Human Rights Watch’s Concerns with Regard to Academic Freedom in Higher Education, and Access to Higher Education for Women who

Turkey’s public universities are still emerging from more than twenty years of military influence and centralized ideological and operational controls. Academic freedom in Turkey reached a low point shortly after the 1980 military coup, when the junta expelled hundreds of staff and thousands of students for their political activities and enacted a new education law imposing firm political prescriptions on Turkey’s higher education system. Although reforms, some as recent as May 2004, have improved campus life in important respects, many of the constraints remain in place.