Is the Threat to Academic Freedom Growing?

In China, students and scholars are being imprisoned by the Communist Party at “re-education camps.” In Sudan, authorities are beating and tear-gassing students participating in protests. And as Brazil reels from the election of the antidemocratic president Jair Bolsonaro, public officials are suggesting policy changes that pose threats to universities’ autonomy.

All of those situations are detailed in a new report by the Scholars at Risk Network, an international group that provides aid to scholars whose work is targeted by threats. This year’s “Free to Think” report rounded up 324 documented “attacks on higher-education communities” spanning 56 countries.

Started by Robert Quinn two decades ago, Scholars at Risk works with a global network of higher-education institutions to arrange what it calls “academic refuge” for scholars whose work has come under fire. To date, it’s assisted more than a thousand scholars with such temporary positions, in addition to hosting conferences and keeping a running tally of threats to academic freedom. The organization was recognized this year with the Politiken Freedom Prize for its work “protecting scholars and the freedom to think, question, and share ideas.”

The Chronicle spoke with Quinn about the report’s findings, how faculty members can teach academic freedom, and his own background in human-rights advocacy.

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How did you decide to pursue human rights in higher education as a career?

I am not an academic. I’m a lawyer by training, and I went into law to do human-rights work. As I was starting my human-rights career, the opportunity came up to start Scholars at Risk. I saw the higher-education sector, the university, as a microcosm of a rights-respecting community, at least in the ideal. All human-rights issues come up in the context of the members of higher education. Theoretically, people are in there for education — they have adequate housing, they have access to health care, they’re allowed to develop their potential fully in the way that we hope human rights will allow.

You’ve been running Scholars at Risk for 20 years. How has that original idea played out?

It took about 10 years to really understand the issues, because the university’s place is very complicated. They’ve got multiple constituencies, ranging from the students, who change every few years, to the faculty, to the staff, the administration, the trustees, the alumni, and the public. So it’s a really complicated space. It took a while to understand that, but I think as we did more of the casework, as we saw more of the examples of the pressures that people experience, it began to expose the dynamics that happen when we don’t respect those values. I’m more convinced than ever that the university space is essential to achieving a better society for everyone.

What about your day-to-day job? How has that changed?

No. 1, unfortunately, the world has moved in a direction where these issues are more self-evident. We’re living at a time where there are attacks on truth itself and on people who are objectively trying to present evidence on truth. That makes it easier for people to understand why our project matters. But, of course, that’s not a good thing over all. On a day-to-day basis, our work has evolved from what I refer to as ambulance work, which is really helping the most threatened people get out and get working again, through engaging with states through monitoring and reporting, like our annual “Free to Think” report. The cutting edge of our work now is having a conversation with the higher-education sector itself about academic freedom and its values and how those relate to the quality of higher education and the quality of the discourse we could have.

Do you think higher-ed leaders are doing enough to speak out against attacks on academic freedom?

It’s a very challenging time. The whole field is going through revolutionary changes — the broad democratization of higher education; we have the most diverse community of learners in higher education ever. On the other hand, the funding models aren’t necessarily moving in good directions. I think that’s very hard for higher-education leaders to deal with. I think most of them try to do the best they can to respect academic freedom, to promote academic freedom. Not as a criticism, but I would say that I think we need to do more proactively. I think we tend to talk about academic freedom and its importance only after trouble has happened. And I think that’s really too late. I think we need to be proactive about it. We need to ritualize the values of higher education so that students know them, so that faculty know them, that staff know them, and that the public know them before an incident.

So that ritualization is something higher-ed leaders can work on. But what about your average faculty members? If they read the report and don’t like what they see, what can they do about it?

When they look at the report, they can say, “Is our university a part of this?” They could take it to their leadership and say, “We should be part of this community that is working on these issues.” More locally, they can say, “How do we live academic freedom in our community? How do we teach our students, our staff, our faculty what it is?” When they’re leading discussions in seminar rooms, are they helping people to understand how we have academic discourse, so that they’re really living it and not just saying it’s an important value?

You’ve created a MOOC to do that, called “Dangerous Questions: Why Academic Freedom Matters.” How does one teach academic freedom?

The short answer is not many people do. Medical schools require ethics, law schools require ethics, journalism schools require classes in journalistic ethics. We don’t require training in what academic freedom is, what discourse on campuses is supposed to look like. So I think that’s a big problem. The MOOC is a step in that direction, but it’s three weeks long; it’s two or three hours per week. That’s a lot to ask. I’d like us to boil that down to a 30-minute training that we imagine everybody takes as part of their orientation into the higher-education sector.

What are the most important takeaways from this year’s “Free to Think” report?

One of the biggest things is in this report, a significant percentage of the incidents are related to student-expression cases. That’s an area that’s really crying out for more research; it’s crying out for more defenders. And frankly, it’s crying out for more training for student leaders, student movements on how to conduct expression, both safely but also responsibly within the values of the university.

Aside from that, there are specific chapters in this report on a few countries that had not appeared as special chapters in prior reports, including Sudan and Brazil. In Brazil in particular, you know, the concern is that they’ve had an administration or two that actively disparage portions of the higher-education community. That’s a very worrying finding, because if you look historically, in the places where there have been large-scale pressures on university spaces — going back to Germany and World War II, all the way up to Turkey and Hungary today — official government voices publicly disparaging either individual scholars or their work product or department is a real warning sign that they’re trying to create the other so that they can then attack it.

When people think about threats to academic freedom, they tend to think of places like China. That geographic diversity — places like Brazil or Sudan — may not occur to them.

There’s two biases involved here. No. 1 is we tend to think of places that we associate with higher education. We might forget to think about Sudan, but of course, they have universities, and we need to pay attention there. No. 2 is there is a tendency to think of certain places as either safe or not safe, free or not free. The map of academic freedom is really much more nuanced than that. One of the values of the report, particularly if you go back historically and look at all of them, is that there are pressures really everywhere. The manifestations are different in different places — more severe in some places, yes, but not necessarily any more comforting in the less violent places.

We have another report that we put out this year on China. One of the things we say in that report is, most scholars or most academics in China might not self-identify as having limits on their academic freedom, because most people at any given time are working within the parameters that the state would allow. But the issue isn’t the percentage of scholars who are directly affected. It’s the fact that these cases are representative of what can happen and does happen. Any scholar at any given time in any place could fall afoul of prevailing authority and experience some kind of improper pressure.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Megan Zahneis is a reporting fellow for The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter at @meganzahneis, or email her at megan.zahneis@chronicle.com.