The transformation of academic labor in Türkiye: Experiences from foundation universities

This thesis examines academics' labor experiences in Istanbul, Türkiye, using semi-structured interviews with 24 academics from 13 foundation universities. It focuses on the impacts of neoliberal colonization of higher education, digitalization, and new academic labor, highlighting labor control, wage inequalities, and exploitation issues. The study explores how academics see themselves, cope with precarity, and experience in a patriarchal, market-driven labor market. It finds significant disparities caused by institutional orientation and broader political and economic contexts. The analysis emphasizes how audit technologies, publication pressures, and performance indicators foster insecurity and erode academic autonomy, commodifying education. It also discusses the differences between teaching and research universities. Findings reveal that academics accept common elements such as performance metrics, publication and project pressure, and the commodification of education across all institutions. However, academics tend to be more satisfied with their conditions in institutions that offer less control and pressure, provide temporal flexibility and freedom, and foster solidarity and communication. This leads to varying responses from academics, as the labor processes in these two types of foundation universities differ. Academics at research universities are generally more satisfied, while those at teaching universities are experiencing high levels of anxiety, stress, and fear due to precarious employment. Similarly, research assistants experience the transformed labor process the most harshly; they work in more uncertain and insecure conditions and are at the bottom of the status hierarchy. Keywords: Academic Labor, Neoliberalism, Higher Education, Foundation Universities, Audit and Performance Metrics, Flexibility, Precarization