Scholars at Risk’s latest report documents 382 attacks on higher education worldwide and highlights cases across the Americas, reinforcing the urgent need to protect academic freedom as a fundamental human right
The new edition of Free to Think, published by Scholars at Risk (SAR), provides a stark overview of the growing threats facing higher education communities around the world. The 2026 report documents 382 attacks against scholars, students, and higher education institutions in 59 countries and territories between July 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026, including cases of violence, wrongful imprisonment, disappearances, restrictions on teaching and research, and interference with institutional autonomy.
The report warns that governments are increasingly seeking to exert political control over higher education through measures that restrict university autonomy, interfere with curricula and research, influence funding, and undermine independent academic governance.
“Universities are critical to a democratic society because they cultivate critical thinking. People in power often dislike having the ideas that sustain their power questioned. As democracy comes under strain, governments interfere with higher education,” said Robert Quinn, Executive Director of Scholars at Risk.
The findings are particularly relevant to the Americas, where the report documents cases in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, the United States, and Venezuela. These cases illustrate how threats to academic freedom can take different forms across the continent, from political and institutional interference to violence, campus disruption, restrictions on teaching, and attacks on students and scholars.
In Argentina, for example, the report documents a case at the National University of San Luis, where teaching materials used by Professor Leonardo Seguín in a Molecular Biology and Genetic Engineering course were removed and labeled as “indoctrination.” The material included the so-called grandparentage index, a statistical formula that has been used to help identify and reunite children who were appropriated during Argentina’s military dictatorship.
In Colombia, the report describes protests, clashes, vandalism, and disruptions at several universities, noting that while academic freedom is generally respected, these incidents affected the ability of students to learn and professors to teach. In Ecuador, security forces entered the Central University amid a protest connected to a national strike, clashing with students and detaining several of them.
The report also documents more severe forms of violence in the region. In Guatemala, unidentified gunmen assassinated Edy Josué Romero Tzin, director of the Petén Regional Campus of the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala. In Venezuela, the report describes a prolonged deterioration in academic freedom, including the imprisonment of scholars, cuts to university budgets, institutional instability, low wages, limited access to research resources, and restrictions on classroom content.
In the United States, meanwhile, the report identifies an escalation in government interference with higher education, including measures affecting tenure, teaching, research funding, university governance, and the participation of international scholars and students.
At the same time, Free to Think 2026 offers an important reminder that decline is not irreversible. Brazil is presented as a case of recovery, with the Academic Freedom Index showing a significant rebound following years of declining academic freedom and institutional autonomy. The report notes that Brazil’s AFI score rose from 0.44 in 2019 to 0.85 in 2025, returning the country to the “fully free” category.
Academic freedom is a human right — and a democratic imperative
Beyond documenting individual attacks, the report places these cases within a broader international framework for protecting academic freedom. In 2024, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education called on states to recognize academic freedom as an autonomous, self-standing human right. The UN Human Rights Council subsequently recognized academic freedom as a key dimension of the right to education and emphasized its importance for scientific progress, knowledge, and the protection of human rights.
The Principles for Implementing the Right to Academic Freedom, included in the report, affirm that academic freedom is the right to develop knowledge and ideas, is protected by international human rights law, requires institutional autonomy, includes freedom of expression within and beyond the academic community, and depends on access to information, freedom of movement and association, and the protection of students’ rights.
For the Coalition for Academic Freedom in the Americas (CAFA), the report is particularly significant because it reinforces the need for collective action across the continent to turn these principles into effective protection for academic communities.
“Free to Think 2026 makes clear that academic freedom is not an abstract or distant concern. Across the Americas, we are seeing different forms of pressure on universities and education communities — from interference with teaching and research to violence, repression and attacks on institutional autonomy. Protecting academic freedom means protecting the right to learn, teach, research and share knowledge freely. It is also about protecting the conditions that make democratic societies possible: critical thinking, scientific rigor, human rights and democracy,” said Camilla Croso, Director of the Coalition for Academic Freedom in the Americas (CAFA).
The report also explicitly recognizes the importance of regional coalitions, recommending support for organizations such as the Coalition for Academic Freedom in the Americas to strengthen the implementation of regional protection principles, monitoring, and legal support.
For CAFA, this regional dimension is essential. The challenges documented in Free to Think 2026 demonstrate that academic freedom cannot be protected through isolated actions. It requires strong institutions, autonomous academic communities, regional cooperation, and mechanisms capable of responding to threats before censorship, political interference, violence, and intimidation become normalized.
“The evidence gathered by Scholars at Risk reinforces the urgency of strengthening collective protection for academic freedom across the Americas. We have principles and international human rights standards that recognize this right; the challenge is to ensure that they are implemented and translated into concrete guarantees for students, educators, researchers and education institutions. Academic freedom can only be built with scientific rigor, human rights and democracy,” added Camilla Croso.
The findings of Free to Think 2026 therefore offer both a warning and a call to action: protecting academic freedom is essential not only for universities and education institutions as a whole, but for democracy, human rights, scientific progress and the free circulation of knowledge across the Americas.