Academic freedom
Based on Wikipedia: Academic freedom
In 1958, a Soviet biologist named Trofim Lysenko convinced Joseph Stalin that Western genetics was bourgeois pseudoscience. Lysenko promised that collectivist farming techniques—rooted in Marxist philosophy rather than empirical research—would transform Soviet agriculture. Scientists who disagreed were expelled, imprisoned, or killed. When Lysenko's methods were implemented across the Soviet Union and later China, the resulting famines killed an estimated thirty million people in China alone during the Great Leap Forward.
This is not ancient history. It is a warning about what happens when governments control what scholars can think, say, and discover.
What Academic Freedom Actually Means
At its simplest, academic freedom means a teacher has the right to instruct and a student has the right to learn without outside interference. But this definition barely scratches the surface.
The deeper principle is that scholars should be able to pursue truth wherever it leads—even when that truth embarrasses powerful people, contradicts official narratives, or challenges popular beliefs. A professor of public health in North Africa discovered that his country's infant mortality rate was far higher than government statistics claimed. For publishing this finding, he lost his job and was thrown in prison.
Academic freedom differs from ordinary free speech in important ways. Everyone has the right to voice opinions about vaccines, climate change, or economic policy. But academic freedom specifically protects scholarly inquiry—research conducted with rigorous methods, reviewed by peers, and grounded in genuine expertise. A random person can claim vaccines don't work. A scholar making that claim must provide evidence that can withstand scrutiny from other experts in the field.
This distinction matters. Academic speech isn't just opinion—it's opinion that has survived a gauntlet of criticism from people qualified to identify its flaws.
The Medieval Roots
Some scholars trace the concept back to Socrates, who defended his right to question Athenian assumptions even as the city sentenced him to death for "corrupting the youth." But academic freedom as an institution is much younger.
Medieval European scholars operated under the watchful eye of the Catholic Church. Questioning church doctrine could end a career—or a life. Yet universities carved out surprising spaces of autonomy. The St. Scholastica Day riot of 1355 in Oxford, which began as a tavern brawl and escalated into a two-day battle between students and townspeople, actually resulted in greater independence for the university. Even theologians accused of heresy, like John Wycliffe and Jan Hus, found protection in their university positions, at least for a time.
The pattern repeated as nation-states emerged. Governments tolerated scholars until those scholars said something inconvenient. Then the protections vanished.
The Humboldtian Revolution
The modern concept of academic freedom crystallized in early nineteenth-century Germany. Wilhelm von Humboldt, a philosopher and linguist, was given authority to create a new university in Berlin. He built it on two radical principles.
First, scientific inquiry must be free. Scholars should follow evidence wherever it leads, even into uncomfortable territory. Second, research and teaching belong together. A university isn't a trade school pumping out graduates; it's a community where knowledge is simultaneously discovered and transmitted.
Underlying both principles was Humboldt's conviction that science is not a fixed body of facts but an endless search. Knowledge is never complete. It must be pursued unceasingly, generation after generation. A university that merely transmits what is already known has failed its mission.
The University of Berlin became a model. Its influence spread across Germany, then throughout the Western world. American research universities trace their intellectual DNA directly to Humboldt's experiment.
The Market of Ideas
The Hungarian-British philosopher Michael Polanyi offered a powerful defense of academic freedom in the mid-twentieth century. In 1936, he visited the Soviet Union and met Nikolai Bukharin, a leading Bolshevik theorist. Bukharin explained that in socialist societies, all scientific research must align with the current five-year plan. Science exists to serve state goals.
Polanyi was horrified. He founded the Society for Freedom in Science and spent years articulating why centrally planned research fails.
His argument was elegant. Scientific progress, Polanyi observed, works like a free market. Just as consumers determine which products succeed by their choices, scientists determine which ideas succeed through open debate, peer review, and replication. No central authority could possibly coordinate this process effectively. The collective intelligence of thousands of independent researchers, each following their own judgment about promising questions, vastly outperforms any committee trying to direct research from above.
Try to organize scientists under a single authority, Polanyi warned, and you eliminate the independent initiatives that make collaboration productive. You reduce the effectiveness of the entire enterprise to the capability of whatever bureaucrat sits at the center.
Polanyi's metaphor illuminates why the Lysenko disaster was predictable. When political authority overrides scientific debate, bad ideas cannot be eliminated through criticism. They persist, spread, and eventually collide with reality—sometimes catastrophically.
Academic Tenure: The Institutional Guarantee
Ideas about freedom are worthless without institutional protection. Academic tenure provides that protection.
Tenure means a professor can only be fired for serious cause—gross incompetence, ethical violations, or behavior that the academic community itself condemns. It does not mean permanent immunity for anything. It means protection from termination based on unpopular opinions or inconvenient findings.
Without tenure, academic freedom exists only at the pleasure of administrators, donors, or politicians. A professor studying climate change, or examining the pharmaceutical industry, or investigating government corruption would always face an implicit threat: produce the wrong results and you're gone.
Tenure removes that threat. It creates space for scholars to follow evidence wherever it leads.
The Global Picture
In 2020, researchers created the first global index of academic freedom, providing ratings for countries going back to 1900. The index measures five dimensions: freedom to research and teach, freedom of academic exchange, institutional autonomy, campus integrity, and freedom of academic and cultural expression.
The findings reveal a troubling pattern. Academic freedom expanded dramatically from the 1960s through 2013. Liberal democracies tend to protect it; authoritarian states tend to suppress it. But since 2013, the global trend has reversed. Academic freedom is now declining worldwide.
The causes include rising authoritarianism, but also political polarization and populism in democratic countries. Academic freedom, it turns out, is not a permanent achievement. It can be lost.
There's an economic angle too. A large study covering 157 countries over more than a century found that academic freedom correlates with innovation. Countries with stronger academic freedom file more patents. The researchers estimate that the recent decline in academic freedom has resulted in at least four percent fewer patents globally.
More ominously, academic freedom appears to be a leading indicator of democratic health. When academic freedom deteriorates, broader democratic backsliding often follows.
China: The Most Consequential Case
China presents the starkest contemporary challenge to academic freedom. The country's universities have achieved remarkable things—Chinese-trained researchers now fill elite positions at technology companies worldwide, and Chinese institutions lead in certain measures of scientific output.
But this success masks severe constraints.
Academics in China face powerful incentives not to express opinions the Chinese Communist Party considers "incorrect." Self-censorship pervades university life. At least 109 universities issued charters affirming Party leadership between 2013 and 2017. In 2020, Shanghai's prestigious Fudan University removed "freedom of thought" from its charter, replacing it with language emphasizing loyalty to the Party.
The control extends to research itself. In December 2020, the Associated Press reported that China's State Council required all research into the origins of COVID-19 to be approved by a government task force. Officials described the coordination of scientific publication as a "game of chess," warning that unauthorized publications would result in punishment.
Perhaps most chillingly, the Party maintains networks of student informants on university campuses. Students are recruited to monitor and report on their professors. In this environment, which topics do scholars avoid? Which questions go unasked? We cannot know, because the silencing is invisible.
Hong Kong, once a bastion of academic freedom in the Chinese orbit, has deteriorated rapidly since the 2020 National Security Law. It now ranks in the bottom twenty percent of countries worldwide.
Hungary: A European Warning
China's restrictions might seem uniquely authoritarian. But the erosion of academic freedom is not limited to one-party states.
Central European University, founded by the financier and philanthropist George Soros, operated in Budapest for over two decades. It was one of Europe's leading graduate institutions. Under Viktor Orbán's government, the university faced mounting legal restrictions that made continued operation impossible. In 2019, it relocated to Vienna.
Hungary is a member of the European Union. Its government was democratically elected. Yet it forced out a major university through bureaucratic harassment. The message to other Hungarian academics was clear.
Denmark: An Unexpected Struggle
Even countries with strong democratic traditions face challenges. Denmark, which ranks near the top of most freedom indices, placed only 24th among 28 European Union states for academic freedom in 2017, and 32nd of 179 countries in a 2024 study.
Danish law formally guarantees both institutional and individual academic freedom. But researchers and their union reported in 2024 that political pressure, insecure employment, and competition for external funding were weakening independence and discouraging basic research.
In 2021, a political campaign against alleged "pseudo-research and activism" resulted in parliamentary resolution V137. Some politicians demanded interventions, lists of "dangerous" academic programs, and the closure of certain research fields. Over 3,000 academics signed a petition warning that the resolution threatened academic freedom and could increase self-censorship.
The controversy wasn't new. In 1986, the Danish government ordered the closure of a sociology program at Copenhagen University. More recently, right-wing parties have proposed shutting down entire universities they consider ideologically objectionable.
Chile: A Path Forward
Not all the news is grim. Chile demonstrates that academic freedom can be recovered.
During the Pinochet dictatorship from 1973 to 1990, academic freedom was brutally suppressed. Students and faculty who challenged the regime faced arrest, torture, and death. Yet even under dictatorship, academics collaborated with the public to create spaces of resistance.
After democracy returned in 1990, Chile rebuilt its academic institutions. By 2025, it ranked in the top ten percent of countries on the Academic Freedom Index. The Chilean experience suggests that academic freedom, once lost, can be restored—but only through sustained effort and genuine political commitment.
Why This Matters Beyond Universities
Academic freedom might seem like a narrow concern, relevant only to professors and students. It isn't.
Universities are where societies generate and validate knowledge. They train doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers, and scientists. They research diseases, develop technologies, and analyze policies. When academic freedom suffers, the entire knowledge-generating capacity of a society suffers.
Consider medicine. If researchers cannot publish findings that contradict official narratives, how will society identify public health threats? Consider technology. If scientists must align their work with political priorities, how will unexpected breakthroughs occur? Consider governance. If scholars cannot study corruption, inequality, or policy failures, how will citizens hold their governments accountable?
The Lysenko catastrophe killed thirty million people not because Lysenko was uniquely evil, but because the Soviet system had eliminated the ability of scientists to say "this is wrong." Academic freedom isn't a luxury for intellectuals. It's a defense mechanism for entire societies.
The Coming Test
We are living through a period of declining academic freedom worldwide. The causes are multiple—authoritarian governments, populist movements, and political polarization all play roles. But the consequences are universal. Less academic freedom means less innovation, less accountability, and less capacity to correct mistakes before they become catastrophes.
The scholars who created the Academic Freedom Index found that restrictions on academic freedom often precede broader democratic decline. Universities, it seems, are canaries in the democratic coal mine. When governments start controlling what professors can say, citizens should worry about what they themselves will soon be forbidden to say.
Humboldt understood this two centuries ago. Science is never finished. Knowledge must be searched for unceasingly. That search requires freedom—freedom to ask uncomfortable questions, to challenge official narratives, to follow evidence into territory that powerful people would prefer remain unexplored.
Without that freedom, we are left with Lysenko. And thirty million dead.