Academic Rights Watch and Their Approach to Democracy and Enemies of Academic Freedom

• In Event: From The Pedagogy of the Oppressed to the Struggles Against the Oppressors

Abstract

Sweden has for long been regarded as a role model for democracy. At the same time, many countries call themselves democratic today (Kirsch & Welzel, 2019) in the sense that the people [demos] are given opportunities to influence country in some sense (Held 1997). At the same time, there are fewer and fewer countries in the world (currently only 5.7%) that have full democracy. Full democracy means the way in which democratic values and thought figures³ strive to hook in people's daily culture instead of focusing on procedures and majority government (The Economist Intelligence Unit 2019). Authoritarian and totalitarian forces are today on a strong rise around the world (McCarthy 2019, Rydgren 2018) based on an idea of absolute obedience as well as an aspiration to radically restrict plurality and oppose various forms of oppression. Consequently, the ambition to purify societies from dissidents is a reality in many countries and is strengthened by the way neoliberalism and various forms of neoconservatism, such as right-wing radical groups unite (Edling & Macrine forthcoming).

One dimension in a vivid democracy is indeed the possibility to criticism and free debate and over the years numerous ideas, groups and organizations have been established. At the same time a vivid democracy also comes with limits (Mouffe, 2005), namely a respect to specific values, such as for instance plurality, everyone’s equal value and human rights (cf. Freire, 1998; Lowe, 2020; Howie, 2018; Dreher and Griffith, 2018).

The tension between freedom of speech and the limit of this freedom is important to acknowledge and debate. In focus point in this paper is Academic Rights Watch (ARW) which is a foundation based on fundraising containing of researchers amongst others who have taken upon themselves that in the name of democracy guard the freedom in the Academy (universities and college universities). They have since 2012 published hundreds of texts about shortcomings at Swedish higher education institutions and have since 2015, 370,000 unique readers who have visited their website. They are active in the debates and are widely disseminated and commented on social media. Moreover, ARW's influence on SULF (trade union) has been confirmed by several independent sources.

The purpose of this paper is to deepen knowledge about broad democracy by exploring the relationship between freedom of speech/research and the ambition to make sure people and groups of people are not harmed. More specifically the paper aims to conduct a case study of published articles on the Swedish ARW website from 2015-2021 in relation to if and how they balance the right for free speech in the Academy and the right not to oppose harm to people. Following questions guide the study:

1) Who are the authors?
2) Is and how is the notion of democracy described?
3) What and who are considered to be obstacles (enemies) for Academic freedom?
4) Are any solutions to stimulate academic freedom presented, if so what kind of solutions?
5) Is and if so, how is the relationship between education and academic freedom presented?

Author

• Silvia Edling, University of Gävle