Guest Columnist
John Richard Schrock
Academic Freedom Declines Worldwide
Academic freedom globally is declining in 23 countries and has increased in only ten countries compared to 2022. The United States is one of the 23 where academic freedom is decreasing.
This analysis is produced by the V-Dem Institute (Varieties of Democracy) at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden and the political science department at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität of Erlangen, Germany.
The Academic Freedom Index (AFI) is compiled annually based on five indicators: “the freedom to research and teach; the freedom of academic exchange and dissemination; the institutional autonomy of universities; campus integrity; and the freedom of academic and cultural expression.”
The assessment of this latest report on AFI for 2023 is made by 2,329 experts from countries around the world, who are continuously reviewing their nation’s “...literature and in-depth discussions with “policymakers, academics and advocates in the higher education field.” They also are involved in comparing “...factual country-year information on constitutional guarantees and commitments to academic freedom under international human rights law.”
The result is a score between zero and one. Those scoring between 0.8 and 1.0 are considered in the status of “fully free.” Eighteen countries rank in this top group and include: Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Finland, Costa Rica and ten others.
Those scoring between 0.6 and below 8.0 are “mostly free.” The United States is near the bottom of this second “mostly free” group with 87 countries above the U.S. in academic freedom. With 179 countries ranked in AFI 2024, this places the U.S. in the middle. There is a range similar to a confidence interval that allows a country to rank slightly higher or lower. However, the U.S. is among the 26 countries that “...have undergone significant and substantial declines in academic freedom in the last decade.”
Other countries in academic freedom decline include El Salvador, Venezuela, Russia, India and Hungary. In some cases, political polarization resulted in a dramatic downturn, as in the case when Prime Minister Orban won election in 2010 and the AFI score dropped to the bottom 20-30% category. The AFI report indicates that “the last 20 years of democratic backsliding is primarily driven by anti-pluralist, nationalist parties.” Unless there are domestic legal frameworks protecting universities, autocrats impose “...a climate of fear that discourages scientists from asking controversial questions or sharing their findings with policymakers and the public.” This curbs “....researchers’ freedom to research and teach, notably when a scientific topic becomes politically and socially salient, such as climate change, pandemics, gender studies, or migration research.”
The next lower group that the U.S. has not yet reached is 0.4 to 0.6 described as “moderately restricted.” Countries in 0.2 to 0.4 are “severely restricted” and 0.0 to 0.2 are “completely restricted.”
This last category includes Egypt, Cuba, Turkiye, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and others, with North Korea at the very bottom. The report notes that today, 3.6 billion people “...now live in countries where academic freedom is completely restricted.
The peak year for the most academic freedom was 2006. The decline that accelerated after 2012 was due both to losses in academic freedom and population growth in countries with the least freedom.
The long-term AFI shows the pre-2006 academic freedom increase was a result of the “third wave of democratization in the 1980s and 1990s” where“...a wave of academic freedom growth emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s.” Since then, the world has mostly experienced democratic backsliding and a loss of university autonomy.
Recent actions in the United States now include book banning and restrictions on teaching about race, sex education and gender identity. And governors, legislators and court judges are now restricting medical professionals and scientists and returning anti-evolution intelligent design to the classrooms.
It is very likely that the AFI score for the United States for the 2024 year will continue to descend into the bottom half of countries worldwide.