This spring in Istanbul, a hundred or so faculty members and students held a lunch-time demonstration in one of Koc University's elegant courtyards. They were protesting against the administrations failure to protect the jobs of the university's service workers. It was peaceful. No one tried to stop them. This is one side of Turkey. The other side is more visible - the violent response of police to the Taksim Square protests against unchecked city development a few weeks later, for example. And the long jail sentences dished out earlier this month to some former university rectors, dogmatic opponents of their country's ban on headscarves in public institutions (see Nature 500,129-130; 2013). The headscarf ban, and the reaction to it, is a telling and useful guide to how Turkish universities and Turkish science could yet flourish amid such political volatility.
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