Smoke gets in your eyes

The 25th annual conference of the European Association for International Education in Istanbul was a great success. With yet again a record number of participants – over 4,800 from more than 90 countries – an exhibition hall that was bigger and more full than ever, a high number of workshops, sessions and dialogues and lots of wining and dining, the conference was a small but inspiring island of debate and networking on international education in the hectic city of Istanbul.

But the conference was also surrounded by large numbers of protesters, police and teargas. Outside the comfortable confines of the Istanbul Congress Center, the real world of Taksim Square – as featured in news headlines some months before the actual conference – directly confronted several conference participants, causing a series of tense moments.

Just before and during the conference, concerns about a possible intervention by the United States and its allies in neighbouring Syria also placed the realities facing the region front and centre in the minds of conference-goers.

Negative travel advisories from the US for the whole country and from the Australian government for one part of Turkey forced participants from these countries to consider cancellation. Safety concerns from family and institutions at home, shared by the participants themselves, were a distraction from the daily conference routine.

Behind the scenes, the leadership and staff of the European Association for International Education, or EAIE, were doing quiet, ongoing risk management work in order to anticipate possible major crises. In the end, no major problems occurred. Only one reception had to be cancelled.

However, some of us experienced for the first time, or – in the case of the older participants among us, and those from countries with regular political tensions – once again, smoke and tears in our eyes. While dining out one evening, we had to dive from the terrace into the restaurant kitchen to escape from teargas.

Academic freedom

All in all, the conference, the networking and the wining and dining continued without major interruption. But what lessons should we learn from an experience that, for the first time in its 25 years, meant the EAIE and its participants gathered in a less than peaceful environment?

How effectively are we, international educators, relating our visions and missions about international education to the real world around us? Should we – EAIE members and conference participants, and the EAIE as an association – have been more prepared for the circumstances in which the conference took place?

Should we have responded more directly to the violations of human rights, freedom of opinion and academic freedom in the country where we gathered?

These questions came up after our experience at the restaurant near Taksim Square and after talking with other Turkish guests during our lock-up there for two hours. A few months before the conference, unconnected to the Taksim Square protests, several military personnel, journalists and academics were condemned to lengthy jail sentences after a prolonged period of pre-trial imprisonment.

The international community and organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch declared the trial to be a political exercise intended to punish leaders opposing the current government.

Among those imprisoned were eight rectors and former rectors of universities, including Kemul Gürüz, also an international educator, who worked in the US and wrote an important book on international student mobility.

Shortly after that, the protests at Taksim Square started and became a broad movement against the abuse of political power and lack of respect for democracy by the current government. But only a handful of members of EAIE worried about these developments and asked the EAIE leadership to clarify the association’s position on these developments.

The EAIE leadership understandably worked hard to analyse the developments, consider the possible implications and craft a ‘plan B’ in case the conference could not take place as planned.

The EAIE also contacted the academic community in Turkey to see how it assessed the situation and in the end decided to let the conference continue as planned, based on a combination of safety arguments and the opinion of the academic community in Turkey that it was important that it went ahead.

Notably, the organisation decided to give extra emphasis, including conference space and a small donation, to Scholars at Risk, a body that supports academics who are victims of academic and political persecution anywhere in the world, and which had been advocating on behalf of Guruz and others.

Of course, the EAIE could have done more. But under unusual and fluid circumstances, these were rational responses to an unprecedented and complex situation.

So far so good.

Passive

But why were we, the participants, so passive in the face of this situation? Why did so few of us in Istanbul pressure the EAIE to take a stand on the circumstances and violations of academic freedom and human rights in Turkey?

Why did we give Turkey’s minister of education, the representative of a government that violates academic freedom and human rights, the chance to speak and even applaud him after his speech? Why did we not start a petition to ask the Turkish government to respect academic freedom and human rights?

Why were we more concerned about smoke in our eyes, our personal safety and our ability to wine and dine, than about the human rights and academic freedom in the country hosting our conference?

Why did we talk in sessions and dialogues about international education and peace and mutual understanding, about how critical the situation of academic freedom is in countries like Sudan, Palestine and others, without linking it to the local context? Are we only interested in these issues when it is not in our own backyard?

And-or has our beloved annual international education conference become a trade show – to the extent that the salesman in us has become more important than the priest, to use a Dutch expression?

We are asking these questions not because we want to judge, nor because we want to criticise the EAIE leadership or participants. Likewise, we do not want to question the decision, taken several years ago, to come to Istanbul, nor the decision to let the conference take place under current circumstances.

Rather, we raise these questions as a wake-up call – as much for ourselves as for anyone. A warning that maybe we have become too distanced from what most of us proclaim is a key driver for us as individual international educators: to contribute to peace and mutual understanding in the world.

What the EAIE experience in Istanbul reminded us of is that it is much easier to live out that credo when the circumstances around us are already peaceful; it is a much more complicated and risky proposition to advance this agenda in the midst of painful social change and deep political uncertainty.

For now, what we would like to ask is that the EAIE, and sister organisations around the world, keep an eye on the trials of colleagues in Turkey – Kemul Gürüz, for example, was released on probation just before the conference, but his trial resumes on 23 October – and look at ways to support them.

Ultimately, we believe that international educators the world over can and should have a voice in crucial matters of human rights, social justice and academic freedom.

* Hans de Wit is director of the Centre for Higher Education Internationalisation at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy, and professor of internationalisation of higher education at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands. He is a founding member and past president of the EAIE. Email: j.w.m.de.wit@hva.nl. Fiona Hunter has worked in strategic management of internationalisation of higher education for the past 20 years and recently became a consultant in higher education and research associate at the centre in Milan. She is a past president of the EAIE. Email: fionajanehunter@gmail.com. Laura E Rumbley is associate director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College in the United States, editor of EAIE Forum and chair of the publications committee of EAIE. Email: laura.rumbley@bc.edu.