ISTANBUL: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered the closure on Friday of a top independent university with liberal leanings in the middle of the school year, according to an official decree.

The decree, published in the official journal, revokes the operating licence for Istanbul’s Bilgi University, which has more than 20,000 students from Turkiye and abroad, with some of its researchers renowned in their fields.

The closure was effective immediately.

As grounds for the move, the edict cites a law allowing for the closure of a private institution if “the expected level of education and training... is insufficient”.

Turkiye’s Council of Higher Education promised to take “the necessary measures” to ensure the students at the social sciences university, who were due to sit end-of-year exams next month, “suffer no harm”.

The council did not say whether the students would be taken in by other institutions in the coming weeks, nor how they would be able to complete their academic year.

“An institution built with 30 years of effort was effectively shut down overnight,” Yaman Akdeniz, a Bilgi professor of law, wrote on X.

Published in Dawn, May 23rd, 2026