Threats to Academic Freedom: A Comparative Approach

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

Researchers around the world are confronted with increasingly prevalent challenges – be they ethical, legal, political or security related – that limit their ability to access certain areas or constrain the way they address their research subjects or interlocutors. While such restrictions on academic freedom are undoubtedly more visible in authoritarian regimes, they do not spare democracies. Europe and the United States are emblematic cases. In Europe, two former communist countries that joined the European Union twenty years ago have distinguished themselves in recent years by their determination to hinder (in Poland) or even bring to heel (in Hungary) intellectuals and academics in particular. By reforming its Academy of Sciences and the governance of universities, by expelling the Central European University (CEU) from Hungary, the government of Viktor Urban has gone a long way in its drive to control higher education and research institutions and personnel. The resurgence of far-right governments elsewhere in Europe raises fears of a massive return to attacks on academic freedom. In the United States, the renewed focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since October 7, 2023, has sparked major debates on the limits of freedom of expression and the politicization of campuses, against a more general backdrop of controversy surrounding the development of what some call « wokism » - Europe, and France in particular, has recently been the scene of a similar debate.
Beyond these spectacular phenomena, which question the nature and scope of academic freedom, the latter is challenged by some of the structural transformations of contemporary democracies, manifested in the application of public management to the governance of higher education, the development of project-based research, the commodification of data (Big Data), the eruption of ethical injunctions and the judicialization of research. These developments, which affect both sides of the Atlantic, deserve to be analyzed in mirror image. This panel aims first and foremost to put into perspective the convergences and divergences in the structural transformations of higher education and research, and to question, on both sides, their effects on academic freedom, as it is perceived here and there. It is not certain that the content, pace and acceptance of these changes by academic communities are equivalent. It is therefore also a question of bringing to light different conceptions of academic freedom and contrasting ways of qualifying a given phenomenon in terms of infringements of academic freedom, depending on the context.

Sub Unit

• Partner Associations / French Political Science Association

Cosponsors

• Division 11: Comparative Politics

• Division 59: Education Politics and Policy

Chair

• Christophe Jaffrelot CERI

Presenters

• Amy G. Mazur Washington State University

• Delphine Allès Inalco (French National Institute for Oriental Studies, Paris)

• Jerome Heurtaux Paris-Dauphine University

• Pascale Laborier Paris Nanterre University

• Darrell M. West The Brookings Institution

• Stéphane Paquin École nationale d'administration publique

• Stéphanie BALME CERI

• Amrita Basu Amherst College

• Simone R. Bohn York University