Brazil and Hungary buck the trend on academic freedom
The 2026 Free to Think: Report of the Scholars at Risk academic freedom monitoring project documents 382 attacks – more than one per day – on scholars and academic freedom in 59 countries, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, India, Nigeria, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Russia, Türkiye, Ukraine and the United States.
“The report repeats the concern seen of the past few years that pressures on academic freedom have spread well beyond conflict countries and traditionally repressive states to also include significant pressures and erosions in a number of democratic states, most especially in the United States,” Robert Quinn, executive director of the New York University-based Scholars at Risk (SAR), told University World News.
But the report also shows that erosion of academic freedom can be reversed by new governments, such as that of Péter Magyar, who defeated prime minister Viktor Orbán last April and quickly set about reversing “Hungary’s trajectory, including by restoring university autonomy, dismantling politicised governance structures, and rebuilding Hungary’s relationship with the European Union”.
A signal example of Hungary’s new trajectory, the report notes, is that it would phase out the private foundation university model (which centralised power in the hands of government appointees) and rejoin the Erasmus student exchange programmes.
Other countries where academic freedom and the safety of scholars have measurably improved are Bangladesh, Venezuela – since the removal of former president Nicolás Maduro in January – and, most notably, Brazil.
Attacks on scholars: the stats
SAR divides attacks on scholars into several categories. In more than a dozen countries, students and faculty “faced targeted violence”, and in 16 countries campuses themselves were the site of “violent attacks, intrusions or occupations or threats of violent attacks”.
The 165 violent attacks reported in this report constitute 43% of the total number of attacks on universities and scholars – and represent a 9% increase of the baseline percentage of 34% recorded since the first Free to Think report released in 2011.
In Guatemala, Edy Josué Romero Tzin, director of the Petén Regional Campus (CUDEP) of the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, was assassinated by an unidentified gunman.
“Authorities suspected that the attack was targeted and related to administrative changes Romero Tzin had announced shortly after becoming campus director,” the report notes.
In Pakistan, gunmen killed Professor Muhammad Khan while he was riding on his motorcycle; in addition to being a poet, writer, translator and essayist, Khan was a professor of Brahui (the language of an indigenous tribal group in Balochistan) at the Government Boys’ Degree College and a prominent social activist and participant in public events.
In Zimbabwe, police arrested three students at Midlands State University for distributing flyers protesting a constitutional amendment that extended the parliamentarians’ and president’s terms from five to seven years and changed the method of electing the president from direct election to parliamentary selection.
“The students spent 14 days in detention before being granted bail and appeared in court in October to face charges of ‘subverting constitutional government’ and ‘incitement to commit public violence’.
“Following his release on bail, one of the students was suspended from the university and then reported missing.” Three students from different universities were kidnapped after attending meetings about the bill; they were later released.
Druze students in Syria were attacked in their dormitory at the University of Aleppo, while at Damascus University, Ali Al-Lahham, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, survived an assassination attempt.
Students protesting lack of transportation were attacked by National Police in Paraguay; the National Police used rubber bullets to disperse students protesting a lack of university transportation.
In Chile water cannons broke up a demonstration against reducing tuition-free access to the University of Santiago, while in Honduras, “riot police fired tear gas at students protesting proposed budget cuts to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras”.
Students in Serbia, Nigeria and Burkina Faso, as well as Pakistan, were either disciplined by their universities for stating their opinions or prosecuted by authorities; those expelled in Pakistan were singing the Indian national anthem. Hong Kong Baptist University suspended the student union after it “publicly expressed condolences for a deadly apartment building fire” on a “democracy wall”.
Wrongfully imprisoned
One of the 63 scholars SAR found to be wrongfully imprisoned in 2025 is Leonid Pshenichnov, a Ukrainian marine biologist living in occupied Crimea and the technical coordinator of Ukraine’s scientific observation programme under the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).
Pshenichnov was imprisoned by the Russians in retaliation for his Antarctic marine research. At the time of his arrest, Pshenichnov was preparing to travel to Hobart, Australia, to participate in the CCAMLR annual international meeting. Russia had consistently opposed restrictions on industrial fishing proposed by the CCAMLR.
SAR highlighted cases of scholars wrongfully imprisoned: nine from Bahrain, Belarus, Iran, the United Arab Emirates; two from Azerbaijan; and three from China.
Igbal Abilov was detained in his native Azerbaijan while attempting to board a flight to Belarus, where he teaches history and ethnography of the ethnic minorities of the South Caucasus, Türkiye and Iran. Illham Tothi, an economics professor in China and Nobel Prize nominee was arrested and convicted of “separatism” for promoting dialogue with Uyghurs.
According to the report, Dr Ahmadreza Djalali was convicted by an Iranian court and sentenced to death for “corruption of the earth” for his connections to the international academic community: Djalali is “a scholar of disaster medicine”.
“Wrongful imprisonment,” explained Quinn, “is a cost-effective way to assert what I would describe as an illegitimate power over intellectual discourse and research. It doesn’t have the same media baggage that direct violent attacks have. And yet, it’s enough to intimidate a wide circle of those who are aware of what is happening.
“Within the wrongful imprisonment category, there are a number of strands. Some are directly aimed at particular ideas and particular research. You see that in Thailand, for example, where a professor is researching military corruption, and so it’s designed to silence that particular research.
“But in other places, it’s much broader. It’s designed to assert the fact that the state can do what it wants to anyone, and, therefore, you shouldn’t cross the lines, even if the lines aren’t particularly clear as to exactly where they are,” said Quinn.
US freedoms still in decline
As was the case with last year’s report and other international reports since Donald J Trump returned to the presidency, Free to Think underscores the decline of academic freedom in the United States, noting how several professors were removed from their positions because of the extramural statements concerning the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
None, it should be noted, advocated killing Kirk. Rather, as reported in University World News, they were critical of Kirk’s evangelical, Christian nationalist and racist positions.
“In October 2025, the US government announced its so-called ‘Compact for Excellence in Higher Education’, which attempted to incentivise universities into committing to the administration’s political agenda in exchange for priority access to federal research funds.
“In May 2026, the US administration published a set of proposed rules through the Office of Management and Budget that would authorise senior political appointees to overrule expert peer-review panels when awarding new research grants or terminating existing ones,” are only two of the many examples the report points to as limitations on academic freedom.
The United States is a federal system, which assigns most of the power over education to the states. As the report notes, state governments “have also targeted higher education. South Dakota, Oklahoma, and Tennessee all announced policies weakening tenure protections for faculty at the state’s public universities and colleges.”
As reported in University World News: “Multiple universities in Texas approved policies restricting teaching. The Texas A&M University System passed restrictions on teaching related to race and gender, and encouraged students to report courses they believe violate the policies.”
Among the material flagged as violating the university’s new policy were readings from Plato’s Symposium discussing patriarchy, masculinity, and gender identity in a philosophy course on ‘Contemporary Moral Problems’.
“Texas Tech University announced a policy requiring faculty members to seek administrative approval for any course material related to gender and sexual identity. The policy used vague and overbroad terms that conflate discriminatory activity, which is already prohibited by law, with non-discriminatory research, teaching, or discussion of contested topics.”
Months later, Texas Tech introduced a new policy ending student research related to sexual orientation and gender identity and phasing out academic programmes ‘centred on’ those topics.
Tenure has been weakened in a number of states, including Oklahoma, where an executive order all but eliminated it in the state’s public colleges and universities.
Missiles strike Ukrainian and Iranian universities
Russian missiles and drones attacked Ukrainian universities at least 17 times in 2025.
Among those hit were Lviv Polytechnic National University, Sumy State University, the National University of Pharmacy in Kharkiv, Kyiv National Aviation University, Kherson State University, Kharkiv National University of Arts, Ukrainian State University of Science and Technology, Dnipro Polytechnic University, National Aerospace University Kharkiv and, as reported by University World News, the Kyiv School of Economics, and the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
In December, American and Israeli planes and missiles hit dozens of Iranian universities and educational institutions including the Iran University of Science and Technology and Isfahan University of Technology.
“Shahid Beheshti University sustained severe material losses to educational infrastructure.” In retaliation, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps threatened to bomb American universities in the Middle East.
When the US-brokered ceasefire took hold in Gaza in October 2025, some 80% of university buildings and research centres had been destroyed.
“According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, more than 17,237 school students, 1,271 university students, and 967 educational staff had been killed in Gaza from 7 October 2023 through 16 September 2025.”
Since the ceasefire, universities have begun to rebuild and reopen; in November the Islamic University of Gaza opened classrooms to hundreds of students.
In April 2026, Scholars Without Borders launched ‘University City’, a locally made makeshift academic space in al-Mawasi, Khan Younis.
Within walls made from wood and metal sheets, dozens of academic institutions rotated weekly to accommodate up to 600 students a day,” noted Free to Think.
Brazil ‘full free’ again
The largest country to have seen the greatest improvement in its academic freedom is Brazil. In the three years since President Lulu Da Silva replaced former president Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil has returned to the ranks of the “fully free” countries as measured by the Academic Freedom Index.
Da Silva has restored research budgets, moved to protect university autonomy and demonstrated “respect for freedom of academic expression”.
Security issues intertwined with freedom issues
University World News interviewed Quinn on Monday, the day following a weekend of headlines about the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI), such as this one from the New York Times: “Could AI Really Kill Humans”, and calls for legislation to rein in research on it. Although Free to Think did not deal with AI, Quinn had some very interesting comments about it.
While he likened research on AI to that of dangerous pathogens and, thus, said that appropriate academic-national security safeguards need to be in place “to be sure that everything’s done safely”, Quinn is concerned that the headline rhetoric is becoming “infected with the national security narrative”.
“What would concern me is what we know from what we’ve seen over the past five years particularly in Europe and North America – a tendency to intertwine academic freedom issues and security issues and to significantly devalue academic freedom by using a very broad brush to paint the security conversations.
“And what I mean by a broad brush is painting anyone of a certain ethnicity as suspect as opposed to going into it [security concerns] with more nuance and evidence.”
Quinn also addressed the question of how AI might affect surveillance of academics and, thus, undermine academic freedom.
At present, he suggests, AI is more of an accelerant than something new. The US government is already using word searches to weed out proposals using disfavoured concepts like “gender equity” or “climate change”.
More concerning is the possible “supercharging of intentional control over the flows of information and-or targeting those who are participating in the exploration of alternatives to whatever power doesn’t want by imposing ideological control over the space of thought”.
Can AI strengthen academic freedom?
At the same time, Quinn suggested that AI could have the positive potential to increase academic freedom by, in fact, increasing the number of contributors to academic discourse. Quinn explained this by using a philosophical-sociological definition of academic freedom.
“When I’m asked what academic freedom is, I say it isn’t about ideas and it’s not about opinions. Academic freedom is the label we use for the bundle of processes that support truth seeking, or, should I say, the processes and responsibilities that support truth seeking. To that definition, we add professional standards as they’ve developed over time.
“According to that standard, we don’t say you have to have a certain title or be employed by an institution with a certain title in order to exercise a claim to academic freedom. As long as you are observing those professionally developed processes and responsibilities, you can make that claim,” he said.
AI tools and engines theoretically would allow a much wider range of human beings to directly participate in the exercise of academic freedom by shortcutting the learning curve to develop the professional competencies to make the claim, he noted.
“So, in a weird way, we could be headed 150 years back in time, when citizen science was a real thing and led to very real discoveries for the public good.” Quinn didn’t provide examples, but one that came to this writer’s mind was Michael Faraday (died 1867), who discovered electromagnetic induction, the basis of the electrical motor, which he designed and built.