Ibn Haldun University: Reclaiming the Epistemic Commons for Social Science and Human Flourishing

Prof. Dr. Ali Gunes

Ibn Haldun University

Department of Comparative Literature

Email: ali.gunes@ihu.edu.tr

 

Something has quietly gone wrong at universities around the world. Governments, funding agencies, and corporate partners have spent decades pushing institutions towards Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines and applied professional programmes, treating them as the surest route to economic productivity. The social sciences, meanwhile, have been pushed to the margins, stripped of prestige and resources. This is not merely a quarrel over departmental budgets. The capacity of contemporary societies to make sense of their most pressing problems -- whether climate change, structural unemployment, mass migration, or political polarisation -- depends on the analytical traditions cultivated by sociology, anthropology, history, political science, and economics. Hollowing them out is a civilisational gamble.

Against this backdrop, Ibn Haldun University, located in Istanbul, has made what can only be called a principled institutional gamble: to restore the social sciences to the centre of scholarly life. This institutional project aims to achieve two things. First, Ibn Haldun University takes responsibility for demonstrating that social science inquiry is not merely a luxury but an urgent necessity. Secondly, Ibn Haldun University's structure, mission and vision make it one of the more genuinely unusual universities in the Turkish higher education landscape, one with the intellectual courage to insist that understanding human societies is itself a form of serious scholarship.

At Ibn Haldun University, the case for social inquiry and research rests on a basic epistemological point: not all knowledge works the same way, and the knowledge we need to govern ourselves wisely is not primarily technical but interpretive, relational, and historical. In this respect, the main virtue of a social scientist is the ability to connect private troubles with public issues, from a perspective that recognises how individual lives are shaped by larger historical, social, economic, political, and cultural forces. Without that ability, citizens tend to mistake personal failures for structural problems and vice versa. Without this ability and recognition, meaningful individual action becomes almost impossible.

However, this is not only an epistemological argument. The urgency is also practical. For instance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports argue that the role of physical science has done its part in detecting global warming, or what is called “climate change,” as a problem or crisis that negatively affects life in different ways. But important social questions remain unanswered: who will solve this problem? What kind of action will politics take? What are the economic incentives related to global warming? How do cultural values and practices influence climate change? What institutional designs have governments created to challenge global warming? Moreover, as Thomas Piketty argues, the world today faces many complex problems, such as regional economic inequalities, mass immigration, an ageing population, wars, human rights abuses, and so on, but no engineer can fix them. The means needed to tackle these issues are proper education, real politics, international politics, the science of economics and sociology, and, importantly, moral values and philosophy. 

It is in this context that, as Michael Burawoy argues, the social sciences should assume a genuinely public role, engaging not only academics but also broader publics in a continuous dialogue about social values and goals to address the problems above. The question is: has this dialogue been established today? If so, is it working? For Martha Nussbaum, the answer is “no.” What is worse, the way education in the social sciences and the liberal arts is treated is deeply troubling: the public image of the social sciences and the liberal arts is also humiliating, as they, unlike medicine and engineering, are not considered financially valuable in an advanced capitalist world. Hence, Nussbaum points out that citizens are trained only for “vocational competence” and professional life, which visibly neglects the education of the inner life, the education of the mind, acculturation, and intellectual development. When citizens are trained for “vocational competence” only with hard skills, education to implement another perspective, or what we call “soft skills”, is abandoned, even though the world runs on them.

There is also an irony in the fact that supporters of purely technical education seem genuinely unable to see this perspective. Although technology companies argue that they prioritise soft skills in their employees, such as communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, and complex problem-solving, they still value technical skills and experience. At the same time, engagement with history, literature, philosophy, and social inquiry remains a luxury or a fantasy. The social sciences are not competitors to innovation but part of what makes it possible.

Ibn Haldun University steps in at this stage with a vision rooted in intellectual heritage. The university’s name is not a decorative one randomly chosen, but there is a clear purpose behind it; it draws its vision and inspiration from Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), the fourteenth-century Tunisian Muslim scholar, historian, philosopher, and sociologist, who wrote Muqaddimah (1377/2015), widely regarded as a founding text of sociology, historiography, and political economy. His theory of “asabiyyah,” meaning roughly “social cohesion,” and his cyclical account of civilisational rise and decline are regarded as original contributions to social theory that anticipate concerns later taken up by Durkheim, Weber, and Toynbee, centuries after Ibn Khaldun had already worked through them.

By centring its identity and vision on this towering figure, Ibn Haldun, the university makes a claim that goes beyond cultural pride and rhetoric. It proclaims that the social sciences are not a Western invention reluctantly adopted from the outside world, but rather a tradition with deep roots in the Islamic intellectual corpus. What is significant in this perception is that social inquiry, as the name implies, belongs here as much as anywhere, as the common heritage of civilisations worldwide.

Founded in 2015 and located in Istanbul, Ibn Haldun University is a research university with the social sciences as its defining institutional priority. Education is conducted in a multilingual environment - Turkish, English, and Arabic. English-medium instruction places the university’s scholars within global academic conversations. Through English, research findings produced at Ibn Haldun University can reach an international scholarly community, and the university’s ambition is clearly not just to educate Turkish students but also to participate in and help shape global social-scientific discourse through its international academic staff and students.

The programmes in psychology, sociology, political science, international relations, Islamic economics and sciences, history, and comparative literature are carefully organised around ideas and orientations that prioritise the education of values, character formation, and practical wisdom rather than exactly copying the natural sciences’ pursuit of universal laws and truth. Ibn Haldun University is cognizant of this huge responsibility and thus takes social inquiry and research seriously and insists on defying the temptation to reduce human social life to data points and numbers.

With this vision and enthusiasm, Ibn Haldun University retains a unique place within the Turkish higher education landscape concerning the study of social sciences. Let me be a bit specific about what makes Ibn Haldun University unusual among Turkish universities. 

Turkey's major research universities, such as Bogazici, Middle East Technical University, Istanbul Technical University, Bilkent, Sabanci, and Koc, all have respected social science faculties. Yet none of them defines itself primarily as a social sciences research university. Bogazici and METU have the strongest international reputations in engineering and applied sciences. Their social science departments are often excellent, but operate within institutional cultures where prestige and resources flow towards STEM. Bilkent, Sabanci, and Koc are non-profit foundation universities whose identities span multiple competitive fields and are largely shaped by market-oriented profiles. Galatasaray University also offers perhaps the closest structural parallel to Ibn Haldun University. It uses French as a medium of instruction, focuses on law, economics, and the humanities within the French academic tradition, and has a genuinely humanistic ethos. But its mission is shaped primarily by the Franco-Turkish cultural partnership that sustains it, not by any explicit commitment to social-scientific research as a civilisational priority in its own right.

Older state universities, such as Istanbul University, Ankara University, and Hacettepe, have respected social science faculties characterised mainly by the mixture of natural and social sciences. These universities produce important scholarship, but the mix of natural and social sciences leads to a loss of focus, making in-depth, critical, and globally engaged inquiry and research difficult.

What separates Ibn Haldun University from all of them is something harder to fake than a mission statement: institutional singularity of purpose and vision. This is not a university that offers all the traditional programmes found at other universities, but rather a social sciences university with the social sciences at its centre. Its entire academic culture - hiring decisions, teaching, research agenda, and the questions master and doctoral students are trained to ask seriously - is organised around a single conviction: understanding human societies is the central intellectual vocation. In the view of Immanuel Wallerstein, there is a call to transcend the artificial boundaries between disciplines and between the social sciences and the humanities. Ibn Haldun University's interdisciplinary philosophy and its willingness to bring Islamic intellectual traditions into genuine dialogue with Western social theory are something close to that call in practice.

In conclusion, Ibn Haldun University is a bold effort to understand humanity and culture, as well as the complexities and problems of social life. The marginalisation and ignorance of the social sciences in contemporary universities cannot be defended intellectually or in practical terms. The crucial problems of the 21st century, including inequality, poverty, ethnic polarisation, climate crisis, mass migration, war, the erosion and abuse of human rights, and loss of trust in international law, are social in nature and call for a social-scientific understanding and solution. By positioning its entire institutional identity on this conviction, Ibn Haldun University does something a brave global university system desperately needs: it makes the case through its very existence and practice, not merely in its mission statement on paper. English-medium instruction obviously extends its scholarly reach beyond its Istanbul-based borders. Associating the university with Ibn Khaldun and his cultural heritage positions its work within a rich tradition of social inquiry and research that predates European intellectual history and does not depend on it. Its singular emphasis on the social sciences also sharply differentiates it from the widespread, multi-faculty competitors that dominate Turkish higher education. At a time when the social sciences are discredited and continually underfunded because their value cannot be reduced to immediate commercial returns, Ibn Haldun University stands as a principled institutional argument that understanding humans, human society, and its workings is not a secondary pursuit in life. It is the very reason Ibn Haldun University exists.