23 January 2024 | American Sociological Association

In the United States and across the world, new challenges to academic freedom have emerged. From Florida and Texas to Turkey and China, governments at the state and national levels are adopting restrictions on what can be taught and researched. Looking at the long historical narrative of academic freedom can help us better understand these current challenges.

In the past 60 years, academic freedom has generally increased worldwide, but with large country variations and notorious episodes of repression. Previous research into what prompts these variations has been largely case-based, stressing domestic or local determinants of academic freedom. But local struggles over academic freedom do not occur in a vacuum, according to a new study appearing in the February 2024 issue of The American Sociological Review.

In the study, “The Social Foundations of Academic Freedom: Heterogeneous Institutions in World Society, 1960 to 2022,” authors Julia C. Lerch, David John Frank, and Evan Schofer from the University of California-Irvine look at the heterogeneity of international structures in world society and theorize how they contribute to ebbs and flows of academic freedom.

Post-1945 liberal international institutions, such as the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “enshrined key rights and norms that bolstered academic freedom worldwide.” Alongside these institutions, note the authors “illiberal alternatives coexisted. Cold War communism, for instance, anchored cultural frames that justified greater constraints on academia.”….

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