Turkey Revokes License of Istanbul Bilgi University, Forcing Closure Mid-Year

Turkey has revoked the operating license of Istanbul Bilgi University, a top private institution known for its liberal values, forcing it to close in the middle of the academic year after the school was seized by the state in a criminal investigation last year.

In a presidential decree published in the Official Gazette on Friday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan revoked the license for the university, which has an estimated 20,000 students from Turkey and around the world.

The decree states the closure is effective immediately.

The order cites a law allowing the closure of an independent school if “the expected level of education and training … is insufficient”.

Bilgi University management has not issued a statement regarding the closure.

Last year, the school was seized by the state in a criminal probe after its parent company, Can Holdings, was caught in a money laundering and tax fraud sweep. Since then, Bilgi University has been run by a court-appointed administrator.

Turkey’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 in June, “suffer no harm”.

Turkish local broadcaster TRT Haber reported that students will continue their education at Mimar Sinan University, the guarantor state university.

Videos of dozens of students protesting at the university circulated online. Some held banners that said, “This is just the beginning, the struggle continues.”

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

The institution was founded in 1996 and is known for its liberal values. The school’s motto is “learning not for school but for life.” It currently ranks 1,401 in the world according to the QS World University ranking.

Bilgi University participates in the Erasmus Mundus programme.