Today, there are 205 universities in Turkey, 129 public, 76 private; all of them are regulated by the national Council of Higher Education (Yükseköğretim Kurulu, or YÖK). 63 universities possess Departments of Art History; 115 house related departments or programs in Studio Art; and 58 related departments or programs in Archaeology.
The roots of Turkey’s higher education system go back to the late Ottoman period, when the government first established Istanbul University (then known as Darülfünûn, est. 1846) and Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University (then called the Sanayi-i Nefise Mekteb-i Âlisi, est. 1883). These institutions were part of a far-reaching set of modernizing reforms known as the Tanzimat, and drew on European instructional models. Both remained state institutions following the establishment of the republic of Turkey in 1923 and have functioned continuously for over a century.
The 1940s–60s saw the establishment of a number of large-scale public universities, often with Art History Departments attached. Two of the most notable examples are located in the capital city of Ankara: these are Ankara University (where the Department of Art History was established by the Islamicist Dr. Katharina Otto-Dorn, in 1954), and Hacettepe University, which has had an Art History program since its founding 1965. The 1960s also saw the creation of the Student Selection and Placement System (Öğrenci Seçme ve Yerleştirme Sistemi), a mandatory national entrance exam required for all students to matriculate.
In the 1980s, the Turkish system of higher education underwent a substantial restructuring in the wake of a national coup and the resulting revisions to the constitution. Mostly significantly, this led to the creation of the Council of Higher Education (YÖK) in 1982, a body which oversees all the universities in Turkey. Because its 24 members are directly nominated by the president, the Council’s policies are directly impacted by the political priorities of the current administration; for the last decade, the Council has been supervised by a conservative Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
A shift towards liberal, international economic policies (roughly parallel to those of Reagan and Thatcher) in the 1980s caused a boom in the number of private universities in the 1990s and early 2000s. In the twenty-year period between 1986 and 2006, the total enrollments in private universities increased from only 426 to 91,000, “constituting 4.3% of the total enrollments of 2.1 million students.”1 Most prominent among these private institutions are Koç University (est. 1993) and Sabancı University (est. 1994), which are affiliated with the two largest industrial conglomerates in Turkey, entities which are also active in the arts sector.
- Kemal Gürüz, “The Development of Private Higher Education in Turkey,” International Higher Education, no. 45 (2006), 11–12, https://doi.org/10.6017/ihe.2006.45.7933.
Text by Dr. Sarah-Neel Smith