Amid mission drift and falling public support, we must reject the assumption that teaching is primarily a window into how great minds think and reconnect with its value as a practical, trainable vocation – from which even research is a potentially expendable distraction, says Arjun Appadurai 

Last month’s presidential decree demanding the closure of Istanbul’s liberal Bilgi University seemed to mirror the academic purges that followed 2016’s failed coup. But then it was cancelled. What happened – and what does it say about the current state of academic freedom in Turkey? Seher Asaf reports