Abstract:

University, roots of which reach back to Medieval Age in Europe, is facing numerous challenges as institution and as idea today both from state and also from market forces most of which are perpetrators of neoliberal capitalism. The concept autonomous university is subject to erosion by devaluation of basic concepts such as truth, critical knowledge and thinking and is also under pressure for collaboration with global and national market and competition within global higher education market. Academicians are being converted to workers serving for knowledge factories and proletarianized and turned into experts or technicians whose knowledge and popularity (through media) are transformed into marketable commodities with exchange values. The commodification of knowledge, probably present in natural sciences (fields of engineering and medicine, in particular) since the beginning, seems to become valid for social sciences and humanities. In this article, we look at how the university, struggling to defend its core values while witnessing dramatic regressions in its capacity of critical knowledge production and thinking, is being perceived, made sense of, and experienced by the university students (who are being converted into customers or consumers under neoliberal conditions) . In the article, we will first provide an overview addressing the siege of universities by neoliberalism within and out of Turkey through ideologies such as entrepreneurship, competitiveness and “quality”. We will then emphasize the historical and sociological meaning and value of youth and university youth in Turkey. Finally, we will discuss the data collected via semi-structured interviews with 20 students, enrolled universities located in Ankara.. The interview data demonstrate that majority of the students are in consensus that university plays an important role in creation of their political identity and consciousness. It is observed that the interviewees tend to link the concept “transformation”, which was sometimes referred to as self-development, independence from family or becoming a subject leading his or her own life, to the opportunities provided by the university environment. The students prioritizing the role of university in their career plans and socialization practices, on the other hand, were being a university student implies coinciding with different points of view, expressing themselves more freely and comfortably. Therefore despite the systematic problems of Turkish academia in terms of producing free knowledge for social development, according to the findings of this research, one could argue that the universities, at least those located in the major cities, have progressive potential and transforming influence on the semantic worlds of the students.

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