Yazl: Murat TAi;lCI '07 - Tun~1 GOLSOY '75 FolD: Teoman GORZiHiN

An intelView to be read by every alumni

A professor of physics, writer of more than 40 books, a lover of istanbul, a legend teacher, a distinguished person of all time ... The interview with John Freely is a great journey in history and the intellectual thinking.

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Weare delighted to see you here. You wrote a new book called "A Bridge of Culture, Robert-College - Bogazic;i University: How an American College in Istanbul became a Turkish University", which we take as a very valuable work because it sheds light on the history of our remarkable school. How did the idea of

such a book come to you? Well, I give the answer to that question at the very beginning of the book, where I tell of the circumstances that brought me and my family to Turkey. The story begins in the spring of 1960, when I was working as a research physicist at Princeton University on the Controlled Thermonuclear Fusion program. At the same time I was doing graduate work in

physics at night at New York University, where I received a PhD in june 1960. Just before I received my PhD I was walking across the campus at Princeton with my friend Ed Meservey when we stopped to admire a flowering cherry tree. When I said it was very beautiful, Ed remarked that it couldn't compare with the flowering judas trees along the Bosphorus in Istanbul. Ed went on to say that he had taught physics at Robert College in the years 1947-1949, and he told me what an interesting school it was and how fascinating and beautiful Istanbul was. I told him that I was very interested, and so he introduced me to David Garwood, who that year was on leave from Robert College on a fellowship at Princeton. David put me in touch with the administration at Robert College, and after I received my PhD from New York University that June I was offered a job in the physics department at Robert College. Then in mid-September 1960 I left for Istanbul along with my wife Dolores and our three children, Maureen, Eileen and Brendan.

I should say that another reason for my coming to Istanbul was the great interest that I had always had in Turkey. My greatgrandfather, Thomas Ashe, was a young Irish soldier who fought in the British Army in the Crimean War, during which he was wounded and then recuperated at Florence Nightingale's hospital at the Selimiye Barracks in Dskiidar. While he was in Istanbul he bought a book called "A Pictorial Voyage Around the World': which had several chapters about Turkey. I spent part of my childhood in Ireland, and this was one of the first books I ever read, and it made a great impression on me, particularly the chapters on Turkey, which added to my interest in coming to Robert College.

As soon as I arrived in Istanbul I began reading about the history of both the city and the College. I learned a great deal about the city from my colleague Hilary Sumner-Boyd, and in 1972 we collaborated on a book called "Strolling Through Istanbul", which has just been published in an updated edition for the celebration of Istanbul being named cultural capital of Europe for the year 2010. Since then I have written more than forty other books, many of them about the history and architecture of Istanbul and the rest of Turkey.

I learned a great deal about the history of Robert College from some of my colleagues, particularly Herbert Lane, whose history of the college still awaits publication, and Keith Greenwood, whose doctoral dissertation on the founding years of RC has been published by our university press. I contemplated writing a history of the College, but then we left Istanbul in 1976, five years after Robert College became Bosphorus University, and so I put aside the idea for the time being.

After leaving Istanbul our children went off to universities in the

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Hamlin Hall, 1871.

Barton Hall, the main building at OskOdar American College.

Robert College teachers with their children. At the back Kennedy Lodge, 1891.

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U. S., and Dolores and I went in tum to Athens 0976-79), Boston 0979-87), London 0987-88), the Koc Ozel Lise in Kurtkoy 0988- 91), and Venice (1991-93). Toward the end of our stay in Venice I was invited to return to Bosphorus University by three of my former students: Faruk Birtek, Gillen ~ and A~e Soysal. So in September 1993 we returned to Istanbul and I rejoined the physics department, after an absence of 17 years, and I was delighted to find that many of my colleagues were my former students.

After our return I began thinking again about writing a history of the school, and I began discussing the idea with Sel~ Alton, an alumnus of Bosphorus University who at the time was head of the Yap, Kredi Bank. Selcuk Bey provided the financial support for me to work in New York for six months so that I could go through the archives of Robert College, and I received permission to do so from the trustees of the College. The result was my two-volume ''History of the American Colleges in Istanbul, "which was published by Yap, Kredi Press in 2000. Then last year our Rector, Kadri Oz~aldtran, suggested that I do a revised and updated version, called "A Bridge of Culture, Robert College - Bogazigi University: How an American College in Istanbul became a Turkish University': which has just been published.

As of 2010, what has remained the same from your perspective? Has Bogazi~i University remained the same as a cultural magnet for intellectual property?

When I returned after an absence of seventeen years I saw profound apparent changes and at the same time essential qualities that seemed to have remained unchanged. First of all, BU is now a far larger institution in terms of students, faculty and academic programs.

When I was writing the first version of my history that came out in 2010, I checked with the registrar and found that the 10,000 students at our university came from 62 different countries, as well as from every province in Turkey. During its early years Robert College had only a few hundred students, but they were generally from many different ethnic, religious and religious groups from allover the Balkans and the Middle East. Thus Bosphorus University is continuing in the tradition of Robert College, in that it is a cultural beacon that attracts students and faculty from all over the world. At the first meeting of the United Nations in 1948 four countries were represented by Robert College graduates. Robert College produced two prime ministers of Bulgaria and two of Turkey, Billent Ecevit and Tansu (:iller, the only woman ever to hold that post.

The first women were admitted to Robert College just the year before I began teaching here, and before I left they made up almost half of the student body, as they do today at Bosphorus University, and as they do in the faculty, where in some departments women outnumber men. This is something in which our institution has been in the forefront in Turkey, which turns out far more women in the sciences and other fields than do western countries, with women also in the highest university administrative posts: department head, dean and rector, something which is not generally known abroad.

The last chapter in my new history is called "Tbe Cultural Heritage". This is a bibliography of more than 750 books by some 200 authors who were teachers and! or students at Robert College - Bosphorus University. The bibliography is necessarily incomplete because of the limited

Another way in which BU has perpetuated the traditions of RC is in its humanities program. During my early years at RC I took part in the Bilingual Bicultural Humanities Program, a two-year course required of every student in the school, with lectures alternately in English and Turkish, covering both Western and Eastern civilization. Everyone who was part of this program, students and faculty alike, agree that it was an extremely important part of their intellectual development, plus the fact that it brought those of us from different faculties together as one collegiate community. When I returned to BU in 1993 a number of my former students and colleagues - particularly Faruk Birtek, Gillen~, Oya Basak, time and facilities available to me, Cevza Sevgen and Alpar Sevgen

but it is an astonishing list in the number and variety of works produced by people at RC and BU. And this bibliography only includes books and not scholarly articles, which are being produced in far greater number at BU than they were at RC because we are far more interconnected with the wider world than we were in the past. Also the chapter does not talk about another aspect of the cultural heritage of our institution, its theater program, though in other chapters I have written about the famous actors, playwrights and directors who began their careers in the theater of RC-BU. (Carolos Koon, the founder of the modern Greek theater, was a product of the RC theater program.) Nor does it mention the music program, though in other chapters I have written about the College symphony orchestra, chamber music society, chorus, Gilbert and Sullivan musicals, and organ recitals. This tradition has been perpetuated at BU in the musical performances at Albert Long Hall, though the performers are mostly outsiders, whereas in the past they were from within the College community.

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- asked me to join them in an effort to revive this program. The first fruits of their efforts blossomed in the fall of 2009, with the beginning of a new humanities program, which, it is to be hoped, will in the near future be broadened in its scope. Because what has made our institution a cultural beacon is the humanistic quality that characterized the first European universities in the thirteenth century, attracting students and faculty from all over the world, which is much wider now than it was then.

What is your idea for today?

I see Bogazici as a global university, Turkish to the core, but by its excellence attracting students from the wider world as Oxford and Paris did in the thirteenth century when their students and faculty laid the foundations for the revival of learning in Europe, whereas in our case BU would be a bridge across the chasm that divides East and West. Our rector is now trying to create a research center that will make BU a focal point for studies by both Turkish and foreign scholars, a place that will take advantage of our unique

After a picnic at the Giant's Grave in 1883. Holding the staff is Caroline Borden, benefactress of ACG; next to her on the right is Henrietta Washburn, with George Washburn standing behind her.

Robert College, Class of 1900; President Washburn seated center.

Robert College Seniors, late 1880s.

geographical location and historical background. Our students should be made more aware of how special this place is, for this would broaden their own cultural horizons, as it has ours.

What has the West imported from Turkey or Robert College? Less than three years from now we will be celebrating the onehundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Robert College, the oldest American institution of higher learning outside of the U. S. During that time a succession of teachers have been coming out to Istanbul from the u. S. and other western countries, bringing back with them an unparalleled knowledge of Turkey, its history, people and way of life through the last sixty years of the Ottoman Empire and now the first eightyseven years of the Turkish Republic. If you look through the last chapter of my new history of RC-BU, "The Cultural Heritage", you will see books on Turkish history, architecture, literature, theater, music, folklore as well as novels, short stories, and poetry on Turkish themes, all written by teachers at RC-BU. Others have come back to the U. S. after teaching at RC and gone on to careers in government, education, business or the arts, bringing with them a knowledge of Turkey that has led to a deeper understanding between the two countries and an appreciation of their cultures.

Do you find any resemblance between alumni attitude of Robert College and Bogazi~i University?

I am at somewhat of a disadvantage in answering this question, since I do not know the Bogazici University alumni nearly as well as those of the old Robert College, nearly all of whom were my students. I have a feeling that the new alumni are not as deeply attached to BU as the old ones were to RC, which is to be expected

because RC was small enough and so self-contained that it was a microcosmos, whereas now many students are working while they attend school and a large part of their life is outside our campus. But I find that the intellectua1 range of my students at BU today is in many cases broader than it was at RC, which is to be expected, since they come from a much wider variety of backgrounds, plus the fact that Turkey is now much more open to the world than it was in times past.

What do you think about graduates of the past and present?

The outstanding students whom I have taught in the past 17 years at BU are just as exceptional as those I taught in my first 16 years at RC-BU. What has especially impressed me about the exceptional students of both eras is their wide range of interests, which has often led them into careers that are very different from what they were prepared for academically. ArifDirlik, our first physics major in the 1960's, ended his career as a professor of Chinese history at Duke University. One of our great actors, the late Ali Taygun, studied physics with me.

I remember meeting another of my former physics students, Atok Karaali, and asking him what he had been doing since I last saw him. "First Turk at the South Pole, sir!", he said, and I have since learned that he was the first Turk at the North Pole too. One of my students in recent years is just about to get his PhD in archaeology at Bryn Mar, and another is due to get his doctorate at the University of Wyoming in the study of wolves. A year ago six students who had taken my course in the history of science asked me to give them a seminar course on the Seventeenth-Century Scientific Revolution. All of them were science, math and engineering majors, but they were also playing music, singing, drawing, painting writing, doing underwater archaeology, exploring caves, sky-diving, studying philosophy, and also having fun. And then there is (:etin ytlmaz, a former student in my history of

science course at BU who received a PhD from the University of Michigan and is now in our mechanical engineering department. Cetin is a reincarnation of Leonardo cia Vinci, and you will soon see his Foucault pendulum swinging in the library, and don't be surprised when he whizzes past you on his unicycle.

What do you think about Turkey is becoming now? When I first came to Turkey in 1960 Anatolia was as poor and backward as the Ireland of my youth, two countries hanging off the opposite ends of Europe, but now both are much more prosperous and far better educated. There is a dynamism in Turkey now that I have seen nowhere else in the world, and this has inevitably led to social and political tensions because old attitudes and ways of doing things no longer apply in a world that changes radically by the day. Europe and the West are now becoming aware that there is a new Turkey, but old prejudices and stereotypes die hard, even

when a Turkish novelist wins the Nobel prize in literature. There is no stopping Turkey now, and things here will never again be the same as they were in the past, for better or for worse, but I am optimistic about the future despite all the alarm bells that are ringing.

Do you have any recommendations for BogaziC;i today?

It would be presumptuous of me to make recommendations, given the little I know about the politics of education in Turkey, but my hope is that BU would gain as much autonomy and independence as possible, because a university is nothing without intellectual freedom. Another hope has been that the university will broaden its contacts with other universities and cultural institutions abroad, and I am gratified to see that this has been happening more and more.

What do you think the vision of Bogazic;i should be in the future?

AB I said earlier, I think that the

Bogazici of the future should be a global university, the pride of the new Turkey in a new world that is not as divided as it is now.

Do you have any criticism of your book?

The main criticism I have of my book is that I did not devote enough space to Bogazici, which appears almost as an epilogue in the history of Robert College.

I think that a new book should be written, a full-fledged history of Bogazici University, in which Robert College is the prologue.

I don't think that I'm the one to do this, but I know just the right person to write this new history. His name is KutIughan Soyubol, who did an MA in our history department in 2007 and is now working toward a PhD at the City University of New York. I have put Kadri Bey in touch with him, and our hope is that Kutlughan will come back to Bogazici University and write its history with the fullness that it deserves as an institution unique in the world.-p-