Melih Bulu

Bulu completed his higher education in the Industrial Engineering Department of Middle East Technical University (1992). He later earned his master's degree in finance at Boğaziçi University, Department of Business Administration, and received his doctorate education in the field of management and organization in the same university. He holds a doctorate in finance.[7] After completing his education, he worked as an engineer at FMC-Nurol, which produces armored personnel carrier in the defense industry, and at TUSAŞ, which manufactures aerospace systems. He then worked as an assistant manager at P&G.[8]

Bulu founded the AKP's Sarıyer branch in 2002.[6] In 2009 he was a candidate of the mayoral election in Ataşehir, but was not nominated.[9] In 2015, his internal party nomination as a candidate for the 1st electoral district in Istanbul failed.[10][11]

Bulu, who taught Business Strategy and Game Theory as a part-time faculty at Boğaziçi and Istanbul Commerce universities between 2003 and 2010, started to work as a full-time academic since 2009. He received the title of associate professor in 2008 and professor in 2016. Between 2010 and 2014, he worked as the Head of Istanbul Şehir University Department of Business Administration. He served as the founding rector of İstinye University in Istanbul between 2016-2019[12] and started to work as the rector of Haliç University in 2020.[8]

He is one of the founders of the International Competitiveness Research Agency (URAK) in 2004. He first served as the agency's general coordinator and was later appointed to the presidency of the agency board between 2017-2019.[13] In 2021, with the President's decision he was appointed as the rector of Boğaziçi University from a list of 9 candidates proposed by YÖK.[14][15][16]

Upon students reacting the decision for cameras being mandatory in exams, Melih Bulu supposedly responded to his students' tweets with a fake account, accusing them of cheating on exams when he was rector of Haliç University. And then he liked tweets sent by himself with his main account.[17][18]

After the detention of four students in January 2021 Bulu tweeted at 1am a Tweet, which contained homophobic speech. He erased the tweet some hours later.[19]

His work "Measuring competitiveness of cities: Turkish experience" written in 2011 is allegedly copied from "The environment and the entrepreneurial city: searching for the urban 'sustainability fix' in Manchester and Leeds".[20][21] According to Cumhuriyet's report, the part he quoted in his article was an exact copy of the summary part of the other article.[21] In the same report, he was accused of plagiarism for his doctorate thesis as, despite citing sources, he had not complied with APA rules regarding quoting.[21] Bulu dismissed the plagiarism allegations as "slander".[22] He talked about the allegations on Veyis Ateş's program that aired on Habertürk TV on 5 January 2021:[23]

The whole plagiarism allegations are a slander. There are literature sections in the first parts of these theses. Everything there is a quote from somewhere. I have quotes in my thesis as well. At the end, the sources were cited. All the issue is about not putting quotation marks around some quoted parts, that's the matter. This is not something [important] after all, in our time, when I was writing these theses, we did not have any written instructions in front of us saying 'it should be done like this, it has to be done like this'. These formats are constantly changing. The bottom line is that I cited the source from which I got the quotes.

Similarly, an analysis on the Science Integrity Digest site included findings that Melih Bulu plagiarized his doctoral thesis. In the third part of Bulu's thesis written in 2003, between 30 and 50 percent was found to be plagiarized.[24]

Boğaziçi University students stated that the rector should not be appointed but elected and criticized the action as a part of anti-democratic practices which allowed President Erdogan to unilaterally appoint university rectors following the 2016 coup d'état.[25][26] Faculty members stated he was the first rector designated outside a university in Turkey since the 1980 coup d'état.[2] Bulu was protested by students who were outraged by the appointment which they deemed to be a political move by the ruling AKP.[4] They said: "We do not accept it as it clearly violates academic freedom and scientific autonomy as well as the democratic values of our university", along with slogans "Melih Bulu is not our rector."[2] Editor in chief of Yeni Akit, a pro-government newspaper, Ali Karahasanoğlu criticized the protests saying that: "As if a professor was not appointed in accordance with legislation and customs but a shopkeeper from Mahmutpaşa."[27] After nearly a month of protest it became clear that no academic of the university wanted to work with Bulu as a vice-president.[28]