In its latest global survey of threats to academic freedom, Scholars at Risk (SAR) documents 382 attacks on scholars, students and universities across 59 countries in a single year, ranging from killings and imprisonment to dismissals and political interference – but as CAF’s burgeoning casefiles suggest, its findings may in fact represent only the most visible part of a far larger problem.
Published annually since 2015, Free to Think draws on SAR’s Academic Freedom Monitoring Project, which investigates and verifies attacks on higher education communities around the world. Its methodology is deliberately rigorous, with researchers triangulating reports and requiring corroboration from at least two independent sources before an incident is classified as verified.
The latest figures include 165 killings, violent attacks and disappearances. Among the most serious was the targeted killing by unidentified gunmen of Muhammad Khan, an assistant professor of Brahui – the language of an indigenous tribal group in Balochistan. Rights organisations and local activists allege that the killing was state-backed. The report separately documents a wider pattern of abductions and enforced disappearances targeting Baloch university students, with Pakistan’s intelligence agencies and army credibly accused of involvement.
A further 50 cases involved the permanent or temporary loss of an academic position, or threats of the same, through dismissal, suspension or denial of contract renewal or promotion. The SRM Institute of Science and Technology in India, for instance, fired Lora Santhakumar, an assistant professor of literature, over social media posts criticising Indian military action in Pakistan. One read: “Say NO to war. And don’t be afraid to say so, even if it is not the popular opinion.”
A further 63 cases involved wrongful imprisonment or prosecution used to punish, deter or impede nonviolent academic activity or the exercise of other protected rights, including in China, Iran, Russia and Venezuela. Another 93 “other” attacks involved interference with institutional and curricular autonomy in countries as diverse as the United States, France, Armenia and Argentina. In the case of the former, SAR cites President Trump’s “Compact for Excellence in Higher Education”, which it says attempted “to incentivize universities into committing to the administration’s political agenda in exchange for priority access to federal research funds”.
Sobering as those figures are, they can capture only part of the damage. As SAR readily concedes, its figures represent “only a fraction” of the attacks that take place: “A comprehensive accounting of all attacks occurring annually is not possible given their scope, variety, and complexity.”
But even a monitoring exercise of this kind faces a deeper problem of measurement. SAR’s definition of an “attack” is concerned principally with overt action: intentional acts involving violence, coercion or restriction. As the report itself makes clear, it does not generally include other infringements of academic freedom that lack those violent, coercive or restrictive dimensions.
That necessarily leaves largely uncounted a whole terrain of academic unfreedom generated by cultures of intellectual and ideological conformity, in which the possibility of professional sanction remains latent, incidents that do occur may go unreported for fear of the consequences, and self-censorship becomes a technique of professional self-preservation.
We see something of this in our own casework. In England, universities and other higher education providers registered with the Office for Students are subject to a statutory duty under section A1 of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 to take the steps that, having particular regard to the importance of freedom of speech, are reasonably practicable to secure freedom of speech within the law for their staff, members, students and for visiting speakers. Yet even where conduct appears difficult to reconcile with that duty – or with an institution’s own academic freedom policies – the affected academic is all too often reluctant even to report what has happened for fear of professional repercussions.
In some cases, it isn’t difficult to understand why. CAF has repeatedly heard from academics with gender-critical – or sex-realist – views who feel they have been penalised for expressing them, but have little confidence in the internal processes available to challenge what has happened. After all, an initial email from an HR partner containing preferred pronouns in their signature and an LGBTQ+ Ally logo immediately beneath it is unlikely to reassure an academic whose complaint is precisely that colleagues have treated their views on women’s single-sex spaces as “transphobic”.
But the problem extends well beyond disputes about sex and gender, arising wherever contested intellectual theories or frameworks become embedded – or appear to have become embedded – in institutional practice, leaving academics who question their premises unsure whether those responsible for adjudicating a complaint share the very assumptions they are challenging.
For instance, CAF is currently supporting an academic who is being pressured to step down from a departmental EDI role because her colleagues deem her insufficiently committed to particular tenets of critical race theory. Yet because she is, understandably, worried about how a complaint would be received by HR, and whether it would leak out to colleagues, she is considering stepping down rather than challenging the pressure being placed upon her. The result? There may never be any institutional or documentary record of this attack on her academic freedom.
That is the difficulty with measuring academic freedom through reported incidents alone, still less treating them as anything approaching a complete picture of the problem. In CAF’s experience, for every case that becomes visible, there are at least half a dozen others in which an academic decides that the safest course is simply to keep quiet.
As SAR itself observes, a single incident can have an impact far beyond the person immediately affected, as others alter their research, teaching or expression for fear that the same thing could happen to them. Factor in the cases that never surface in the first place, as well as what this insidious chilling effect costs in lectures never given, research questions never proposed and interventions never articulated, and the true extent of the problem becomes harder still to measure.