University World News Examines OSUN's Role in Resisting Threats to Academic Freedom Worldwide

University World News recently published an article by Nathan M. Greenfield surveying the many crises universities are experiencing across the globe as authoritarian governments or figures assault academic freedom. The article provides three instances where institutions associated with OSUN have faced attacks because their humanities and social sciences programs teach students to think critically and challenge orthodoxies. Greenfield also describes the various ways universities and governments are responding to the threats. 

In the article, Jonathan Becker, Vice Chancellor of OSUN and Executive Vice President of Bard College, says, “the sad truth is that authoritarians are targeting higher education around the globe, be it in Russia or Hungary, the Philippines or Afghanistan, or now the United States. Leaders of these countries want a compliant and not an engaged citizenry.” Becker also speaks critically of neoliberal regimes, “who want to emphasize technical degrees and business education” at the expense of liberal arts and sciences studies.

In 2021, the Russian government declared Bard College, an OSUN co-founder and a major force behind Smolny College in St. Petersburg, the only accredited liberal arts and science institution in Russia, to be an “undesirable foreign organization.” This decree criminalized the vibrant partnership, effectively gutting Smolny’s liberal arts curriculum.

Becker explains that Bard’s expulsion from Russia signified the victory of educational traditionalists and neoliberals: “They are not interested in a new type of education that emphasizes individual development and the production of an engaged citizenry.”

The article explains how the 2021 military coup in Myanmar scuttled the opening of the OSUN-supported Parami University, which would have been the country’s first liberal arts institution. A liberal education, “questioning assumption, questioning authority, empowering students to think,” was too threatening to the junta, says the school’s founder, Kyaw Moe Tun, who was forced to flee the country and is now a fellow in OSUN’s Threatened Scholars Integration Initiative. 

Finally, Greenfield discusses the undergraduate students at New College of Florida who are working with OSUN to support the activist group D.E.F.Y. (Defending Educational Freedom for Youth), which was formed after Governor Ron De Santis waged a draconian campaign to obliterate the college’s traditional progressive and liberal arts culture.

Read the article in University World News

Post Date: September 19, 2023