Jakarta –
Professor at Sweden’s Stockholm University rejected applications for internships from Turkish students. The reasons are considered political. What’s that?
Fatma Zehra S, a third-year student at the Faculty of Psychology at Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul, Turkey, has been accepted for the 2023 Erasmus+ summer internship program. This program facilitates student applicants to choose the campus of their choice for internships.
Fatma chose to apply for an internship at Sweden’s Stockholm University and sent her application email on November 23, 2022. He expressed interest in a clinical psychology research project led by Professor Per Carlbring.
Hours later, his email received a reply from Carlbring, “I would love to host you. However, since Turkey won’t allow Sweden to join NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), I have to decline. Sorry!”
“After receiving this reply, I was spontaneously shocked. It took me a long time to process it,” said Fatma as quoted by TRT World, Saturday (14/1/2023) quoted detikEdu, Sunday (15/1/2023).
Fatma said her experience could be just the “tip of the iceberg” and serious enough for her to file a formal complaint.
“If he did this to me, he would do this to other students of a different racial background who are applying to university,” he said.
He proceeded to file a discrimination complaint with Stockholm University on 5 December 2023, describing Professor Carlbring’s response as “politically judged” and “discriminatory, if not outright racist”.
“Mixing citizens and student – who simply wants to pursue studies under the best conditions – with the political attitude of the government of his country of origin, is an insulting way of judging a person’s skills and character,” he wrote in his complaint.
His complaint email was responded to by the Deputy Head of the Psychology Department, Torun Lindholm Ojmyr, on December 6, 2023, who apologized for the incident. Ojmyr claims Professor Carlbring acknowledged that his behavior was inappropriate and wrong. He added that there would be some action from the Department of Psychology going forward, including equality training under Sweden’s Discrimination Act.
However, Fatma felt that the statement did not have enough impact.
“What I want them to do is take active action about his behavior. Discrimination training is okay, but how can that be measured,” Fatma sued questioning whether it was enough so that incidents like this don’t happen again in the future.
He also has yet to receive a formal apology from Professor Carlbring in person. “At this point, I was hoping he would send me an apology, but he didn’t, and I’m disappointed by that,” she said.
“I think this behavior is childish, racist and completely inappropriate. I am strong mentally, but other students who feel insecure about applying to a different program will not be able to recover from such an answer,” he said.
Despite this negative experience, Fatma said her application was received by a different professor in the psychology department at the same university, and she plans to continue her internship this summer.
Meanwhile, TRT World confirmed, Head of the Psychology Department of the University of Stockholm Fredrik Jonsson said that “We receive a lot of inquiries from students who are interested in visiting us as research interns. We cannot accept all of them, but expect any request to be responded to in a professional manner. In this case, as soon as we were aware of the matter, we acted and handled it according to our procedure.”
Professor Carlbring did not respond to requests for comment from TRT World.
Finland and Sweden formally signed up to join NATO in May 2022, changing the course of decades of military non-alignment. This decision was triggered by Russia’s war against Ukraine.
However, Turkey – a member of Nato for more than 70 years – voiced objections, saying both countries had tolerated and supported terrorist groups.
In June 2022, Turkey and the two Nordic countries signed a memorandum at the summit NATO to address Ankara’s security concerns, paving the way for their membership in the alliance. Seven months have passed since the signing of the memorandum and Sweden has yet to fulfill the agreed recommendations.
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(nwk/twu)
