On Thursday, September 1st,  Ohio State alumni Yücel Demirer and Derya Keskin-Demirer were permanently dismissed from their positions at Kocaeli University in Turkey under the statute of exception passed after the failed coup attempt. On the same day, 37 other Kocaeli faculty members, 2344 other faculty nationwide, and a total of 43,000 public employees lost their jobs, their passports, and their right to work in the public sector. There was no hearing and there is no right to appeal.

The justification for these dismissals is supposed involvement with the religious group led by Fethullah Gülen, believed to have led the July 15 coup attempt.  This is a strange allegation against our friends, because in January 2016 Yücel and Derya had been accused of a very different political offense. Along with 2218 other Turkish scholars, they were placed under judicial investigation for having signed a peace petition protesting violence against civilians in the government counterinsurgency campaign against Kurdish separatists in southeast Turkey. Yücel and Derya were being investigated both by their universities and by the Kocaeli public prosecutor on the grounds that the peace petition was a mode of terrorist propaganda.

During the same period between January and this summer, Yücel was approved for promotion to full Professor of Political Science, and Derya was approved for promotion to tenure as Associate Professor of Labor Economics.

Many of you will remember Yücel as an active member of the Center for Folklore Studies, who studied Kurdish and Turkish new year festivals for his dissertation with Margaret Mills. Yücel also created an influential NELC course on Islam in America, which in the wake of 9-11 made Ohio State students familiar with the wide range of Muslim communities and customs well-established in the US. He was a beloved teacher and colleague here at Ohio State, just as he and Derya now are among their students and many faculty of Kocaeli. Derya is a friend to folklore and did her MA work with Margaret in NELC, later spending a summer as a visiting scholar at CFS. Both attend the meetings of the American Folklore Society and SIEF as often as they can. At Kocaeli they have worked actively for the civil rights of ethnic and religious minorities but also for those of observant Muslims, arguing for example that  female students should have the right to cover their heads in the classroom if they wish. 

The Academics for Peace—signers of the January petition—have suffered arbitrary dismissal, investigation and sometimes imprisonment, online and personal harassment, and violent threats. Our friends, who were in the US at the time of the coup attempt, voluntarily complied with the order to return to Turkey afterwards, fully aware of the ongoing risks they faced but wanting to support their country in its period of trouble. They have a difficult time before them, but are also optimistic about the future of Turkey and determined to work for its betterment.

The Center for Folklore Studies expresses its solidarity with our friends, their colleagues and students, and the people of Turkey. We believe that the Turkish government will better accomplish the important tasks of bringing the coup organizers to justice and controlling terrorism by respecting the rule of law. As scholars, we also believe that  free critical dialogue among holders of diverse views allows countries to build genuine resilience in the face of threats.

For further information about the “Academics for Peace” solidarity campaign, see http://internationalsolidarity4academic.tumblr.com/ and https://barisicinakademisyenler.net/English