Free-Marketization of Academia through Authoritarianism: | 101 Free-Marketization of Academia through Authoritarianism: The Bologna Process in

ABSTRACT: This article focuses on the neoliberalization of higher education in Turkey. Our analysis is based on the historico-political dynamics of the state-academy-free market nexus in post-1980s Turkey. The paper relies on two layers of analysis. First, we focus on the regulatory mechanisms that have eased the neoliberalization of higher education. We analyze the legal regulations, and mainly the Law on Higher Education and related amendments that have been carried out to restructure the higher education system. The second layer of our analysis concerns academia itself and how the neoliberalization process has been perceived, internalized or opposed from within academia via ethnographic data gathering techniques (e.g. participant observations, in-depth interviews and field notes). Here, we focus on those academics who have been actively involved in the implementation of the Bologna Process in the universities of Turkey. Relying on field data, we argue that the Bologna Process is the most recent example of neoliberalizing education in Turkey that has included authoritarianism as an important asset and that has further fragmented academic work through both the internalization of neoliberal thought and alienation