(Science|Business) Europe is not safe from erosion of academic freedom, says monitoring group

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Attacks on higher education communities around the world have continued to spread over the last 12 months, according to Scholars at Risk, a network of institutions and individuals that monitors academic freedom. Although Europe has remained relatively shielded, the risk of spillover from its neighbours and long-standing academic partners cannot be neglected.

“While Europe has led the way in elevating the visibility of academic freedom concerns and offering support to at-risk researchers, the system remains vulnerable to external political pressure and state-level overreach,” said Denise Roche, advocacy manager at Scholars at Risk Europe. “In multiple European countries, including Serbia and Georgia, governments took actions that eroded institutional autonomy.”

In Serbia, repression has transitioned from overt violence to external interference in university affairs, the report finds. Some faculty members were denied promotions or removed from their positions for supporting the nationwide anti-corruption movement, more students had their status revoked, most notably at the State University of Novi Pazar, and police raided the rectorate of the University of Belgrade without prior notice. Researchers have also paid the price for backing the student protests with caps on paid research time, grant evaluation delays and, more recently, their apparent replacement by party loyalists.

Further east, the Georgian government increased efforts to centralise higher education by consolidating programmes at public universities, reorganising multidisciplinary universities into specialised institutions under the One City-One Faculty initiative, and attempting to merge the country’s two largest public universities.

On the upside, the election of Péter Magyar in April has offered Hungary an opportunity to phase out the Orbán-era private foundation model at its universities which, ultimately, should rejoin both Erasmus+ and Horizon Europe.

Roche underscored the need to maintain and speed up efforts to protect academic freedom in Europe, “to prevent further erosion” across the continent. “Because no single institution can fully address this challenge alone, the next step is to foster a collaborative space to translate this growing body of activity into coordinated action,” she told Science|Business.

Between 1 July 2025 and 30 June 2026, Scholars at Risk documented 382 attacks on scholars, students and institutions across 59 countries and territories. This represents fewer attacks than during the same period a year before, although the New-York-based organisation notes a paradox under which the lack of reported incidents in environments that are known to be highly repressive likely suggests that systemic fear has successfully silenced or pushed away academics.

“When attacks of this nature persist, they pose a real risk of spillover across [Europe], particularly as governments have been known to draw lessons from one another’s approaches,” Roche said. “Recent developments in the US have also shown how quickly long-established protections can come under strain, highlighting that no system should take its resilience for granted.”

Pressures on academia are no longer confined to authoritarian regimes; in democratic contexts, restrictions are being increasingly formalised into illiberal policies, as is the case in the US where President Donald Trump has not stopped at funding cuts, layoffs and censorship, but has even tried to deport non-citizen students and academics.

“It started with the use of allegations of antisemitism during protests over Israel and Palestine as a cudgel to force universities into settlements with the government,” said Nate Schenkkan, director of research and learning at Scholars at Risk, referring to the Trump administration’s continuing efforts to coerce elite universities into restructuring their governance and curricula.

In the same vein, the government tried last October to have prominent universities commit to its political and ideological agenda in exchange for preferential treatment, a proposal known as the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. This was abandoned after widespread pushback, but pressures did not ease afterwards.

“In particular, the government has been very aggressive about bringing investigations into admissions practices at universities across the country, claiming that they have violated laws against discrimination based on race by continuing forms of affirmative action for minority applicants,” Schenkkan said.

As for research, the US government had planned to give senior political appointees the power to override scientific peer review over federal research grants. The regulation, which would allow non-experts to alter or cancel the awards mid-way should programme or presidential priorities shift, was temporarily blocked by Congress.

Policies have also been implemented at the state level, whether to weaken faculty tenure protections across Oklahoma, Tennessee and South Dakota, or to prohibit student research on gender identity and sexual orientation in Texas.

Overall, most incidents reported in the US concerned a loss of position at several prominent schools and institutions, including the universities of Harvard, Princeton, Cornell and Brown, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tufts University is one of the few places that saw one of its students be detained in March 2025, in apparent retaliation for a pro-Palestinian opinion piece. Removal proceedings were ended in February. On a related topic, in May, police used violence to disperse students protesting Israeli state military action in Gaza on the campus of Brooklyn College.

“Despite its uneven progress, it is clear that the federal government has the same goal of control over higher education,” Schenkkan said. “In early August, the government made a national call to action to universities, which repeats most of the criteria of the Compact, but now on a supposedly voluntary basis. The problem is that, at a time when the government is openly using coercion against universities to reach its goals, it appears more like a threat than an offer,” he added.

Meanwhile, in countries most marked by political instability, systemic corruption and human rights abuses, the situation is unchanged since last year. Military repression of Bangladeshi student protests against a quota system for government jobs has caused the death of 1,400 people. In Zimbabwe, government forces have multiplied arrests and allegedly tortured student leaders and activists and in Pakistan, Baloch students have continued to vanish at an alarming rate.