Academic freedom is fundamental to scientific progress, the pursuit of truth, research collaboration, and quality higher education. Plenty of universities and states have committed to safeguarding academic freedom, yet it remains under attack in many places.
As we are publishing this report, the global community is racing to respond to the novel coronavirus Sars-CoV‑2. Academics, both inside and outside of universities and in an extraordinarily broad range of disciplines, are playing a vital role in addressing the epidemiological, economic, political, and cultural dimensions of the response to the crisis, as they will in the eventual recovery and restoration of essential functions and services. The situation demonstrates that academic freedom matters to everyone — and in a situation of crisis, it can literally help to save lives.
The authors offer this report and index in the hope that it will help to defend academic freedom, for the present and the future of society. We can only achieve this goal if we monitor academic freedom carefully and consistently. To this end, new data is needed.
Prior efforts to collect data on academic freedom have been limited in scope and breadth. This paper introduces a brand-new, global time-series dataset based on expert assessments involving 1,810 scholars from around the world, covering the years 1900 to 2019. It includes more than 110,000 observation points, eight indicators, and an aggregate index on academic freedom, based on a Bayesian measurement model.
This dataset was developed collaboratively by experts at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), the Scholars at Risk Network, and the V‑Dem Institute. The data is publicly available, and V‑Dem provides an online tool that can be used to analyze any of the indicators.
