Academic freedom at risk: Creating centres of resistance

Over the past 30 years, the famous line from the 1995 film Forrest Gump – “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get” – has proven true in many ways.

For higher education, this period brought profound transformations, especially an expansion of international cooperation and student mobility, and a surge in academic freedom and institutional autonomy.

However, in recent years, these trends have been increasingly questioned, challenged and even dismantled, as geopolitical tensions, nationalist policies and ideological shifts toward populism, illiberal democracy and autocracy reshape the landscape of global higher education. In many ways, these developments have caught higher education by surprise.

Take, for example, academic freedom, ie, the freedom of academic staff and students to research, teach, learn and disseminate knowledge within and outside the higher education sector. In recent years, we have witnessed a global erosion of academic freedom, even in democracies.

The Academic Freedom Index, which monitors the global state of this fundamental academic value, reveals a disturbing trend: in the last decade, academic freedom has declined in 22 countries, representing more than half of the global population, including major democracies like Brazil, India, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The European Parliament Academic Freedom Monitor also documents decreasing de jure and de facto levels of academic freedom in many European Union member states.

Threats to academic freedom come from various sources, including governments, institutional leadership, civil society and private actors.

These threats undermine both ‘negative freedom’ – the absence of external barriers to academic inquiry – and ‘positive freedom’, which implies conditions that enable free intellectual exploration, such as institutional autonomy or adequate labour and financial conditions. While, traditionally, protectors of academic freedom were the first to be attacked, nowadays threats to conditions promoting academic freedom are more insidious but equally harmful.

Unconventional responses

In addition to domestic challenges, geopolitical crises are posing new threats to academic freedom. Together, these developments have brought about existential challenges to universities and have driven institutions, staff and students across borders.

Hence the return of ‘flying universities’, a concept originating in 19th-century Poland, where they were created to provide an alternative independent educational space free from political reprisals. These universities ‘flew’ from place to place to avoid detection, which is how they got their name.

Today, flying universities take many forms: universities in exile (for example, the European Humanities University), invisible universities (for instance, Off University, Spring University Myanmar and the Invisible University for Ukraine), refugee education initiatives (for example, OLIve – the Open Learning Initiative), and cross-border flying universities (such as Central European University).

These institutions arose not only as safe havens for learning but also as centres of resistance, providing a platform for critical thinking, academic freedom and the continuation of the mission of higher education. Although extreme, the return of flying universities demonstrates the demand for unconventional institutional responses to authoritarian pressures and geopolitical tensions.

At the policy level, we have also seen a number of initiatives to protect and promote academic freedom. Take recent policy initiatives in Europe, where overall levels of academic freedom are still relatively high compared to other regions of the world.

In the European Higher Education Area, the Bologna Process proposes common definitions of fundamental values in higher education, including academic freedom, and is developing a monitoring framework to ensure that member states honour their commitments.

The European Commission seeks to promote respect for academic freedom in response to democratic backsliding by proposing a set of guiding principles for scientific research.

The European Parliament puts out a yearly academic freedom monitor and seeks to establish enforceable protections at the level of the European Union.

The Council of Europe has started the project ‘Academic Freedom in Action’ to highlight higher education’s essential role in supporting democratic values and institutions.

The challenge lies in coordinating these initiatives to avoid redundant efforts, promote synergies between policies, ensure practical implementation and monitor developments.

Research possibilities

Understanding the new threats and broader impacts of academic freedom erosions is crucial for effective policy action.

While research on this topic has expanded, a comprehensive comparative examination across regions and disciplines is needed to identify commonalities and differences in how academic freedom is shaped, contested and defended in varying sociopolitical and institutional landscapes. Further development of methodological tools to measure and monitor academic freedom across contexts should be part of this endeavour.

The return of flying universities also offers fertile ground to investigate alternative models of institutional resistance and the role of academic solidarity in times of geopolitical tensions.

Even though nationalist tendencies lead to deinternationalisation and a clampdown on mobility, threats to academic freedom travel across borders, highlighting how interconnected the challenges faced by academic institutions worldwide have become.

Daniela Craciun is assistant professor of higher education policy at the Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies, University of Twente, Netherlands. E-mail: d.craciun@utwente.nl. This work was supported by a starter grant from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. This article was first published in the 30th anniversary edition of International Higher Education.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.