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November 2020. Ongoing injustice for dismissed academics. Yet, public employees dismissed by emergency decrees cannot bring their grievances directly to a court of law. They must first apply to the State of Emergency Appeals Commission for a reassessment and may seek review through administrative courts only if the Commission rejects their application. Since its inception in 2017, the Commission has
been sharply criticized for bias and for its lack of As of July 2020, the Commission had received a
total of 126,300 appeals; of those, it had issued Feelings of permanent threat and psychological
preparation for the worst are very common among According to a key finding in the research, half of the academics report that they, too, had fears of being dismissed through an emergency decree (49%). One is tempted to recall what Robert Maynard Hutchins, the former president of the University of Chicago, said during the McCarthy era: "The question is not how many professors have been fired for their beliefs, but how many think they might be. The entire teaching profession is intimidated."10 The same holds true for Turkey's academic community today. A clear majority of academics "do not feel free" to share expert knowledge and opinion in their
Following a five-year crackdown, academic freedom
and freedom of expression in Turkey are today ENDNOTES
1. See Scholars at Risk, Free to Think (2016), pp. 9-12; (2017), pp.
12-19; (2018), pp. 28-34; (2019) pp. 25-30, all available at
https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/tag/free-to-think/.
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