In Post-Coup Turkey, Academics Turn to Alternative Universities

Kocaeli, Turkey (dpa) - About 100 students cram into this room in the city of Kocaeli, some 100 kilometres east of Istanbul, to hear a social sciences lecture by Guven Bakirezer.

The venue belongs to Egitim-Sen - the left-wing Education and Science Workers' Union, which is critical of the conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP)-ruled government.

Bakirezer apologizes for the lack of space, noting that lectures are still being hastily arranged. The whole time, students balance notebooks on their knees and prepare to switch on their recording devices.

Because he is suspected, along with 18 fellow academics, of participation in the attempted July 15 coup, Bakirezer is banned from the premises of the local university. The locks have even been changed.

His crime is membership in the "Academics for Peace" network, which authored a petition in January calling for an end to military deployments in Turkey's Kurdish regions. More than 1,100 academics signed it. The problem, authorities say, is that the petition did not reference violence carried out by the banned PKK Kurdistan Workers' Party.

More than 40 of those signatories have now been sacked by their universities, a move made possible by the emergency powers given to the government after the attempted coup. They remain out of work, even though there is no clear link between the attempted coup and the petition.

In Kocaeli, they decided they had no time to sit around idly. Now they've got their alternative university, with 19 seminars on offer. Today's subject is freedom of speech, as defined by the 19th century British philosopher John Stuart Mill.

"According to Mill, the majority needs to ensure that precisely those whose voices are heard least in a...