January 23, 2024
Newswise — WASHINGTON, DC—In the United States and across the world, new challenges to academic freedom have emerged. From Florida and Texas to Turkey and China, governments at the state and national levels are adopting restrictions on what can be taught and researched. Looking at the long historical narrative of academic freedom can help us better understand these current challenges.
In the past 60 years, academic freedom has generally increased worldwide, but with large country variations and notorious episodes of repression. Previous research into what prompts these variations has been largely case-based, stressing domestic or local determinants of academic freedom. But local struggles over academic freedom do not occur in a vacuum, according to a new study appearing in the February 2024 issue of The American Sociological Review.
In the study, “The Social Foundations of Academic Freedom: Heterogeneous Institutions in World Society, 1960 to 2022,” authors Julia C. Lerch, David John Frank, and Evan Schofer from the University of California-Irvine look at the heterogeneity of international structures in world society and theorize how they contribute to ebbs and flows of academic freedom.
Post-1945 liberal international institutions, such as the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “enshrined key rights and norms that bolstered academic freedom worldwide.” Alongside these institutions, note the authors “illiberal alternatives coexisted. Cold War communism, for instance, anchored cultural frames that justified greater constraints on academia.”
The authors use new cross-national and longitudinal measures of academic freedom from the Varieties of Democracy dataset, spanning 155 countries from 1960 to 2022, to explore how these heterogeneous institutional structures in world society have divergent effects on academic freedom.
Using a series of independent variables that capture countries’ connections to the liberal and illiberal institutions of world society and the evolving global context—such as memberships in international non-governmental organizations, ratification of human rights treaties, and memberships in international scientific unions, among others—the authors found support for conventional views that countries that are more autocratic, more militarized, more religious, and affected by armed conflict are less hospitable to academic freedom.
They also find support for the argument that heterogeneous institutional structures in world society shape large-scale trajectories of academic freedom. “Country linkages to liberal international institutions are positively associated with academic freedom. Illiberal international structures and organizations have the opposite effect.”
The authors’ findings highlight the importance of competing liberal and illiberal institutions in world society, which nurture and curtail academic freedom, respectively. In this regard, the authors extend the theory of world society beyond prior research that emphasizes the uniformity of international structures and their influence on countries. “Attention to heterogeneity in the global institutional environment allows us to make sense of both the sweeping diffusion of academic freedom, as well as regional and temporal countertrends.”
The work contributes immediately to the understanding of academic freedom, an issue that has been much discussed, but never analyzed in such a broad and systematic way. More broadly, it sheds light on the contemporary crisis of the university, only a portion of which concerns academic freedom per se. Much more of it derives from the erosion of the university’s liberal premises, especially those clustered around rationalism, universalism, and individualism.
“The global trajectory of illiberalism affects academic freedom everywhere,” note the authors. “If the expansion of illiberal structures in the international community proves to be a lasting phenomenon, then the recent contractions of academic freedom may be but a foretaste of a dark feast to come.”
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About the American Sociological Association and the American Sociological Review
The American Sociological Association, founded in 1905, is a nonprofit membership association dedicated to serving sociologists in their work, advancing sociology as a science and profession, and promoting the contributions to and use of sociology by society. The American Sociological Review is ASA's flagship journal.
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