Why do we need the university? Episode 12: The Campus as Social Infrastructure

Here are more thoughts on academic life! Episode 12 is at your service: What the university has that cannot be delivered Two episodes ago I argued that the university’s peculiar gift is slow time — the licence to sit with a question for fifteen years. In the last one I argued that its other gift … Read more

What do we need academia for? Episode 10: The Gift of Slow Time 

In nine episodes (you can find them here), I have focused on some characteristics of the current academic life that is killing the university system -not any more- slowly: Nine episodes of administrative bloat, ranking obsessions, funding regimes that reward the wrong things, accreditation rituals nobody quite believes in, a journal hierarchy that has turned … Read more

Episode 9: The new arenas of academic self‑promotion

Here comes the new episode for Thoughts on academic life There has always been self‑promotion in academia. People mailed offprints, boasted about books, dropped famous names at dinner. But the contemporary landscape is qualitatively different: platformized, metricized, gamified.[6][8] Academics now operate across multiple, interconnected arenas: Citation and profile platforms: Google Scholar, Scopus IDs, ORCID, ResearchGate, … Read more

A few days in Kaunas, Lithuania

I have attended a workshop of a COST project, and now I am flying back to İstanbul. The workshop took place on 19-20 March 2026 at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania.  RELINK2 is one of the COST projects I could align my studies with. Glad to be part of it.       By … Read more

Another busy week left behind- including a training session at AA

After three weeks, I can finally rest on a Saturday, which still includes the embarrassingly dirty car getting washed, which in turn contributes more to Google Maps by trying a different mall.   The highlight of the week was a training session at the Anadolu Agency ,which is reported here in English. The week included … Read more