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One by one, Turkish professors are taking their lecture halls offline. Not because anyone accused them of teaching badly, but because YouTube paid them for it.
Türkiye has now decided that once advertising money is involved, this kind of teaching stops counting as academic work and starts counting as trade.
The decision arrived as a directive from the Presidency's General Secretariat to the Council of Higher Education (YOK), declaring that income civil servants and academics earn from YouTube, social media, websites or mobile apps falls under the commercial activity ban.
Since early September, professors nationwide have quietly begun closing channels that once connected them to millions of viewers.
The process began on June 17, when YOK asked the Presidency for a legal opinion on academics' digital publishing activities.
On Aug. 20, Türkiye's Revenue Administration prepared an assessment, and on Sept. 2, the Presidency's General Secretariat for Personnel and Principles told YOK that digital platform earnings should count as commercial activity under Article 28.
That article bars civil servants, including professors at state universities, from being registered as a merchant, holding a second private-sector job, or running a private office for professional gain.
Türkiye's tax code exempts content creators from income tax up to ₺5.3 million ($109,000) a year in 2026, but the directive specifies this exemption does not remove the commercial activity restriction.
Regular income from ads, sponsorships, memberships, or platform payouts is enough to trigger scrutiny, regardless of amount.
The ban targets only civil servants. Scholars at Türkiye's foundation universities, who work under private contracts, remain unaffected.
Prof. Altay Tayfun Ozcan, a history professor at Kutahya Dumlupinar University in western Türkiye, stopped publishing on YouTube once the directive reached his university.
"It was an opportunity to spread accurate information. From now on, we will only meet in books," he said.
Assoc. Prof. Suleyman Tekir of Akdeniz University in the southern city of Antalya warned that restricting academic content leaves the field open to unqualified creators. "History content production is being left to amateurs and hacks," he said.
Assoc. Prof. Ozgur Tufekci, who teaches at Karadeniz Technical University in the Black Sea city of Trabzon, argued the answer is not to push academics off digital platforms but to build a clear framework encouraging quality content instead.
Not everyone framed the ruling as a ban on knowledge sharing itself. Dr. Ibrahim Can, a finance expert, said that if income is transparent and taxed, an activity should not be considered unethical simply because the person doing it is an academic, and that the law should apply equally to everyone.
Talking to Türkiye Today, Oguz Ergin, a computer engineering professor at TOBB University of Economics and Technology in Ankara, said his own informal review found roughly 146 Turkish academics running personal YouTube channels, a count he stressed is not official or complete.
Those channels split roughly 92 to 40 between state and foundation universities, with a combined 11.27 million subscribers.
Modeling their earnings against typical ad payouts suggests the income at stake for academics at state universities totals some ₺9 million to ₺18 million ($186,000 to $372,000) a year, split thin enough that most earn only a few thousand lira a month.
His objection, he said, is not to a ban on selling knowledge but to classifying ad revenue on free educational content as trade in the first place, since professors already earn royalties from books and fees from peer review, and platforms withhold tax on YouTube earnings before it reaches a creator's account.
"The state recognizes this income type and taxes it on one hand, and on the other hand treats the same income as a commercial activity for a public employee," he said.
He said he has no evidence the directive was written to target any specific person, but that applying scrutiny unevenly across similar activities naturally raises suspicion about whether the goal is a general legal standard or a tool that could be used selectively.
Ergin also questioned why YOK needed an outside opinion on the matter at all, given that it independently created Science Communication Offices and already runs its own YouTube channel.
"Does YOK's leadership lack the institutional confidence to make its own assessment on such a basic issue, or is there some other need behind seeking this opinion?" he asked.
To some scholars, the deeper problem is not financial but institutional.
Last year, YOK set up Science Communication Offices at universities across Türkiye to help academic knowledge reach beyond campus walls, and it still runs its own accounts online.
Dr. Omer Kamaci of Istanbul Technical University's Eurasia Institute of Earth Sciences, who posts science videos without monetizing them, said "content producer" is often equated with people who profit from it, when the two are separate questions.
Nurcan Seven, founder of the science communication platform Hypatia Bilim, said she values YOK's push for Science Communication Offices but warned that restricting the platforms academics use to communicate risks undermining that effort unless rules target genuine commercial activity and conflicts of interest.
The rollout itself has been inconsistent. Some scholars say their university never forwarded the directive, while others closed channels preemptively despite earning nothing from them.
Neither YOK nor the Presidency has clarified whether a channel with monetization off, but a large enough audience to imply "earning potential," still falls within the ban.
For now, professors who spent years building an audience for their subjects have fewer options: publish through university-branded channels, write books, give conferences, or stop altogether. The directive says nothing about who, or what, fills that space next.
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