On Nov. 19, Turkey’s Official Gazette, where every new law gets published to become valid, published a bizarre amendment to the regulations of the Council of Higher Education (YOK). This government institution, established by the military after the 1980 coup, controls all Turkish universities, even private ones, as one of the icons of Turkey’s highly centralized and unabashedly overbearing state system. But now the YOK will have even more power, the Official Gazette announced, for it will have the authority to close down private universities if their administrators “execute or support activities against the state’s indivisible integrity.”

This means, in more practical terms, the private universities that are deemed as enemies of the state by the masters of the state may soon be confiscated by the state. The new regulation says such universities will not be closed down, but only taken over by the YOK, which will appoint new administrators and put it under an existing state university. It is a polite way of saying that they will be confiscated.

The regulation increases the authority of the YOK on every level, making every university liable to inspection by YOK at any moment. It also gives the YOK the authority to suspend certain programs in universities, suspend taking new students or close down the whole institution indefinitely. Some of the listed reasons for these punishments may be relatively objective criteria, such as cheating in exams, grades or student transfers. But other criteria seem just draconian, such as “not giving the YOK the necessary documents for inspection at the right time.” The most worrying part, the crime of “executing or supporting activities against the state's indivisible integrity,” is clearly a very vague clause that can easily be used to punish political dissidents.

Many people in Turkey think that this new draconian YOK regulation was planned by the government — or, more probably, by the Presidential Palace — with a specific target in mind: the universities that are affiliated with the Gulen movement, President Tayyip Erdogan’s biggest “enemy within.” Turkey has a total of 190 universities; 114 of them are public, 76 of them are private, which are called “foundation universities.” Of these foundation universities, 17 are affiliated with the Gulen movement, and thus they may soon be closed thanks to this new regulation, as a pro-government pundit zealously celebrated in his column.