Universities worldwide are facing “increasingly aggressive” attacks, not only in authoritarian regimes but also in democratic states, as exemplified by troubling new data from the world’s two superpowers, the United States and China. In its latest report, the campaign group Scholars at Risk (SAR) warns that higher-education institutions face escalating threats to their autonomy, academic freedom and the safety of their scholarly communities, as governments of every stripe seek to dictate what may be taught, studied or discussed.
SAR’s Free to Think 2025 documents 395 attacks on scholars, students and universities across 49 countries and territories between July 2024 and June 2025. The findings reveal not only persistent repression in authoritarian states but also an assault on academic freedom in established democracies.
Yet even these figures likely understate the scale of repression. The Academic Freedom Monitoring Project (AFMP) – the research base for SAR’s annual Free to Think reports – relies primarily on open-source media, which inevitably leaves gaps in countries where academia and the press are tightly controlled. “The paradox,” as the report’s authors observe, “is that the most repressive environments can appear benign simply because little information is able to emerge from them.”
Robert Quinn, SAR’s executive director, said national leaders were “systematically attacking the higher-education sector’s ability to foster independent thought and critique power”. Across every continent, he added, authorities had sought to “ban the study of disfavoured topics” and to target individuals “for what they teach, study, or say.”
The report identifies the US as a growing source of concern, noting that political pressures on universities have intensified across successive administrations and now threaten to damage the sector’s reputation both domestically and internationally. Its AFMP recorded a sharp rise in incidents – 15–20 annually before 2023, rising to more than 80 in 2024.
As Free to Think 2024 noted, state and local governments under the Biden administration had already used legislation to suppress disfavoured speech and reshape campus governance. After Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, the report says, the federal government launched “an unprecedented range of actions” aimed at controlling admissions, hiring, research, teaching, departmental structures, speech policies, disciplinary procedures and finance. US authorities also widened restrictions on international scholars and students. In March 2025, for instance, border agents denied entry to a French scientist after finding messages critical of President Trump on his devices, prompting visit cancellations by other academics and calls for a boycott of US conferences.
If the US shows how academic freedom can erode when a federal democracy becomes politicised, China, its only rival superpower, illustrates what happens when political control is complete.
Nowhere is that control more visible than in the physical detention and silencing of scholars, with the status and whereabout of several Uyghur academics from Xinjiang, in north-west China, remains unknown. Rahile Dawut, Ilham Tohti, Tashpolat Tiyip and Abdulqadir Jalaleddin, among others, have all been imprisoned in connection with their research or cultural work.
While censorship and a tightly controlled media environment make it difficult to verify conditions on the ground, investigations by human-rights organisations depict a system under pervasive ideological supervision. Surveillance cameras in classrooms, networks of student informants and the appointment of senior university officials vetted for political loyalty all attest to the depth of political oversight.
Beijing has also sought to project influence beyond its borders through international exchange programmes that serve as instruments of soft power and, in some cases, as channels for the transnational harassment of Chinese scholars and students abroad, including in Britain.
In Hong Kong, long a regional hub for independent research, academic freedom has sharply declined since the Beijing-backed National Security Law (NSL) was imposed on the territory in 2020. The measure has chilled debate and encouraged self-censorship, especially in political-science departments, by criminalising vaguely defined threats to “national security”. Those restrictions deepened in March 2024, when Chief Executive John Lee signed the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, Hong Kong’s long-promised Article 23 legislation. Expanding on the NSL, the ordinance allows closed-door trials, permits detention for sixteen days without charge, and empowers the government to ban organisations or companies deemed to be “working for foreign forces”. Academics have repeatedly warned that its broad and deliberately vague definition of “foreign interference” could expose researchers engaged in international collaboration to prosecution.
Since the first security law took effect, Hong Kong has seen a steady exodus of scholars, a trend observers say is likely to accelerate under the new ordinance. In October 2024, that pressure turned to outright expulsion when Hong Kong’s Immigration Department refused to renew the visa of Rowena He, a Canadian historian at the Chinese University of Hong Kong whose work focuses on the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and censorship in China. CUHK subsequently terminated her contract, citing the visa refusal.
Beyond the US and China, the picture for academic freedom painted by SAR is bleak. “The space for academic freedom has shrunk at an accelerating pace over the past decade,” the report concludes. “Even in societies that have long had strong and stable democratic institutions, elected officials with autocratic impulses are using both the levers of democracy and extra-legal administrative measures to undermine democratic institutions, including universities.”
If you’d like to stay up to date with cases like this and our wider work defending academic freedom, sign up for our monthly newsletter.