Unsafe Positions: How Precarity and Repression Silence the University (Frontlines) #4

🎙️ Season 2 of This Authoritarian Life continues at another frontline: the university — where political repression and economic precarity work together to silence critical voices and disempower those who produce knowledge.

In this episode, we speak with Aslı Vatansever — a sociologist of work who was dismissed from her position in Istanbul after signing the 'Academics for Peace' petition and now lives and works in Berlin, where she wrote At the Margins of Academia: Exile, Precariousness, and Subjectivity.

• Why are precarity and repression "two sides of the same coin" — and how do they produce hopelessness and self-censorship?
• What happened to Turkish academics who signed the Peace Petition — and why did the German response to the university protests against Israel's war in Gaza feel like déjà vu?
• How do scholarships supporting 'scholars at risk' work as a type of stigma and trap?

🎧 To find out, tune into This Authoritarian Life, Season 2, Episode 4 — Unsafe Positions: How Precarity and Repression Silence the University, with Kristóf Szombati and Erdem Evren.

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(00:00) Aslı Vatansever: I've been very vocal about this, that economic precarization, which is more rampant in the core countries, and the political oppression, which is more overt in peripheral countries, are two sides of the same coin. They have one purpose, one main purpose, which is to disempower the knowledge-producing labor force. We are disempowered. We have learned hopelessness. We have internalized it.

(Intro) Kristóf Szombati: You're listening to This Authoritarian Life, a podcast in which we explore everyday human stories to make sense of authoritarian politics. My name is Kristóf Szombati.

Erdem Evren: And I'm Erdem Evren. Welcome back to This Authoritarian Life. This is the fourth episode of season two. We continue talking to our guests on what you call the front lines of authoritarianism. And today we are exploring what has happened to universities. In what ways they cease to become places that protect critical thinking and in what ways they come under pressure from both political repression and economic precarization.

And as far as we are concerned, this is not only about a couple of well-educated people losing their jobs or a couple of universities getting more authoritarian. But for better or worse, universities actually reproduce societies. They train doctors, lawyers, teachers, produce research that informs public policy—once again, for better or worse.

So when academics are silenced, when they are rendered disposable, this has far-reaching consequences. And this is precisely what we are seeing in Turkey, in Germany, in the United States, and in many other places. That space is very visibly shrinking.

Kristóf Szombati: And Erdem and I actually know all this personally. This is a topic that is very close to our hearts. We've spent years in the academic system. Erdem worked as a researcher and a lecturer for over a decade before leaving. I am still inside the system, but very ambivalent.

But more importantly, we have witnessed colleagues self-censoring themselves, we've seen critical voices being pushed out of academia, and we saw how those precarious contracts make people afraid to speak actually. And so this episode is a way to make sense of all this and to make sense of our own disquiet and frustration. And to help us do that, we actually invited someone who has lived through political repression as an academic in Turkey, but who has also studied the structural conditions that make universities so vulnerable.

(03:11) Erdem Evren: So our guest today is Aslı Vatansever. Welcome to This Authoritarian Life, Aslı. Aslı is a sociologist of work by training. She was dismissed from her academic position in Istanbul after she signed the Peace Petition of the Academics for Peace, about which we'll talk about more. She has published widely in Turkish, English, and German. One prominent publication, for example, is a book titled At the Margins of Academia: Exile, Precariousness and Subjectivity. And she's currently working at Bard College Berlin, but on administrative capacity. Welcome, Aslı.

Aslı Vatansever: Hi Kristóf. Hi Erdem. Thank you. Thanks for the nice welcoming introduction.

(04:19) Kristóf Szombati: So let me ask the first question and it's going to be a very simple one. What drew you to enter academia and become an academic? Was there an experience that you can recount?

Aslı Vatansever: And this is supposed to be your easy question. Oh my God. What drove me to become an academic? Interesting. I mean, I got into sociology after high school by sheer coincidence, actually. I had graduated from the German High School [Deutsche Schule Istanbul] in Istanbul, which is a more STEM-focused high school, as is the case for the German system in general. And all I knew was that I didn't want to study anything with math or any type of STEM thing in it.

Actually, my mom had prepared my university application list. And for some reason, I got into sociology and I got the news and I was like, "What? Did I have sociology on my list? I don't even know what that is, you know?" And I started studying sociology. And in my second semester, in my freshman year, I was so smitten. I was so above and beyond myself. I thought, "My God, this is amazing." Like it makes me understand so much more about the world that we live in. And I found myself drawn to sociology and starting with my second freshman semester, I didn't want to do anything else in my life. So that was the case. I was just drawn to sociology actually and yeah, that's how I got duped into this Ponzi scheme.

(06:13) Kristóf Szombati: What year was that?

Aslı Vatansever: That was 2000 and it escalated for me after September 11, 2001. I was taking a sociology of culture class with Meral Özbek, whom I don't know if you're familiar with. She is a prominent figure in Turkish sociology. She was my professor and she's amazing. September 11 had just happened and we were discussing in class. And after class, she just beckoned me to herself and she said, "You know what, you're asking very smart questions. I think you can do something and go and just write an article on September 11th for me." I'm like, "What? Like I didn't even know how to write an article." I just imitated referencing systems that I saw in books. I was totally clueless and was just pushed into it by Meral Özbek and I wrote my first article on September 11, and it was this particular conjunction of global events and personal interests that drew me into it.

(07:42) Kristóf Szombati: And what was the university landscape like back then? Were some pressures already palpable that erupted later or became much more pronounced? What was your experience like?

Aslı Vatansever: As an undergrad, by the time when I was an undergrad, it was the early 2000s and I was at Mimar Sinan [University] Sociology, which is known to be a very leftist department and institution, at least in my time it was the case. And there was nothing that we couldn't talk about in the classroom. And I have always been a very solipsistic academic. I have never been really part of the academic networks in Turkey, with the exception of the Peace Academics for a brief period. So even if there were power struggles in the university context, I wouldn't have known anything about it. I was just reading and writing and that was all I did. And I thought that academia would be like this, where you just read and write. I was totally unaware of the politics of the work relations.

(08:50) Kristóf Szombati: So what's the first experience that you can remember where something changed, something clicked? Where you became aware of the power relations and the politics of the whole thing? That the atmosphere was changing towards a space in which not everything could be discussed?

Aslı Vatansever: I was doing my PhD in Hamburg at the University of Hamburg and some degree programs like gender studies started to be shut down due to funding reasons, which we all know is always a political question. What you fund and what you deny funds actually expresses where the economic interests go. And that was probably one of the first experiences that I had with... so not everything is permissible in academia. Not everything gains the same priority as other stuff. Some programs, some research fields are obviously more profitable. And the question of "what is profitable" is actually decisive in what gets researched, what gets to be studied.

(10:18) Aslı Vatansever: That was the late 2000s. Just to give you a timeline, I started with my BA in 1999. I finished my BA in 2003. Then I went to Hamburg in 2004 for my master's. I finished my master's in 2006. I started with my PhD by the beginning of 2007 and finished my PhD in January 2010.

(10:55) Erdem Evren: And you went back to Istanbul after you finished your PhD?

Aslı Vatansever: As soon as I finished my PhD, I went back to Istanbul because I thought, okay, the academic labor market in Germany seems very bleak. Either I stay here and chase after post-docs or I can go back to Turkey and get an assistant professorship at a university. And that was also the time the private universities were mushrooming. And I wasn't yet completely aware of what the private universities meant. I was actually in historical sociology back in the day in my PhD. I worked on the incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the capitalist world economy. That was broadly related to what is happening, of course, but not directly related to labor sociology. And I was like, okay, I can go back to Turkey and get an assistant professorship and then just move straightforward, have a very uncomplicated career. That was the plan. And we all know how that went.

(11:50) Erdem Evren: Like what sort of a place was that? It was a small private university, right?

Aslı Vatansever: Not so small, actually. They're getting bigger and bigger. Now it's actually part of a conglomerate together with some other private universities, but they were owned by a former police chief or someone like this who also had high schools and primary schools. It was like a chain. And then I started working there as an assistant professor and I quickly understood that, okay, this is a teaching factory and you can't really expect the students to have the level of interest and the level of engagement that you would expect from a university student.

But then something even worse happened. Around 2014, the owner went bankrupt. I don't know how that happened in a private university where you're still getting enrollment fees, which were not low, by the way. But somehow they managed to get bankrupt. And then the university got sold to another group, which is known as the Çelik Group, who are close to the AKP government. I mean, these are the type of guys who are the man for every period, actually, they just bend and reshape themselves according to any conjuncture. Anyway, so they bought the university and then you really got to feel the commodification, the ruthless commodification of everything, which actually brings us back to why I even started studying academic precarity.

(14:07) Kristóf Szombati: Yeah, tell us about that because that's what you experienced, right?

Aslı Vatansever: I mean, I literally started studying academic precarity by suffering it in my own life. Well, I had started working on the precariat and precarization in the aftermath of the Gezi moment or during the Gezi moment where I was very active and realized parallels between the emerging proletariat of the 19th century and the emerging precariat of the 21st century.

Anyway, I had started working on the precariat in 2013. And then during this acquisition process of the university by another group, suddenly we were forced to sign contracts which had absolutely, ultimately worse conditions than the previous contracts that we had and with no salary indication. Like we were literally forced to sign contracts where there was no salary. And I had a huge fight with the university administration with their board. I said, "What the hell is this? I'm not going to sign this. I mean, there's no salary on it." And then they were like, "Yeah, you know, it's because of the inflation rates that are not clear yet. Don't you trust us?" And I'm like, "Of course I don't trust you. And I mean, this is a work relationship. This is an employment relationship. I don't have to trust you. This is not a personal relationship. And this is why we have contracts in the first place."

You are imposing upon us worse terms, you are forcing us to use step cards when going in and out of the university. You are imposing upon us increased work hours. It shows me that you don't trust me either. Why should I trust you? I'm not going to sign this contract. And you know what I'm going to do if you fire me? I will go to court and sue you because I'm justified to do so.

We have this huge fight. And then we negotiated. I made them put a clause on my contract. But that was a breach of relationships. And I was going crazy, by the way. I fell into such a depression in the face of the futility of all academic work, you know, emptying of the teaching experience, the devaluation of my labor at the hands of these scumbags. And I was literally kicking against the walls in my office in between classes and having nervous breakdowns. I was sharing a floor with colleagues from the psychology department and one of them literally came up to me one day and said, "I keep hearing you screaming in your office and I'm afraid that you might do something to yourself. Do you want to talk about this?"

I had a colleague at the psychology department, Meral Gezici Yalçın, who is a social psychologist, and we became comrades and buddies and we kept venting about the situation during lunch. And then we were like, you know what? We're not that desperate. We're not that hopeless. We have a weapon. It might not be much, but it is the only weapon that we have and this is research. Why don't we go out and do some field research on the working conditions at private universities in Turkey? At least in Istanbul, because we didn't have research funding, obviously, and we had to limit it. But you know, Istanbul is the place where the private universities congregate anyway. So we did that research and man, the situation was even worse than we thought. Like it was so abysmal, so pathetic.

(18:26) Kristóf Szombati: Can you describe for our listeners what this looks like? What does this abysmal precarity look like from the perspective of someone experiencing it?

Aslı Vatansever: Yeah, well, first of all, at private universities, you don't have tenure, you have annual contracts, so you're perpetually precarious. And every year around June, people fear for their livelihoods because this is the time when the contracts either get renewed or terminated. And in most cases, people were forced to work twice or thrice as much as 40 hours a week. They had to teach over 15 hours a week. They had absolutely no time, no funding, no support for any research. Most of them did not even get inflation adjustments on their salaries for years. Most of them signed contracts without salaries at the beginning of their careers. Most of them signed contracts and were not paid for six months after they started working at a university.

We ourselves during that crisis of bankruptcy of the university had a period where we did not get paid for three months. And during that field research, we understood, okay, this is part and parcel of the whole business because everybody's going through that obviously for one reason or the other. And people have found ways to cope with that and justify that because of this inner disempowerment. You feel so powerless because one of the university owners, the owner of the Okan University has this famous quote where he said, "Well, there are a lot of universities for you and there are a lot of professors for me." This is their mentality. You're like so disposable. The university administrations are so disinterested in the content of what you have to offer. You're just a cog in the machine and anyone can teach what you teach. Like I'm a labor sociologist or when I started, I was a historical sociologist and I was expected to teach European Integration just because I had a master's in that. So Meral and I saw this bleak picture and we published a book with the findings of that research called Ready to Teach Anything. So it came out in 2015.

(21:40) Erdem Evren: But on top of what you're describing came the political repression, the unprecedented political repression, let's call it, the Academics for Peace petition. So can you very briefly explain for our listeners what it was about and what happened and how it affected you personally?

Aslı Vatansever: Yeah, you probably remember in summer 2015 after the elections, there is this breeze of optimism when HDP [Peoples' Democratic Party] made it into the parliament.

Kristóf Szombati: This is the pro-Kurdish [party].

Aslı Vatansever: Exactly. And you know, in Turkey, you should always be cautiously optimistic. You should never be too happy. I guess our mistake was to be too happy for a moment. And immediately thereafter came the offensive in the Kurdish populated towns and long curfews and civilian deaths. And I never worked on the Kurdish movement or the so-called Kurdish conflict, that's not my area of expertise. But of course, we were getting news from the Kurdish populated towns in a limited way, but that was even enough. And the situation got so bleak that when in January I saw the petition, I was like, hey, this is the minimum of what we can do. This is the least we can do, at least sign this.

(24:00) Erdem Evren: Just to contextualize it, more than 1,000 academics from all around Turkey signed this petition. And the government's response was to start prosecutions. Hundreds of academics, both junior and senior academics, were fired from their positions. There were very serious death threats. Even under the conditions of military coups, like in the 80s or 60s, the figures were not that high. So can we ask you what the repercussions were for you?

Aslı Vatansever: Well, I signed the petition in January 2016. I was in the first round. Like I said, when I signed it, I thought it was something like a Change.org campaign. And I did not find the language particularly harsh. But then again, I have a propensity to harsher language. And at first, I didn't take any reaction seriously when a mafia boss, Sedat Peker, threatened us. I made jokes of it on Facebook. I shared the petition on my Facebook page saying, "Hey people, sign this." This is the type of middle-class, naivety, romantic, rebellious attitude—which is sometimes also stupid, of course.

But then we went to the Çağlayan Courthouse to make a complaint about Sedat Peker's threat. And the press was there. So apparently I got on TV and the rector of the university I was working at saw that on TV and he flipped out. She was not at work and she was there making a complaint against Sedat Peker and she signed the petition. And they sent me a disciplinary investigation. That was the first reaction that I got from the university. And I wrote a reply to them saying, "Hey, I'm not going to defend myself. Fuck you."

And then we went to Diyarbakır for the academic watch. Every month or every couple of months, a group of Peace Academics went to Kurdish populated towns to say, "Hey, we're here watching this." So we went to Diyarbakır together and we made a press release there. And I read the press release, but it didn't get published anywhere on mainstream media. It only got published in underground Kurdish newspapers. And somehow the rectorate got wind of it, which shows that they were actually surveilling me at that time. And then came the second disciplinary investigation. Again, I said, "Fuck you."

And then I had a meeting with the rector, said, "Hey, you know what? You keep threatening me and I'm sick of this. We can negotiate a good exit and I can leave because I'm emotionally not bound to this institution anyway. And obviously you just want to cause problems. Let's settle." And he refused it. And then they sent me a notice saying, "Hey, by the end of this day, empty your office and get out." That was April 29, 2016.

But I was still so agitated. And that was the time of very intense solidarity among Peace Academics. I got fired and a couple of weeks later, I found in my bank account money from Peace Academics. We were in touch with our colleagues abroad and they were frantically trying to get positions for us. And at that time, the Zentrum Moderner Orient [ZMO] in Berlin offered a small, short-term scholarship for Peace Academics who lost their jobs. So Erdem informed the group, I applied to that. And so this is how I got back to Germany.

(30:38) Kristóf Szombati: I suppose it was not very easy to leave Turkey.

Aslı Vatansever: No, actually at the beginning I didn't even think of leaving. I even wrote an article for the Deutsche Universitätszeitung where I explained why we don't want to leave and we're not leaving. But then after a while, of course, you think to yourself, alright, you know what? If I stay here, I can't work at the moment. It wasn't decreed yet at that moment. I was just fired from the university, but it was clear that no other university would hire me either.

I got fired in April and paradoxically, I got my associate professorship in October, months after I got fired. And you know, at the time I thought, okay, I might as well go to Berlin for four months, earn some money because I'm unemployed, and also have a little peace of mind to maybe write an article. And that's how I got here. But then when I was here, a statutory decree came out in February 2017 and banned me from public service and declared my passport as invalid and then I couldn't go back.

(34:10) Erdem Evren: Let's fast forward a bit. You came to Germany. But what I want to comment on is another petition actually. After the genocide in Gaza started, there was another kind of petition that's called the "Gaza Petition," once again by academics. Was there a sense of deja vu for you?

Aslı Vatansever: Erdem, just to set the record straight, I don't know about the Gaza petition that you're talking about. I signed a petition where we criticized police intervention on campuses. It wasn't directly related to Gaza. It was to show solidarity with the student encampments and protests. The petition said, hey, we're against police intervention on campuses. And any university administration that invites police to the campus is complicit in whatever is going on politically, globally at the moment.

And of course I had a huge deja vu, especially when the toilet paper that is the Bild newspaper published our names as traitors. I was like, my God, I managed to become a traitor in two different countries within a decade. But I thought, "okay, where will I go to exile from now?" Because obviously Germany is about to deport me as well. So what's going to happen?

But it actually only confirmed what I've been saying all along: Every state has its red lines. And Germany is no less of an authoritarian state than Turkey. It is just smarter. And it has the luxuries of being a core country within a capitalist world economy. Stupid peripheral regimes like Turkey use overt oppression, which makes them more vulnerable. Whereas in core countries like Germany, which are more covertly authoritarian, you manufacture consent to such a degree.

I hate to quote Chomsky in any context since I saw him having a nice chat with Epstein in his private jet. But to say it with Chomsky, the most successfully authoritarian systems are those that make you believe that they're not. And Germany is a prime example of that. And we have seen after this little petition crisis that we had, that the emperor is naked here as well. And he looks quite despicable when naked.

(39:06) Aslı Vatansever: At the moment I signed that petition, I was working at Bard College Berlin, which is a very progressive institution and also vocally critical of what's going on in the Middle East. But I know that especially the German state universities have been very oppressive during the whole thing.

(40:38) Aslı Vatansever: What I found more dramatic and more frightening during the whole thing was the scandal around Bettina Stark-Watzinger, who was the Federal Minister of Education. And it came out that she released a memo... that advised to deny funding to academics who support Palestine. Or I don't even want to say support Palestine, who are just against genocide. Period. She released this memo that literally said, "deny funding to these people." Which is no different than the civil death that we talked about in Turkey, especially considering the academic labor market in Germany, where 92% of academic workers are dependent on external funding. This is like a Berufsverbot [professional ban] in Nazi times. This was the Staatsräson in play.

(42:38) Kristóf Szombati: I think we just arrived at a really important point because what you're highlighting is kind of this link between precarization in German academia and how that supports authoritarian tendencies.

Aslı Vatansever: Economic precarization, which is more rampant in the core countries, and the political oppression, which is more overt in peripheral countries, are two sides of the same coin. And most of the time they proceed in conjunction.

(45:31) Erdem Evren: In your publications, you talk a lot about the exiled academic's position. In the media, "scholars at risk" are treated as this endangered species. Was this really how they saw you?

Aslı Vatansever: By introducing or framing displaced academics as an endangered species, as scholars at risk, first of all, you create a quarantine zone of shorter risk scholarships, which work as a type of stigma. In the long term, having been confined to that humanitarian bubble of non-competitive risk scholarships, first you think, "Good, I can survive here." But soon you realize, okay, this is a quarantine zone. I'm being pushed towards the margins of academia. I'm being treated like a museum piece behind a glass.

And also, this helps categorize academic precariat into fractions. They have enough to deal with the domestic precariat. And if you add to this growing reserve army of disposable academic labor force, the displaced academics that come from third world countries like Turkey... "we can't feed them over a long period of time, just give them some risk scholarships for a short while." But so that we know where they're at and they should not step outside of that bubble. This is yet another, you know, typical below mediocre third world country intellectual who could be interesting as an image prop for our institution for a while, but no longer.

(51:07) Erdem Evren: Do you see something specific about the German system that exacerbates these forms of disciplining?

Aslı Vatansever: Well, the German academic labor market is the worst. And this is not my personal opinion. There was a study from 2016 conducted by Alexandre Afonso. The German academic labor market was one of a kind: insecure and closed. 92% of the academic labor force works on fixed-term contracts. And according to the statistics of the DGB [Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund], only 5% of PhD holders have a prospect of tenure.

We see the chair system, which is a feudal relic that persists. And despite the Netzwerk für Gute Arbeit in der Wissenschaft (Network for Decent Work in Academia), which is a nationwide umbrella network for precarious researchers, pushing for the abolition of the chair system, we don't see anything happening. Imagine a system where 92% of the workforce consists of precarious researchers and they are not a part of any decision-making mechanism. A handful of professors decide on everything. How democratic is that?

(54:17) Kristof Szombati: Should we come to maybe the last batch of questions? Are there any initiatives that you can recall which make a push towards alliances between precarious academics? And maybe to add to that, learning and teaching and knowledge production in general—can they thrive and flourish outside of university settings?

Aslı Vatansever: I'm usually more disinclined to talk about hope. It's not my job to paint a pink picture. We're not in a TED Talk here. I'm not some influencer. I'm not some wellness guru. But of course, it is important to create venues of resistance. If any resistance is futile, we might as well just die. I might as well just throw myself off the balcony, which sometimes seems very attractive.

But this is what the Precarious Researchers initiatives are doing. Like, you might remember the #IchBinHannahcampaign a couple of years back. That actually swept the entire German academia. And it has done wonders in shifting the entire discourse. Or the Network for Decent Work in Academia.

To your question, Erdem, whether there might be venues of knowledge production. Yes, there are, of course. There are academic structures outside of the conventional universities, like Off-University we have mentioned and others. And they're valuable. But at the end of the day, if your goal is to challenge the status quo in a meaningful way, I'm not sure whether this is the way to go. Because, to what extent can it challenge the Ivy League, for example? You might create a bubble which feels safe for a little group of people, but changes little in real time. And also, you inevitably face the most banal concern, which is we don't have money.

(01:04:21) Erdem Evren: Well, once again, we are back to the conjuncture. There was a time when communist parties were funding workers universities and even social democratic parties were pushing for very influential and actually relatively well-paid kind of educational initiatives. But thank you so much, Aslı, for joining us. This was really great.

Aslı Vatansever: It was great for me too, it was really exhilarating to get some things off my chest. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Outro: So that's it from us for today. Thanks for listening. Goodbye. We would also like to thank our contributors: music and mastering Shai Levy, artwork and graphics Paulina Georgescu, editing Vera Jónás, and our in-house communications advisor Anna Szilágyi.