US leads worldwide decline in academic freedom – Report

Academic freedom has declined more quickly in the United States than any other country in the past year, but it is a significant contributor to a worrying global trend of continuing decline in academic freedom, according to a new report.

From an average worldwide high in 2015 of 0.6 (with 1 equalling fully free), academic freedom fell to 0.54 in 2025, says the latest Academic Freedom Index (AFI) report released on 17 March.

The experience of academic freedom by the mass of the world’s scholars and students between 2015 and 2025 fell 22%, from 0.49 to 0.38, a decline of 25%.

Behind the global figure is the stark finding that one year into the second presidency of Donald J Trump, the United States registered a steep and unprecedented decline in its academic freedom score, dropping from 0.68 to 0.4.

This decline moved the US from third from the bottom in the top 40%-50% in the Country’s Score Table to the middle of the bottom 30%-40%. It leaves the US’ level of academic freedom just below that of Mozambique (0.41) and just above Thailand (0.38), where the law of llèse-majesté, forbidding insult of the monarchy, is the strictest in the world.

The decline in academic freedom and other democracy indicators in the US has led to a warning by another report tracking the health of democracy globally that the US is on the cusp of no longer being classified as a liberal democracy.

“The most important thing that the AFI report focused on,” said Robert Quinn, executive director of New York City-based Scholars at Risk Network, “was a decline in academic freedom in far more countries – what they call ‘autocratising countries’ and I would call ‘eroding democracies’ – than those in which there were improvements.

“The biggest danger from the current pressures on higher education in the United States comes from the use of extra-legal means to undermine the autonomy of the university,” Quinn said.

“At the federal level, the government is using not only executive orders but [also] coercive executive actions, cancelling of contracts, not making payments on approved grants, changes to various policies and practices outside the terms of statutory rules and procedures.”

Overall, since 2015, academic freedom has declined in 50 countries – including India, Türkiye, Madagascar and Russia, but also France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Iceland.

The nine countries where academic freedom has increased over this period include Bangladesh, Gambia, Montenegro and Uzbekistan.

Over this same period, institutional autonomy (the sine qua non measure of academic freedom, the authors of the AFI argue) declined in 43 countries while improving in 11. In more than 50 countries, the freedom to research and teach without censorship or interference declined, while in 13 countries, professors saw an improvement in these areas.

The AFI is based on a collaborative project between scholars at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at the University of Gothenburg. These researchers draw on the expertise of 2,357 experts worldwide and over one million data points.

Experts’ ratings were aggregated using advanced statistical techniques to produce the point estimates (and estimates of uncertainty).

US leads worldwide decline in academic freedom – Report

Liberal democracy status at risk

The decline in academic freedom that the AFI charts in the US is one component triggering the V-Dem Institute’s conclusion that the US is on the cusp of losing its status as a liberal democracy, as explained in V-Dem’s Democracy Report 2026: Unravelling The Democratic Era (Democracy Report) that was also published on 17 March.

The authors of Democracy Report write: “The scale and speed of autocratisation under the Trump administration are unprecedented in modern times. Within one year, the USA’s LDI [Liberal Democracy Index] score has declined by 24%; its world rank dropped from 20th to 51st place out of 179 nations.

“The level of democracy on the LDI is dwindling to [the] 1965 level – the year that most regard as the start of a real, modern democracy in the USA.”

Democracy Report’s conclusion is based on examinations of Trump’s use of executive orders, centralisation of power in his office, the Republican-controlled Congress’ abdication of its constitutional oversight, belittling of the courts, removal of federal civil rights protections and efforts to control elections.

Additionally, V-Dem data (which is used in both reports) “shows a substantial drop in the freedom of academic and cultural expression”.

The report further states: “The current administration’s offensive against academia includes the reduction of autonomy, the restriction of the freedom to research and teach, the politicisation of educational content, and the weaponising of federal funding.

“In particular, the Trump administration has leveraged federal funding and accreditation to force universities to dismantle DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] programmes and to restrict pro-Palestine activities and is seeking to fundamentally reshape admission, hiring, and protest management. A series of universities have settled with the administration to restore financial stability.”

Top and bottom scorers

The three countries that scored the highest in the AFI report that covered 2024, Czechia, Estonia and Belgium, retained these spots in the 2026 report (which covers 2025). All were between 0.98 and 0.95. Slovenia’s AFI score of 0.94 moved it from eight to the fifth position; Sweden too remained in this cohort.

The other Western European nations that were in this cohort in 2024 – Spain, Italy, Finland and Portugal – all fell. Spain dropped to the top 10%-20%, while Italy, Finland and Portugal fell one cohort lower, into the top 20%-30%.

This year’s second cohort, the top 10%-20%, includes Austria, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Poland, Kenya, Canada, Norway and Australia – only Australia and Denmark were in this cohort in last year’s report.

Also in this cohort for this year is South Korea, while North Korea’s less than 0.04 placed it as the fourth from the bottom of all countries examined.

The top 40%-50% in this year’s report includes Mexico, with a score of 0.71; Greece with about the same score, down to Togo, which had a score of 0.61. The UK’s score of 0.68 placed it in the middle of this cohort – but represents a decline of 0.08 from last year’s score of 0.76 that placed the UK in the middle of the next-highest cohort.

The US, in the bottom 30%-40% cohort, had a score of 0.4, which is 0.28 lower than last year’s score of 0.75, for a decline of about 70%. The US score puts it between Mozambique’s 0.41 and Thailand’s 0.38.

Russia and India are in the next to the lowest cohort: the bottom 10%-20%. Russia’s score is about 0.18, while India’s is 0.14.

The scores of the bottom 10% were near 0.1 and included (in descending order) Nicaragua, Türkye, Egypt, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Belarus.

The presence of seven Western universities in Education City in Doha (including branches of the American universities Cornell, Carnegie Mellon and Northwestern, as well as one of the University of Calgary, Canada) does not appear to have influenced academic freedom in Qatar. The emirate’s AFI score of 0.10 places it at the top of this, the lowest, cohort.

Qatar scores best in Campus Integrity (1.44) and Academic Exchange and Dissemination (1.05), both of which are measures of activity inside campuses. Lower scores are recorded in Institutional Autonomy (0.65) and Academic and Cultural Expression (0.67), both of which, Quinn explained, cross over the campus into the public.

“I don’t think this [the differential in scores] is terribly surprising. What you’ll frequently hear from overseas campuses is that ‘Within our campus we have full academic freedom’.

And the higher Campus Integrity and Academic Exchange scores suggest that there’s some truth to that or at least perceived truth to that. But there’s a recognition that there are off-limit areas, such as off campus,” said Quinn.

Subcategories show breadth of decline

The AFI includes an interactive map that gives detailed historical information about a country’s scores going back to 1900 (where possible).

Finland’s fallout of the top cohort is due to a 0.10 decline in, for example, Freedom to Teach and Research to 3.05 and Institutional Autonomy to 2.93, and a larger 0.36 decline in Campus Integrity to 2.74.

The UK’s 0.9 decline to 0.67 was caused by a decline in every subcategory: Freedom to Research and Teach, from 3.09 to 2.94; Academic Exchange and Dissemination, from 3.23 to 2.87; Institutional Autonomy, from 2.82 to 2.53; Campus Integrity, from 2.76 to 2.61; and Academic and Cultural Expression, from 3.15 to 2.57. For the UK, this was the ninth straight year of decline; in 2016, its score was 0.93.

France’s overall decline from 0.88 to 0.80 was largely caused by its decline from 3.40 to 2.81 in Freedom to Research and Teach, and a decline from 3.38 to 2.74 in Campus Integrity. As recently as 2023, France’s overall score was 0.89.

Canada held steady at 0.89, though there are two warning signs. Since 2019, Institutional Autonomy has fallen more than a full point: from 3.74 to 2.63, largely because some provincial governments (which charter universities in Canada) have weakened shared governance and have exerted pressure on curricula. Accordingly, Freedom to Research and Teach has declined from 3.46 in 2021 to 3.23 today.

Russia’s overall score has almost halved since 2021 to 0.18 today. In the past year, Campus Integrity declined from 1.78 to 1.12 – as the Federal Security Service, or FSB, has worked to keep the lid on any anti-Putin efforts.

Institutional autonomy

Every week, Scholars at Risk publishes a newsletter with a list of articles that deal with attacks on scholars and universities. Many of the articles, including some that appeared in University World News, focus on attacks on universities’ institutional autonomy.

The AFI argues that institutional autonomy occupies a central position in the protection of academic freedom and cites the 1997 UNESCO definition of institutional autonomy – “that degree of self-governance necessary for effective decision making . . . regarding academic work, standards . . . and respect for academic freedom and human rights”.

The authors of the AFI point to a ruling on academic freedom from Germany’s constitutional court which ruled that the country’s Basic Law “guarantee[d] institutional self-governance and reason[ed] that individual academic freedom would be illusory if universities lacked sufficient institutional autonomy”.

This discussion of institutional autonomy and academic freedom pushes back on the argument that “higher education institutions have become a locus where hegemonic, typically liberal attitudes, norms, and cultural values dominate through silencing of critical and dissenting voices, thereby limiting freedom of speech, entrenching intellectual exclusion, and eroding tolerance and pluralism”.

Such charges are regularly made by Trump’s supporters and, as University World News has shown, animate the US president’s many executive orders and lawsuits against universities such as Harvard and Columbia.

They are also made by politicians and critics of higher education in countries where populist parties are either in government, such as in prime minister Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, or have popular support, such as in France (Rassemblement National) or Britain (Reform UK).

The data in the AFI allows an empirical investigation of this thesis: V-Dem and FAU averaged the institutional autonomy and freedom to research and teach scores of each country from 2000 to 2025 and then plotted the scores on a chart.

The results show, said Dr Angelo V Panaro, postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Political Science at FAU, “that in countries with high levels of institutional autonomy the freedom of individual academics is strong. Conversely, when institutional autonomy is weak, the freedom of individual academics is less protected.”

Unprecedented decline in the US

The AFI’s longest analytical section is devoted to the US, where the decline of academic freedom is unprecedented.

In 2020, before politicians in states like Florida and Texas began pressuring universities to ban DEI programmes and stop teaching “divisive topics” like critical race theory (which became an issue in that year’s presidential election), the institutional autonomy score of the US was 3.26, comfortably above the 2.98, which Panaro explained was the “average level of institutional autonomy for all countries included in Western Europe and North America”. The US is not included in North America in this case.

By 2023, as the attacks on DEI and critical race theory continued and states began passing laws against them, America’s score had declined to 2.58, while the average score had declined to 2.86. A year later, as the average peer country figure declined to 2.75, the figure for the US declined to 2.4, almost 14% lower than the average.

The peer-country average in 2025 remained at 2.75. The figure for the US one year into Trump’s second presidency is 48% lower: 1.68. This figure puts the US behind the UK (2.53), Italy (2.82), Poland (2.82) and also behind Senegal (2.64), Bolivia (2.59), Colombia (2.35) and Indonesia (1.95).

“The steep decline in the US case, concentrated within a relatively short six-year period, shows how quickly political and administrative pressures can erode institutional autonomy,” states the AFI.

“Other countries with relatively high scores for academic freedom and democracy which have lately experienced consistent declines, such as Hungary, India, and Türkiye, have also experienced substantial and statistically significant declines, as political attacks, legal reforms, and administrative interventions have gradually undermined the autonomy of higher education institutions.

“Compared to the US, however, these have occurred over longer periods and with different magnitudes,” the AFI states.

It took 16 years for Hungary to fall from 3.0 (on a four-point scale) to 0.8. Pressure from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government led to a decline of 1.0 (2.2 to 1.1) over 13 years. It took Türkiye’s president, Recep Erdogan, eight years to push Türkiye’s figure for institutional autonomy down from 2.0 to 0.8.

A plethora of state laws passed during the presidency of Joe Biden (2020-2024) and additional state laws, Trump’s executive orders and lawsuits have led to a 1.6-point decline in institutional autonomy – from 3.2 to 1.6 – in six years, almost 30% faster than Türkiye’s decline, the next fastest, and 90% faster than the decline in Orbán’s Hungary.

For his part, Quinn told University World News that “the pace and variety of vectors used, particularly by the federal administration and some states [are] what’s shocking – and should be shocking to people who care about universities that serve the public”.

Quinn is not surprised at the speed of America’s decline because politics have unfolded differently. In countries like Hungary or Türkiye, the decline took years because the governments “passed legislative ‘reforms’ that eroded autonomy”.

By contrast, in the United States, the Trump administration is using “extra-legal” means outside the “normal legislative and rule-making process” by such means as executive orders, lawsuits and failure to fulfil contractual responsibilities.

An exporter of a bad model

Over the coming year, Panaro is interested in countries that are experiencing increases in academic freedom, such as The Gambia, Uzbekistan, and Bahrain. “Looking at these cases allows us to examine what happens in countries where academic freedom is actually improving and to better understand the drivers behind this increase.”

He’s less sanguine about what the next year will show in Western Europe. “We will definitely continue to keep an eye on most Western European countries where populist parties are in government because in last year’s report, we found that academic freedom is often undermined when populist parties are in power, for example, Hungary and Italy,” he stated.

Both Panaro and Quinn think that further restrictions on academic freedom in the US have deleterious effects on the wider higher education ecosphere because, as Panaro put it, the US “sets the standard for other countries, especially in Western Europe. So the US definitely remains one of our key areas of focus”.

Quinn said: “For most of our history, the United States has been a role model that we communicate to the world on valuing and protecting higher education autonomy and academic freedom. Now it is a negative example and a real risk of being an exporter of bad models.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that anti-democratic actors around the world sell legitimacy for their own attacks on higher education based on what’s going on in the United States,” he said.