New Authoritarianism and the Erosion of Academic Freedoms: Exploring the Global Dynamics in Higher Education between 1900-2022

• In Event: Higher education’s resistance of new authoritarianism, hegemony, and the erosion of democracy

Proposal

In the past two decades, there has been a noticeable decline in democracy worldwide (Diamond, 2021), with a corresponding weakening of democratic institutions such as the rule of law, fair elections, and human rights and freedoms. This decline can be attributed to the rise of populist, conservative, and illiberal regimes (Bermeo, 2016; Cianetti et al., 2018). Consequently, higher education (HE) has come under increased scrutiny from governments (Meyer-Sahling & Toth, 2020), which was already struggling to uphold its missions and freedoms amidst growing interventions driven by neoliberal austerity policies. These new interventions have been particularly energized by right-wing, populist, and conservative political regimes, who invoke the notion of a "national" university with a specific understanding of academic freedoms and the missions of HE. However, comparative research in the field of HE has yet to explore the connections between political shifts and the transformation of civil rights, including academic freedoms comprehensively (Altbach et al., 2010; Buckner, 2017; Jessop, 2013).
Governments and/or states, including in democratically declining countries have the capacity to exert significant influence on universities, as the state remains the main provider of the legislative framework for HE activities (Pachuashvili, 2011), the largest funder of HE (Mettler, 2014), the primary regulator of access to HE (Perry, 2015), and the definer of the political and economic atmosphere for HE (Levy, 2009). To enable them to better serve the regimes’ objectives, governments typically employ a variety of mechanisms to consolidate control over HE, such as applying centralized control of universities, repressing academic freedoms of faculty and students, changing regulatory framework of democratic governance to accommodate regime’s expectations, appointing university leaders from people loyal to regime, and clamping down dissent by any measure, including use of force. Additionally, the increasing use of populist rhetoric, anti-globalist, and anti-scientific tendencies, as well as the increasing emphasis on religious and nationalist values by political leaders impose an indirect pressure over universities and aim silencing them. The friction between external political pressure and the longstanding buffer of academic freedom offers a unique opportunity to observe how democratically declining governments are changing HE.
This study aims to investigate the emergence of new authoritarianism and its convoluted political effects over HE, specifically academic freedom at the national level. I conceptualize universities as political institutions (Dillabough, 2021; Robertson, 2020) and academia as a public space pierced by crises and precarity (Filippini, 2017; Pusser, 2016) in this study that is forced to change in order to survive and if possible, flourish within public landscape while preserving its traditions, culture and missions. Additionally, I explore academic freedom as a politically defined and motivated concept (Neave, 1988; Neave & Vught, 1994) that is embedded within nation-states, including the political landscape. My major research question for this paper will be: Which political factors impact the conditions of academic freedom at a national level worldwide and is there a variation in this impact across different dimensions across time and space? To answer this question, I employ quantitative analysis of different political factors, such as democratic decline, illiberalism, ideological pressure, right-wing and extreme right-wing parties in power, centralization of university governance, the rise of conservative and nationalist economic policies in higher education, including the employment of financial tools used to “tame” universities.
My analysis uses a country-year panel dataset spanning from 1900 to 2020 and containing data on nearly 200 countries. The variables come from a range of trusted international sources of cross-national longitudinal data. The dependent variable of this study is the disaggregated from Academic Freedom Index – Freedom of Research and Teaching that measures classical understanding of academic freedom. It was developed in 2020 as part of the Varieties of Democracy dataset covering 202 countries covering data between the 1900s and 2020 (Coppedge et al., 2021; Spannagel et al., 2020). My independent variables come from V-Democracy Institute (Coppedge et al., 2021), Database of Political Institutions (Scartascini et al., 2021), Democratic Erosion Event Dataset (Gottlieb et al., 2022), World Bank and UNESCO (UIS, 2016).
Initial findings. The base model across time shows a significant difference across time, showing increase of academic freedoms since 1950s with fast and steady positive trend after 1980s. The flattening trend since 2000s coincides with the reporting of global decline of academic freedoms (Scholars at Risk Network, 2020). Extended models with political factors show a strong association between most of the factors and academic freedom as expected. The results show a significant differentiation based on types of political regimes and translates into positive association as countries transition from autocracy to democracy. Similarly, I find a negative and statistically significant association between promotion of ideology of the ruling regimes and academic freedom, and it suggests that extended inclination of the regimes to specific ideologies curtail academic freedom without depending on the characteristics of the ideologies, such as nationalist, conservative, socialist, or religious tendencies. Additionally, strong association is also observed between academic freedoms and broader political and civil rights, meaning that academic freedoms are not isolated within the society and is embedded within political system of the countries. Pre-existing limited university autonomy conditions also lead to the decrease of academic freedoms showing that individual freedoms are difficult to maintain without institutional support. Major tools used by current de-democratizing regimes, such as application of repression and use of force also leads to a strong negative association with academic freedoms as expected. In contrast, I did not find the significant association between private and public systems of higher education and academic freedom; the association become even weaker after controlling for regimes and democracy measures. Surprisingly, I also could not observe association between international and national protections of academic freedom and academic freedom conditions that leads to the assumption that governments were able to find regulatory and legal frameworks of bypassing international protections of academic freedoms with fewer harms to their rule.

Author

• Zahra Jafarova, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto