Report tracks US role in global squeeze on academic freedom

Ongoing pressure on institutional autonomy and academic freedom in authoritarian states has been combined with “historic levels” of pressure on academia in liberal democratic states, principally the United States, according to the director of Scholars at Risk (SAR), which published its new annual report on academic freedom in New York City this week.

Between 1 July 2024 and 30 June 2025 there were 183 violent attacks by state security forces and non-state actors against students and professors in countries including India, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Argentina, Nigeria, Cameroon, Bangladesh, Georgia, Ethiopia, Morrocco, Türkiye, Brazil, Kenya, as well as France and the United States, according to the report 2025 Free to Think: Report of Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Monitoring Project (Free to Think).

While Robert Quinn, executive director of SAR, which published the report today in New York City, said it provides a snapshot of cases, the figure of 183 nonetheless represents a massive increase on last year’s tally of 100 violent attacks.

Over the same period, more than 50 scholars were wrongfully imprisoned. Countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Afghanistan and the United States saw state and higher education authorities “use a range of disciplinary actions to punish, deter, and restrict the exercise of academic freedom and other protected rights of scholars and students.”

“We continue to see significant pressure on institutional autonomy and academic freedom in authoritarian states. This is coupled with historic levels of pressures in liberal democratic states, principally the United States,” Quinn told University World News.

Quinn also noted the deleterious impact on higher education worldwide of the policies that President Donald J Trump has pursued since returning to power in January.

“The higher education space is a microcosm for [the] larger political and civil society space. In that larger space, we’ve seen a marked U-turn in US policy from promoting democracy and civil society to attacking it.

“The attacks on the university space in the US are really an attack on independent thought in the US. There is no question that this is going to embolden other countries because, at a minimum, they know that the US isn’t going to interfere,” said Quinn.

State violence against students

Among the violent acts against students by state security forces the report highlighted was the seizure of a certain Agapito by Mozambique security personnel last November.

According to SAR, three members of the Serviço Nacional de Invegiaçã Criminal wearing masks and civilian clothing, blindfolded and gagged Agapito, who was on the way to a store, and then “drove him to an unknown location where a fourth individual reportedly tortured and interrogated him, telling him that his activism had made him a target”.

A month earlier, in Afghanistan, Taliban guards responded to Hassamuddin Rahimzai’s objection to the process of evaluating faculty members by beating the professor in the Faculty of Islamic Jurisprudence at Sheikh Zayed University until he lost consciousness.

At Debark University (Ethiopia), government forces killed one student and injured two others while firing indiscriminately at students protesting a shortage of funding for student meals; hundreds more were detained for a day.

Students were teargassed, shot at with rubber bullets and water cannons or sprayed with pepper spray in Bangladesh, Georgia, Serbia, Colombia, Türkiye, Kenya, Morocco, Liberia and Gambia. In France, 60 students protesting budget cuts to the University of Lille’s Pont-de-Bois campus were teargassed.

In Brazil the Grupo de Ações Táticas Especiais (Special Tactical Actions Group), a military police unit, employed stun grenades to end a two-month sit-in by students at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro protesting budget cuts to services and financial assistance.

Non-state actors

Violence by non-state actors occurred in a number of countries. In India, for allegedly promoting Christianity, the head of the Electrical Engineering Department at Sri Venkateswara University was beaten by Hindu nationalists, while on the campus of Universidad Central de Venezuela, “unidentified individuals fired tear gas against students standing in line waiting to vote in student elections”.

In Nigeria, over the period examined, gunmen abducted some 36 staff and students. The largest group consisted of 20 University of Jos and University of Maiduguri medical students and a doctor on their way to a medical convention in Benue State.

These abductees were released a week later, unlike the acting rector of Benue State Polytechnic’s Ugbokolo campus and two other staff members whose whereabouts were still unknown at the time Free to Think was finalised.

Women in the crosshairs

The situation for scholars in Afghanistan, especially for female scholars, continued to worsen. The Taliban forced 12 professors at Sayed Jamaluddin Afghani University to resign because of their anti-Taliban views. At Sheikh Zayed University, because they had been affiliated with the US-backed government the Taliban overthrew in August 2021, the Taliban dismissed 120 faculty and staff members.

In December 2024, the Taliban banned women from midwifery and nursing programmes, the last medical education available to them after the Taliban banned women from higher education in 2022.

In February, female Afghani students outside Afghanistan saw their dreams of higher education cut short by the Trump administration. Eighty of these women were studying in Oman until USAID cut funds for the programme; following a short reprieve, in April, USAID confirmed that their scholarships would be terminated immediately. “The withdrawal of funding left them unable to complete their degrees and without legal status in Qatar,” states the report.

Also in February, the US government withdrew support for the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh, which, since 2021, had provided higher educational opportunities to hundreds of Afghan women. The termination of US funds meant that 330 Afghan women outside Afghanistan no longer had an academic destination.

Russian aggression

Russian aggression continued to severely disrupt higher education in Ukraine, which by mid-2024 had seen more than a third of its scientists leave the country. According to SAR, by early 2025, 20% of Ukraine's universities and colleges and a third of its research facilities had been damaged or destroyed.

At least 12 universities have been damaged by cruise and ballistic missiles or drones, including Sumy State University, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kharkiv National University of Urban Economy, Dnipro State Medical University and Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute.

Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza has brought higher education to a halt, as the Gazan universities have been largely destroyed. While the university infrastructure in the West Bank remains, according to Free to Think there have been “frequent raids at universities, arrests and detentions of students, faculty and staff, and significant movement restrictions that blocked access to university campuses”.

The report notes that “Information on specific incidents was challenging to verify for several reasons, including the ongoing conflict and restrictions on the media landscape. Academic freedom was severely impacted across the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”

Court outcomes

Notably, courts in India, Morocco and France sided with students and professors.

In late November, the Delhi High Court stayed the suspension of Jyoti Karki, a Delhi University MA student in the Department of Slavonic and Finno-Ugrian Studies and member of the student activist group Disha Student Organization, who had written slogans on a wall other than the one the university had agreed to.

In May, India’s Supreme Court ordered that Ali Khan Mahmudabad be released from prison; the professor of political science at Ashoka University (Haryana) was arrested and had been “accused of endangering national security and promoting enmity”, following a complaint filed against him by “a youth member” of the governing Hindu Nationalist party for a social media post about India’s military action against Pakistan.

In January, the Court of First Instance in Rabat, Morocco, acquitted the 15 students at the Mohammed V University the police had beaten and arrested for “disobedience” and failure to comply with orders to disperse.

The Paris Administrative Court rejected the reason – “risk of public order disturbances” – the famed Sciences Po gave for denying Rima Hassan, a French-Palestinian member of the French Parliament, a lecture hall, only to have the Conseil d’État reinstate the university’s ban.

In Russia, Thailand and Azerbaijan, the courts were supine.

A researcher into hypersonic technology and director of the Siberian branch of the Khristianovich Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, Alexander Shiplyuk, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for “alleged leaks of classified information to foreign entities” – a charge that may be doubted because announcing such treasonous acts is hardly standard operating procedure in Russia, which raises, SAR says, “concerns about due process”.

In April, a “Thai court charged [US academic Paul] Chambers with violating the country’s lèse-majesté law, which makes it illegal to insult the monarchy, and Computer Crimes Act, which bars the introduction of ‘counterfeit computer data that could threaten national security’,” says the report.

In February 2025, Azerbaijan’s Lankaran Serious Crimes Court sentenced Igbal Abilov, who studies ethnic minorities of the South Caucasus, Türkiye and Iran, to an 18-year sentence for “high treason”.

According to SAR, a pro-government media outlet said that Abilov had been arrested because he had acted “on behalf of Armenia’s national security services, including [by having] communications with Professor Garnik Asatrian, an Armenian professor in Iranistics and Kurdology”; Abilov admitted to having only professional contacts with Asatryan.

Several months later, the Baku Grave Crimes Court sentenced Bahruz Samadov, an Azerbaijani PhD student enrolled in the Political Science Department of Charles University (Prague), to 15 years in prison for “high treason”. The case began in August 2024 when Samadov was arrested for having, allegedly, provided “sensitive information” to Armenia about the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh (which pits Azerbaijan against Armenia).

Among the 10 scholars highlighted in this year’s SAR report is Dr Nasser bin Ghaith, a former lecturer in economics at University of Paris IV Abu Dhabi, who has been in prison since 2017 for tweets critical of the UAE’s government. In March, an Emeriti court rejected his and 84 other defendants' appeal of convictions handed down the previous July; bin Ghaith had been given a 10-year sentence for having established and maintained a terrorist organisation.

“The decision is final and cannot be further appealed,” writes SAR. “Human rights organisations have raised concerns about due process in the trial,” including the prevention of lawyers from “accessing case files and court documents”.

US government intervention

Last year’s Free to Think report focused on the US Congressional hearings into antisemitism at Harvard, Columbia and other elite universities. The focus was on police use of force – including tear gas and rubber bullets – as well as the administrative disciplining of protestors.

According to the 2024 report, some 3,100 students and dozens of faculty members had been arrested at 61 campuses across the country during protests in support of Palestine and against Israel’s war against Hamas. Additionally, SAR flagged the passing by state legislatures of laws that “restricting [diversity, equity and inclusion] DEI offices and staff, mandatory DEI training, diversity statements, or identity-based preferences for hiring and admissions”, in publicly funded state colleges and universities. This year’s report contains updates on all of these issues.

Absent from last year’s report was anything like the statement that begins this year’s section on the United States: “Almost immediately upon coming into office in January 2025, the administration issued a series of executive orders and agency actions affecting higher education, with little apparent concern for resulting harm to ongoing research or the American public.

These included accelerated civil rights investigations; more than 30 pieces of legislation related to higher education introduced during the first 75 days of the new administration; and executive orders eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion; gender equity programming; and prohibiting accreditors from setting diversity, equity, and inclusion standards.”

Referring to the presidency of Joe Biden, which ended on 20 January 2025, Quinn said that the US federal government was not “unduly intrusive in terms of trying to control the [higher education] sector.

“States [for example, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma and South Carolina] were trying to do that and were specifically passing laws saying, ‘You can’t teach certain topics’ and that people who did so could be fired – or by trying to withdraw union protection in many places or imposing non-academics or non-expert decision-makers into decisions about curricula or content of research. That was the dominant theme in the prior report.

“This report covers the period that was the end of the prior administration [Joe Biden’s] and the beginning of the current administration [Trump’s]. And, obviously, this administration is radically different from the prior administration.

“It’s even radically different from any administration the country has had, at least since the McCarthy era [1950s]. But I would submit, the scale here is much bigger than that era in terms of direct intervention into all aspects of higher education,” Quinn told University World News.

Hundreds of international students in the United States have now faced the sort of experience Agapito did in Mozambique, as officers belonging to the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) branch conducted an extralegal campaign to arrest, detain, and attempt to deport without due process several US-based, noncitizen scholars and students.

“Rather than following normal procedures, immigration officials – frequently dressed in plain clothes and sometimes wearing masks – arrested the students on public streets, from university housing, and on university campuses, without first notifying their universities.

“They then transported them, often at night, to sites that in some cases were over a thousand miles away, in an apparent attempt to place the case in a judicial venue more friendly to the administration. None of these individuals were charged with violating the terms of their visas or any other crime,” states the report.

Free to Think also notes how, by cutting federal research dollars, the Trump administration had “significantly undermined the academic freedom of individual scholars, inhibiting their ability to conduct vital research”. Further, their funding is now uncertain, and colleges and universities have cut their own expenses, “reducing research staff, freezing hiring, and reducing the number of incoming doctoral students”, which, perforce, ends their academic research and freedom.

Long-term control

At the end of our interview, I asked Quinn: “Why are countries around the world clamping down on higher education given that, even in the US, it accounts for less than 1% of the nation’s GDP?” His answer explained what lies behind the many abuses detailed by Free to Think.

“Because the higher education sector is a time machine. What happens in higher education now is the training and the debating and the developing of evidence for the future.

“The sector, the space we have in the present, determines what kind of society we will have in the future. And power knows that. They know that if they control the universities today, they will have less opposition tomorrow.

“So it’s a direct line to achieving long-term control, as it is for cracking down on the media, as it is for cracking down on defence lawyers [the Trump administration has forced a number of law firms that had taken cases against him in the past to agree to pay into a fund he established and perform millions of dollars of pro bono work for organisations favourable to him], and as it is for cracking down on independent sources of funding for NGOs and civil society scholars and philanthropies,” he stated.

Quinn’s last point was a reference to the fact that the day before I interviewed Quinn, the Trump administration announced that it would be investigating Open Society Foundations, the American grantmaking network founded by business magnate George Soros.

That investigation, Quinn said, “is a case of the US emulating authoritarian states because Russia did that years ago, and Soros had to pull out of their regional foundations and from several countries because they were promoting democracy”.