Some countries have seen a stark decline in academic freedom over the past decade
Jen Christiansen
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The ability to research and teach without interference from politics, wealthy donors or religious institutions produces more and better science and innovation, studies have found. Yet academic freedom around the world has been declining. According to the Academic Freedom Index, 50 of 179 countries or territories experienced a significant drop between 2015 and 2025. Only nine improved. The analysis is a collaboration between the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany and the V-Dem Project in Sweden, with input from more than 2,300 experts providing information from both inside and outside each country.
The report, published this year, found that the autonomy of a region’s academic institutions—one of the five variables that influence the overall index score—has a particularly strong impact on the freedom of individual researchers there.
“When institutional autonomy is undermined, higher education institutions and individual scholars become more exposed to external pressures, ranging from economic constraints to political and ideological restrictions,” the authors write. Institutional autonomy in the U.S., for instance, fell from a score of 3.3 in 2019 to 1.7 in 2025. “The decline in institutional autonomy in the United States stands out as a case of fast and steep deterioration,” the report notes. Many countries with previously high scores—including Hungary, India and Türkiye—have been declining as “political attacks, legal reforms, and administrative interventions have gradually undermined the autonomy of higher education institutions.”
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FEELING THE PRESSURE
Sometimes the priorities of an institution unduly influence the researchers’ work. Who is most at risk? An unrelated survey conducted by Nature Research Intelligence, with more than 6,000 respondents (all authors of scientific papers published in high-impact journals), indicates that early-career researchers feel most at the mercy of their institution’s inclinations. Scientists with a robust publishing record, in contrast, are more resilient to institutional pressure.
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