Knowledge production at a crossroads: rising antidemocracy and diminishing academic freedom

ABSTRACT

This essay links the global shift toward antidemocracy with the global attack on higher education. I argue that rising far-right politics in many countries is also politicizing higher education, in turn diminishing the freedom to research, think and teach. This is apparent across Europe, the Americas, Middle East, Asia, Africa and among supposedly leading liberal democracies such as the United States. A common strategy in far-right attacks on higher education has been to limit scholars’ claim to collective institutional autonomy and reduce scholarly conversation to an individual’s right to free speech. The new UK Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 illustrates this reductionism explicitly. To counter this trend, I argue for reframing academic freedom as social responsibility to wider societies, underscoring its collective dimensions and legibility and applicability to nonacademic audiences. This reframing is particularly important in global north countries given the dominance of the Euro-American academy in knowledge production, and the relative power of western scholars to push back against intellectual censorship. Drawing on the recent wave of political activism across social movements and union mobilization in the United States, I argue this presents an opportunity for connecting the defense of higher education with the defense of wider concerns around issues such as the climate crisis, labor conditions, anti-racism, conflict and abortion rights. I conclude that shifting the narrative about academic freedom is essential for building transnational support across class, race, ethnic, religious, gender and educational differences, and resisting escalating attacks on universities and colleges around the world.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• academic freedom
• social responsibility
• antidemocracy
• censorship
• policing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-states/freedom-world/2023.

2 https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2024/01/09/global-economic-prospects-january-2024-press-release.

3 https://monitor.civicus.org/about/.

4 UNESCO (1997). Recommendation concerning the Status of Higher-Education Teaching Personnel. UNESCO, November 11, 1997 https://www.unesco.org/en/legal-affairs/recommendation-concerning-status-higher-education-teaching-personnel.

5 See Scholars at Risk, Promoting Higher Education Values, 6–10, available at https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/wpcontent/uploads/2020/05/SAR_PHV_DiscussionGuide_v20_ONLINE.pdf.

6 https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/2024/02/joint-submission-to-the-united-nations-special-rapporteur-on-the-right-to-education/?emci=cb40452d-53cb-ee11-85f9-002248223794&emdi=86d9719a-74e0-ee11-85fb-002248223794&ceid=1647205.

7 https://talloiresnetwork.tufts.edu/who-we-are/.

8 https://www.oas.org/en/iachr/reports/questionnaires/2021_principiosinteramericanos_libertadacademica_autonomiauniversitaria_eng.pdf.

9 According to labor journalist Hamilton Nolan, in the US in the 1950s one in three people was a member of a union, but this has been reduced to approximately one in ten people today (Nolan 2024).

10 https://www.nea.org/about-nea/media-center/press-releases/3-million-strong-national-education-association-recommends-president-joe-biden-and-vice-president#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIn%202024%2C%20the%20future%20of,Biden%20and%20Vice%20President%20Harris.%E2%80%9D.

11 https://store.chronicle.com/products/the-unionized-campus?utm_campaign=che-st-rpt-tuc&utm_medium=em&utm_source=mkto&utm_content=23-10-13-e1&mkt_tok=OTMxLUVLQS0yMTgAAAGO15R23EYn18gNDcL4Sk44_cs79dn4E4XARdI6-yyXe19DKQZ14p-lwQP3XV1VD6z8JYQUbmHGqErpRXrGOW50mBP1DW9NXJd2wK7QNTwnKTdxiAU.

12 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/21/us-universities-wave-strikes.