Moral Authority and the Academy under Attack: The Case of #Boğaziçidireniyor at Boğaziçi University
Dr. Elizabeth Buckner
24 June 2022
14:00 – 16:00
Cambridge/Online
In this talk, Dr Elizabeth Buckner focuses on the question of how universities respond to authoritarian attacks on their autonomy through a close reading of faculty protests over rector appointments at Boğaziçi University (BU) in Turkey. The author draws on digital and social media accounts of the protests and interviews with displaced Turkish academics to refine the arguments in the article arguing that in their unified resistance, BU academics claim professional and moral authority over the domain of university governance and that their resistance has been particularly resonant nationally and internationally because it exposes and belies the raw political violence of the Erdoğan regime on moral, not political, terms. Exploring how one university community has resisted direct attacks on their autonomy sheds light on how universities mobilize cultural and moral authority to combat the newest iteration of political power that seeks to both undermine and claim that authority.
Elizabeth Buckner is an Associate Professor of Higher Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Prof. Buckner is a member of the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education, and holds the Canada Research Chair in Higher Education for Sustainable Global Development. Her research examines how global trends affect higher education policies, institutional practices, and students’ lives. She teaches courses on comparative higher education, the internationalization of higher education, the sociology of higher education and research design.