Universities and higher education institutions in long-standing democracies—including the United States, India, and Georgia—have seen their institutional autonomy directly compromised by government interference over the past year. According to the latest annual assessment released by the international academic rights organization Scholars at Risk (SAR), the pressures facing higher education are shifting, becoming more systemic even as overt forms of violence persist globally.
The report, titled Free to Think 2026, documents a staggering 382 separate attacks on scholars, students, and higher education institutions across 59 countries and territories between July 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026. While this numerical tally is marginally lower than the 395 attacks recorded in the previous year’s assessment—despite the evaluation expanding from 49 countries and territories to 59—SAR emphasizes that the nature of the threats is evolving rather than receding.
Last year’s report captured extreme scenes of physical violence, notably documenting brutal crackdowns by police forces on student-led protests in Bangladesh. Those events resulted in thousands of injuries and up to 1,400 deaths. The previous assessment also highlighted the destabilizing fallout from cuts to international aid and cross-border research funding, such as sweeping U.S. government budget reductions that crippled educational opportunities and joint research initiatives in nations ranging from Afghanistan and Malawi to Australia and Portugal.
By contrast, the findings for the 2025–2026 period point to a dual track of entrenched authoritarian repression alongside subtle legislative and administrative maneuvers designed to hobble academic liberty. On one end of the spectrum, the report highlights the persistence of direct repression and overt violence, citing the wrongful imprisonment of academics in authoritarian states like China and Russia. Even more grimly, the document flags targeted assassinations of university leaders in countries such as Guatemala and Pakistan, illustrating the lethal risks faced by educational administrators operating in volatile political environments.
However, the report warns that the erosion of academic freedom is no longer confined to fragile states or overt dictatorships. Even countries traditionally associated with robust protections for free speech and institutional autonomy have enacted legislative and administrative shifts aimed at restricting higher education systems.
In the United States, for instance, the report highlights how sweeping full or partial immigration bans targeting nationals from 39 countries—enacted via presidential proclamation—have placed international students and scholars in a profoundly precarious professional and personal position. These administrative barriers threaten to isolate American campuses and disrupt the global exchange of talent and ideas.
Meanwhile, in India, external political pressures continue to dictate campus programming. The report highlights Banaras Hindu University as one of several institutions forced to cave to external influence. The university abruptly canceled a planned speaking engagement by scholar Kedar Mishra, axing the lecture entirely because the government opposed his participation.
Beyond direct state edicts, public pressure and political polarization also played a major role in diminishing academic liberty during the 2025–2026 academic year. The report documents several instances where faculty members in the United States and Canada were suspended or fired from their positions following public statements they made in the wake of the high-profile killing of political commentator Charlie Kirk last September.
A stark administrative manifestation of this climate occurred in January of this year, when the University of Arkansas publicly announced it had rescinded an offer of employment to legal scholar Emily Suski to serve as the dean of its law school. The university administration acknowledged that the decision was directly influenced by feedback from elected officials who objected to Suski having signed an amicus brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court. The brief in question supported transgender students’ rights to participate on school sports teams aligned with their gender identity, illustrating how legal advocacy and scholarly participation in public interest litigation can trigger immediate professional retaliation.
Despite these grim domestic and international developments, the report offers a measure of cautious optimism, pointing to newly established political administrations in countries like Bangladesh and Hungary as potential catalysts for reversing worrying trends in academic freedom.
In Hungary, the defeat of far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán by new leader Péter Magyar in April 2026 has opened a critical window of opportunity to begin restoring university autonomy. Under Orbán’s long tenure, public universities were systematically stripped of their independence and placed under strict political control through a controversial restructuring that transferred their ownership to private foundations headed by political loyalists.
That takeover drew severe international condemnation and immediate punitive action from the European Union, which suspended Hungary from both the Erasmus student exchange program and the Horizon Europe research funding framework. But the political shift under Magyar has already signaled a dramatic reversal. According to the report, by the end of May—less than a month after Magyar assumed office—Hungary indicated that it would phase out the private foundation model for its universities and work to rejoin the Erasmus student exchange program.
Yet, despite such isolated glimmers of institutional recovery, Robert Quinn, the founding executive director of Scholars at Risk, cautions that the documented violations represent merely the tip of the iceberg.
Speaking at the European Association for International Education conference in Glasgow, Quinn told Times Higher Education that while efforts from civil society and advocacy groups to defend academic freedom have never been stronger, the grim reality is that threats are growing at a pace that outstrips protection efforts.
To combat this widening gap, Quinn outlined ambitions to forge a concrete and practical "global academic freedom agenda" designed to change the tide on intellectual and research liberty. He stressed that the initiative must move past flowery language and theoretical commitments, focusing instead on establishing clear, enforceable parameters and operational frameworks to protect scholars and encourage robust intellectual debate.
Crucially, Quinn argued that safeguarding the future of higher education requires enlisting the active support of the general public by dramatically improving how universities communicate their societal value.
The university that is in service to the public needs to deliver the message clearly that it is in service to the public, Quinn explained, noting that this is an area where academic institutions have historically fallen short. In his view, universities simply are not talking about their contributions to society in a way that resonates with ordinary citizens.
If academic institutions spend the coming decades properly messaging their purpose and internalizing the reality that the public is their primary purpose, Quinn concluded, the public will ultimately become their primary defender.
