COVID-19 and risks to academic freedom

• In Event: Presidential Highlighted Session and Higher Education SIG Highlighted Session: New Threats to Academic Freedom in Times of COVID-19

Proposal

The significance of academic freedom for preventing and adequately managing a pandemic is clear; the answer to the reverse question, however, is less obvious: How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected academic freedom around the world? Using data from the new Academic Freedom Index (AFi) – a near-global time series dataset, the second edition of which was published in March 2021 – we set out to quantitatively investigate this question. We found that the global trend lines in academic freedom do not reveal a significant change when we compare 2020 to the previous years. Similarly, when zooming in on individual countries or territories, we found that there are several cases in which country-level AFi scores declined in 2020 (e.g., Belarus, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, or Zambia) – but none of these negative developments can be clearly and unequivocally attributed to the spread of the Coronavirus. Even so, it is a plausible hypothesis that certain pandemic-related politics and measures reinforced some developments that had already begun before the pandemic hit. However, there are clear limitations to a quantitative approach in terms of how much it can tell us about actual links between the public health crisis and changes in academic freedom. Smaller pandemic-induced changes in academic freedom levels in particular are likely not to register in the aggregated index data at all, or they are hard to distinguish from random statistical fluctuation. However, this does not mean that these changes are not highly relevant within their context, or that they may not reveal an even stronger effect in the medium or long term that is simply not yet visible in the 2020 data.

At the same time looking beyond the aggregated index data we can shed light on different intersection points between the COVID-19 pandemic and academic freedom. First, we can dissect the risks that are inherent in the precipitous mass move to – often transnational – modes of online teaching, including the expanded opportunities this development presents for the surveillance of scholars and students as well as how it influences pressures toward self-censorship. Second, we can observe the impact that pandemic-related emergency measures have had on academia and academic freedom – and how differences between countries correspond with different regime types and policies. Third, we can discern on the consequences of prolonged and widespread mobility restrictions for researchers who normally depend on – but find it impossible to – conduct field research. Fourth, we can observe the ways in which the pandemic has exacerbated political polarization in democratic societies, resulting in heightened levels of public harassment facing scholars. Our presentation builds on the work published in this collection on “COVID-19 and Academic Freedom: What’s the Connection”.

Authors

• Janika Spannagel, Free University Berlin

• Ilyas Saliba, WZB Berlin Social Science Center