Scholars at Risk launches 2024 Edition of Free to Think report

In the Americas, this report highlights evidence of threats to academic freedom in Nicaragua, the United States and Canada.

Fuente: Con informaciones de Scholars at Risk (SAR)

Click here to read the 2024 Free to Think report

Scholars at Risk (SAR) has launched its 2024 Free to Think report. The attacks on higher education described in this report imperil both the lives and livelihoods of scholars and students. They upend scholars’ careers, jeopardize students’ futures, and result in death, injuries, and the deprivation of liberty.  But even more, they threaten the foundations of social progress by degrading the quality of teaching, research, and discourse on campus. Ultimately, they impact all of us by damaging higher education’s unique capacity to drive the social, political, cultural, and economic development from which we all benefit.

Free to Think 2024 documents 391 attacks on scholars, students, and institutions in 51 countries and territories, from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024. The reporting period was marked by several concerning trends. Among these, intrastate and interstate armed conflict brought devastation to the higher education systems of multiple countries. Government and university authorities—often under pressure from external actors, including donors, politicians, or other community members—cracked down on dissent and disfavored speech, both in the classroom and outside of it. This often resulted in university students and scholars losing their positions or facing arrest and detention, including for their participation in peaceful protests. In many cases, such actions were bolstered by new illiberal laws and policies that undermined university autonomy, academic freedom, and international research collaboration. These developments created the conditions for more violent and grave attacks on higher education

Academic Freedom in the Americas

The report highlights SAR particular concerns about academic freedom in three countries in the Americas.

Nicaragua is situated among the states that introduced and implemented illiberal legislation and policies that undermined university autonomy and academic freedom. As several authoritarian countries, Nicaragua introduced measures that directly expanded government authority over the higher education sector: the government of this country passed legislation further eroding university autonomy. This included alleged reforms to Law 89, the Law of Autonomy of Higher Education Institutions, and Law 582, the General Education Law, which granted the government further administrative and financial oversight of universities. According to the Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua—a United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights mandated independent research group—“the university sector of Nicaragua as a whole no longer has independent institutions.”

The United States and Canada are situated among the liberal countries where legislation and policies provided state and university actors with pretexts for penalizing scholars and students. In the United States, elected officials in some states passed bills to shape or control the content of  university curricula, tenure systems and approvals,  accreditation processes, and mission statements. The bills  often used vague and overbroad language that made it difficult for faculty to understand their scope, eroding academic freedom even more, and difficult for administrators to implement narrowly, eroding institutional autonomy.

The report also shows that United States universities canceled lectures, poetry readings, and film screenings related to the violence in the Middle East. Often, university leaders justified the cancellations by expressing unspecified security concerns. The use of violence to break up related protests is also mentioned: according to Free to Think report, state and higher education officials called in police or security forces to break up protests, often resulting in clashes, with police sometimes using less-lethal methods of crowd control, including teargas and rubber bullets.

In Canada, a  proposed foreign influence transparency registry, for example, requires scientists working for one of the country’s three main research agencies to flag any research proposals they deem  problematic—undefined—for review by  defense and intelligence officers. The lack of standards and transparency in the proposed review would create an excessive risk of arbitrary, biased, or overbroad restrictions, undermining academic freedom and the free exchange of non-sensitive ideas and expertise.

About this report

Free to Think is an annual report by Scholars at Risk’s Academic Freedom Monitoring Project. The report explores concerning trends in attacks on higher education communities around the world with the aims of raising awareness and urging diverse state and non-state stakeholders to join us in protecting and promoting academic freedom.

Through its Academic Freedom Monitoring Project, Scholars at Risk (SAR) responds to these attacks by identifying and tracking key incidents, with the aim of protecting vulnerable individuals, raising awareness, encouraging accountability, and promoting the dialogue and understanding necessary to prevent future threats. Since 2015, SAR has been publishing Free to Think, a series of annual reports analyzing attacks on higher education communities around the world.

Click here to read the report

Categories: News, Reports, Uncategorized