Research at Risk? Examining the Importance of Academic Freedom for STEM Research Production

• In Event: Prospects of research: building research universities

Proposal

The international community has recognized that academic freedom is a necessary prerequisite for fulfilling the fundamental human right to education. Policymakers around the globe have widely adopted scripts about the importance of supporting education for individual and economic development (Baker, 2014), but many authoritarian leaders who voice support for education have also sought to control the scope and content of learning. Thus, for several decades scholars have sought to make normative arguments about the importance of protecting academic freedom.

In 1990 African scholars adopted a pair of declarations in support of academic freedom at Der Es Salaam in Tanzania and at Kampala, Uganda. In Tanzania, scholars noted that the authoritarian tendencies that were emerging across Africa were leading to “increasingly greater, deeper and more frequent encroachments on academic freedom and freedom to pursue truth and knowledge, particularly at the universities and other institutions of higher education” (Dar Es Salaam Declaration on Academic Freedom and Social Responsibility of Academics, 1990, preamble). In Uganda later that year, scholars tried to build on the Dar Es Salaam declaration to mobilize a pan-African movement to protect academic freedom from authoritarian state leaders (Kampala Declaration on Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility, 1990).

What began in Africa soon caught broader support in the international community. By 1997, the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) took up the issue of academic freedom in its Recommendation Concerning the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel. The UNESCO report warned of “the vulnerability of the academic community to untoward political pressures which could undermine academic freedom” (p. 46). More recently, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression issued a report to the seventy-fifth session of the UN General Assembly, which recognized the rise of threats to academic freedom around the globe. The Special Rapporteur reminded the international community that “academic freedom enjoys fundamental protection not only in international human rights instruments but also at the regional level” (Kaye, 2020, p. 10), including through The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, The European Court of Human Rights, The European Convention on Human Rights (Article 10), and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa’s (CODESRIA’s) Juba Declaration on Academic Freedom and University Autonomy.

Although there is a strong international basis for protecting academic freedom, there is a dearth of empirical research that examines the benefits of academic freedom. Researchers have noted that academic freedom has, at least in part, driven this research production (Niemczyk & Rossouw, 2019; Rónay & Niemczyk, 2020). However, the evidence behind these claims is mostly anecdotal (Niemczyk & Rossouw, 2019; Rónay & Niemczyk, 2020). As neo-nationalism currents are resulting in more authoritarian leadership in the West and throughout the globe (e.g., Douglass, 2021), it is important to document the positive influence of academic freedom on higher education and society. Therefore, this paper uses a novel panel dataset to examine whether countries with higher measures of academic freedom had greater research production in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

Theoretical Framework

There are several theoretical reasons as to why we can expect that when scholars enjoy academic freedom, their research production might increase. First, constraints on academic freedom limit which topics researchers can investigate (Altbach, 2001), potentially inhibiting the originality of the work and the creativity of the authors. Additionally, limitations on academic freedom often entail regulating scholars’ collaborations with international colleagues, or unintentionally chilling scholars’ motivation to engage in such collaborations (Douglass, 2021), which are essential to robust research activity (Baker et al., 2018). Also, when academic freedom is limited, researchers find it harder to secure funds to conduct their studies (Douglass, 2021). All this might lead to decreased research production.

Data

We use cross-national, longitudinal, quantitative measures of academic freedom to examine the relationship between academic freedom and STEM research production over time. The V-Dem Institute developed the Academic Freedom Index (Spannagel et al., 2020), which offers multiple internationally comparable measures of academic freedom over time. We separately analyzed multiple variables from the V-Dem dataset to check whether our findings were robust to different measures of academic freedom. The V-Dem variables including “Freedom of Academic and Cultural Expression” (v2clacfree), “Freedom to Research and Teach” (v2cafres), “Freedom of Academic Exchange and Dissemination” (v2cafexch), and a measure of the extent to which academics publicly criticize government policies (v2cacritic). We merged the academic freedom data with previously collected data on country-level STEM research production, which was measured as the overall volume of publications, as well as the share of publications published in differently ranked journals (AUTHOR). As control variables, we included measures that capture the size of higher education system, economic development and connectedness to the global economy, as well as government spending on research and development. Our panel included 457 country-year observations.

Methods

We used panel data models (Zhang, 2010) with year and institution fixed effects to test whether measures of academic freedom were related to STEM research production. Although the Hausman test indicated that we should specify fixed effects models, we also estimated random effects models to test whether our results were sensitive to this model specification. Regardless of the V-Dem variable we used to measure academic freedom, and across fixed- and random-effects models, we found a similar pattern of results in all our analyses. Academic freedom has a statistically significant, positive relationship with STEM research production over time.

Contribution and Implications

This proposal addresses the conference’s sub-them on social justice and inclusion by demonstrating the importance of protecting academic freedom, which should be a tenet of democratic institutions but is increasingly under attack by rising neo-nationalist and authoritarian tendencies around the globe. We show that not only is academic freedom a prerequisite for fulfilling the fundamental human right to education, but it also influences STEM research production over time. In the full version of the paper, we also discuss opportunities to protect academic freedom.

Author

• Volha Chykina, University of Richmond