Academic FREEDOM is declining globally due to increased political interference. A number of researchers have clashed with authorities in India, China and Russia, resulting in prison and threats.
“Only one in three people live in a country that guarantees the independence of universities and research,” according to research results on the annual world academic freedom index released by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, as reported by AFP, Thursday (4/4) .
The research warns that academic freedom is declining around the world, particularly in Russia, China and India. Attacks on freedom of expression, political interference gripping universities, and the jailing of researchers are just a few examples of the decline in academic freedom.
This index was compiled based on input from more than 2,300 experts in 179 countries and was published last month. This is as part of a report on democracy by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
This report measures changes in higher education and research over the past half century by looking at five different indicators. They include freedom of research and teaching, academic exchange, academic and cultural expression, institutional autonomy and campus integrity.
Professor at Germany’s Erlangen-Nuremberg University, Katrin Kinzelbach said that 171 countries have ratified human rights treaties that bind them to respect the freedom of scientific research. “Only one in three people in the world lives in a country where research and higher education have a high degree of freedom,” he said.
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According to Kinzelbach, who is one of the organizers of the index, which takes into account world population growth, the proportion of people living in countries with academic freedom is comparable to 1973.
“Today, 45.5% of the world’s population, 3.6 billion people live in 27 countries where academic freedom is severely restricted,” the report said.
Worse
Significant declines were especially visible in India, China and Russia. These three are the countries with the first, second and ninth largest populations. According to Kinzelbach, conditions in the three countries show autocracy.
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“Academic freedom has declined drastically in India since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took power in 2014,” he said.
Kinzelbach cited British-Indian academic Nitasha Kaul, a politics professor at the University of Westminster in England who was denied entry to India to attend a conference last month.
“In Russia and China, academic freedom has never been good, and has now gone from bad to worse,” Kinzelbach said.
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Perhaps more surprising, the index found that academic freedom has also declined in the United States (US) since 2019, which Kinzelbach said came as a surprise to many academics.
He emphasized that society and the political system in the US are highly polarized. “University campuses have become the arena where this polarization occurs,” he said.
He called for calm, evidence-based debate on campus, including on highly divisive issues. According to the index, most countries in Europe have very high levels of academic freedom, with Hungary having the lowest level of academic freedom, followed by Poland.
But Kinzelbach said Poland’s score would likely improve under the new government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk. (AFP/Cah/Z-7)
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