Mapping Academic Freedom in a Global Context

“In order to create new knowledge about academic freedom that is relevant in a global perspective, you must have access to the problems of other places. This work could not be accomplished without the global connectedness of the Open Society University Network,” says Liviu Matei, Vice Chancellor of OSUN and Provost of Central European University (CEU), a co-founding partner of OSUN.

Matei, a professor of higher education policy who has taught at universities in Romania, Hungary, Austria and the US, co-leads OSUN’s Global Observatory on Academic Freedom with Milica Popović, Visiting Researcher at CEU’s Yehuda Elkana Center for Higher Education, CEU. Matei says that the worldwide reach of OSUN’s institutional partnerships is the defining feature that enables its education, research, and civic engagement opportunities to speak to the most urgent concerns about open societies in today’s rapidly shifting academic and political landscapes.
 
As contemporary challenges to the freedoms and responsibilities of universities expand and contract across the globe, the Observatory engages in global research and advocacy activities that promote academic freedom. It also publishes an annual report documenting both the positive and negative trends in the field.
 
Importantly, the Observatory seeks to promote a new, up-to-date and adapted conceptualization of academic freedom that institutions and influential actors worldwide are embracing. While it examines empirical practices and intellectual understandings  of the concept, the Observatory also scrutinizes the range of political and institutional interpretations of it, with the goal of locating or building consensus.
 
How academics and governments understand academic freedom is a major question the project pursues, according to Matei, with a focus “not just on China and Russia, but also on France, the EU and the US.”

“Whether one looks to higher-education policies or within universities themselves, there simply is no shared definition of the concept (of academic freedom), nor any common recognition of why it is currently needed,” writes Matei in a recent article in Project Syndicate on “The West’s Crisis of Academic Freedom.” 

Alarmingly, that lack of an intellectual consensus on academic freedom within European higher education institutions has created “a situation that is used and abused by political powers,” said Matei recently during the project’s first public event, a roundtable discussion with several leading academics and human rights specialists at the Yehuda Elkana Center for Higher Education, CEU.

Politicians in the EU, UK or the US are increasingly condemning and attempting to stifle research in academic fields that challenge their own agendas, writes Matei. He gives the example of France’s minister of higher education, Frédérique Vidal, who has accused French universities of promoting “Islamo-leftism.” He cites as further evidence of governmental overreach Vidal’s arguably disingenuous claim that an official probe into the academic field of postcolonial studies in France was necessary to protect against potential acts of terror. 

One remedy Matei suggests is the formulation of a common regional reference for academic freedom that draws on prior human rights standards, such as the 1975 Helsinki Accords. He also supports a shift from approaching European higher education as purely a scientific or rational practice to seeing it more as a social practice that is open to the influence of many different types of people and experiences. 

With the launch of the OSUN Global Observatory on Academic Freedom, and its rigorous standards for academic research, analysis, and documentation, Matei and his colleagues are striving to map the various interpretations of academic freedom that are embraced by educators and governments across the globe. Equipped with this knowledge, they hope to lay the foundation for an allied “intellectual resistance” against forces that would erode open societies and the free flow of ideas worldwide. Judging by the caliber of the Observatory’s recent efforts, the project is fully equipped to meet the challenge. 
 

Post Date: 05-11-2021