons. Not knowing the reason is also a result of direct assignments, since you cannot change the people in charge directly, they don't see themselves as accountable to you. So you always deal with many impulsive decisions also. In a situation like this, the academic staff will just rightfully put the blame on someone/something else and do not think about it because whatever you do has no effect in the system.

Of course, protests would have no meaning if we had not included YÖK :))