On July 16, 2024, in Bangladesh, two police officers fired birdshot at close range into a crowd of student protesters. One round struck Abu Sayed, a 24-year-old undergraduate and organiser of the country’s anti-quota movement, as he stood alone in front of the group with his arms spread wide. He was unarmed. According to an Amnesty International analysis of the incident, he “posed no apparent physical threat” to the officers who killed him. Two days later, police shot another student, Shykh Aashhabul Yamin, loaded his body onto an armoured personnel carrier, paraded it down a road, then tipped it over a highway median and drove off. Bangladesh’s government would fall within three weeks, but not before what the United Nations Human Rights Office would later call “brutal, systematic repression” left as many as 1,400 people dead.
Eight months later, on the other side of the world, plainclothes immigration agents surrounded Mahmoud Khalil — a recent graduate of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a lawful US permanent resident — and took him into custody without filing a single criminal charge. His apparent offence was leading a coalition of student groups that had organised protests over the war in Gaza. He was flown to a detention facility far from his lawyers and held for three months before a judge ordered his release.
A dead student in Dhaka and a green-card holder detained in Manhattan would not, on their face, seem to belong in the same story. One is a killing carried out by a security state confronting a mass uprising; the other is a bureaucratic manoeuvre executed under the letterhead of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy. But according to Scholars at Risk (SAR), the nonprofit whose Academic Freedom Monitoring Project has spent fourteen years cataloguing exactly this kind of incident, the two cases sit on the same continuum. They are both, in the organization’s telling, symptoms of the same underlying disease: a growing willingness by governments — authoritarian and elected alike — to treat universities as threats to be managed rather than institutions to be protected.
That argument is the spine of Free to Think 2025, SAR’s newly published annual report, which documents 395 attacks on higher education communities in 49 countries and territories over twelve months, from July 1, 2024, through June 30, 2025. The tally spans killings, forced disappearances, torture, wrongful arrests, prosecutions under vague “national security” statutes, firings, expulsions, travel bans, and a subtler kind of damage — frozen grants, purged faculty rolls, gutted research budgets — that rarely makes a headline on its own but can hollow out a university just as thoroughly as a raid.
SAR is not a neutral statistics agency; it is an advocacy and monitoring organisation founded to protect threatened academics, and its report is explicit about both its methodology and its limits. Each incident logged in the Academic Freedom Monitoring Project must be corroborated by at least two independent sources — typically local or international media, human rights reporting, and, where possible, court records or firsthand interviews — before it is counted. Even so, the report’s authors are candid that their figures capture only “a fraction of the total number of attacks that occur annually,” a shortfall driven by survivors’ fear of reprisal, restricted media environments in the world’s most repressive states, and SAR’s own limited resources. Paradoxically, the report argues, a falling incident count in a given country is sometimes the worst sign of all: it can mean not that repression has eased, but that it has succeeded so completely — through self-censorship, shuttered institutions, or the flight of scholars abroad — that there is almost no one left to report an attack on.
A Six-Part Taxonomy
SAR’s monitors sort what they find into six categories, and the cumulative totals since the project’s founding in 2011 sketch a grim shape. Violence — killings, torture, beatings, forced disappearances — accounts for 1,255 documented incidents system-wide, including 183 in the year covered by this report. Wrongful imprisonment and prosecution account for another 1,029 incidents historically, 55 of them this year. Loss of position — firings, forced resignations, expulsions — adds 441 incidents, 52 in this cycle. Travel restrictions, the smallest category, still total 113 incidents, nine of them this year, almost all in the United States. A catch-all “other” category, covering everything from campus occupations to legislative assaults on university autonomy, has grown to 574 incidents, 79 of them in this reporting period. And running through nearly all of these is a theme SAR treats as its own subject: incidents tied specifically to student expression made up 203 of the 328 verified incidents this year — roughly six in every ten.
Behind the categories are people. In Mozambique, on November 14, 2024, three masked members of the state criminal investigation service blindfolded and gagged a university student named Agapito as he walked to a store, drove him to an undisclosed location, and had him tortured and threatened with death for his activism; he was released the next day, the report notes, apparently only because his captor recognised him as a fellow native of the same province. In Afghanistan, Taliban guards beat a professor of Islamic jurisprudence, Hassamuddin Rahimzai, unconscious after he objected to a purge of faculty deemed insufficiently loyal to the regime, then held and tortured him in a governor’s detention facility. In India, members of Hindu nationalist groups assaulted an electrical engineering professor and Dalit-rights advocate, accusing him of promoting Christianity in his classroom. In Cameroon, a militant group abducted eleven students and staff of Saint-Lawrence University Institute on their way to a rural education program — one incident in a broader pattern of opportunistic kidnappings that has made Nigeria’s north and northeast especially dangerous for students, where armed groups have repeatedly seized university staff and busloads of students for ransom, sometimes releasing them within days, sometimes not.
The report also documents a subtler form of legal warfare. In Thailand, police arrested political scientist Paul Chambers in April 2025 over a webinar in which he discussed the military’s role in politics, charging him under the country’s lèse-majesté law and a computer-crimes statute; the charges were eventually dropped, but not before his university had already terminated him without a hearing, nullifying his work permit in the process. In Tunisia, a French doctoral student researching the career paths of former Arab Spring activists spent a month in detention on “endangering state security” charges before diplomatic pressure secured his release. And in the United States, after border agents discovered messages critical of President Trump on the personal devices of a visiting French scientist in March 2025, they denied him entry to a conference — an incident that, per the report, prompted a wave of academics to cancel trips to the US and calls for an international boycott of American conferences.
“Razakars”: Anatomy of an Uprising
Nowhere did the human cost land harder than in Bangladesh, where a legal dispute over civil-service hiring quotas detonated into the deadliest confrontation between a government and its own university students in recent memory.
The spark, per the report, was a June 2024 high court ruling reinstating a quota system — first adopted after independence in 1971 and abolished by student pressure in 2018 — that reserved more than half of government jobs for specific groups, including descendants of independence-war veterans. University students, who had organised against the same quotas six years earlier, mobilised again. The protests were initially peaceful. They turned decisive on July 14, when then–prime minister Sheikh Hasina publicly branded the demonstrators “razakars” — a slur for wartime collaborators with Pakistan, roughly equivalent to “traitors.” The remark appears to have emboldened the Bangladesh Chhatra League, the student wing of Hasina’s Awami League, whose members began attacking anti-quota protesters at Dhaka University the following day, injuring roughly 100 students; police joined in with tear gas and rubber bullets. By evening, the same pattern had repeated at Jahangirnagar University, and the government’s University Grants Commission shut every college and university in the country.
What followed, according to the report’s reconstruction, escalated by the day. An Amnesty International review found police using unlawful force against protesters; at least six students were killed that week, Abu Sayed and Yamin among them. The government imposed a nationwide internet blackout and curfew and deployed troops. By July 21, the high court had abolished most of the quotas, but students, now demanding accountability for the killings, kept marching. Authorities responded by opening investigations against tens of thousands of people and arresting more than 10,000 — what the report describes as some observers calling a “witch hunt.” Student leaders Asif Mahmud and Abu Bakar Majumder were abducted by police, held for four days, released blindfolded near a roadside, admitted to a hospital for treatment — and abducted again from their hospital beds a week later. Student leader Nur Nabi told researchers he was blindfolded, stripped, and tortured in custody.
Hasina resigned and fled the country on August 5, 2024. An interim government led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus took power, with prominent student organisers, including Nahid Islam and Asif Mahmud, appointed to cabinet posts. But the report is careful not to describe what followed as a clean resolution: reprisal violence broke out against Awami League supporters and religious minorities; a student mob at Jahangirnagar University beat a former Chhatra League leader to death in September; and rival student political factions — some aligned with the interim order, some with parties competing to fill the vacuum — clashed repeatedly on campuses through the following winter, in incidents involving rods, knives, and sickles that had nothing to do with the original protest movement and everything to do with who would inherit its authority.
Behind Bars for Books and Blogs
SAR devotes a dedicated chapter of the report — its Scholars in Prison project — to individuals the organisation has taken up as advocacy cases, and the profiles read as a kind of atlas of the offences that can now land an academic in a cell.
In Iran, disaster-medicine scholar Ahmadreza Djalali has been held under a death sentence since 2017 on a “corruption on earth” charge that appears to stem from his ties to the international academic community; his health has deteriorated over the years in solitary confinement and repeated hunger strikes. In June 2025, during twelve days of open warfare between Israel and Iran, an Israeli strike hit the wing of Evin Prison where he was being held. Prison authorities moved him to an undisclosed location afterwards. As of the report’s publication, no one — including his family in Sweden — knows where he is.
In China’s Xinjiang region, economics professor Ilham Tohti — twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and winner of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize — has served a life sentence since 2014 for “separatism,” a charge Chinese authorities have supported with nothing beyond his own articles, interviews, and lectures; his family has had no confirmed information about his condition since 2017. Folklore scholar Rahile Dawut disappeared in 2017 and, more than three years later, was revealed to have been secretly sentenced to life for “endangering state security.” Geographer Tashpolat Tiyip and literary scholar Abdulqadir Jalaleddin remain among an unknown number of Uyghur academics whom human-rights researchers say have vanished into a system the United Nations Human Rights Office has said may amount to crimes against humanity.
In Belarus, Marfa Rabkova, a law student at European Humanities University who was coordinating human-rights monitoring of the 2020 anti-Lukashenko protests, has been imprisoned since that year; a closed four-month trial produced a 15-year sentence on thirteen charges, later trimmed by three months on appeal. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has called for her immediate release and compensation. In Bahrain, retired mechanical-engineering professor Abduljalil Al-Singace has been serving a life sentence since 2011 for “plotting to overthrow the government”; for four years he has sustained himself on a liquid-only hunger strike, protesting both his treatment and prison authorities’ confiscation of a manuscript on Bahraini Arabic dialects that he spent four years researching. A UN special rapporteur has said he can no longer walk or exercise properly. In the United Arab Emirates, economist Nasser bin Ghaith, arrested in 2015 over a series of tweets criticising the government’s human-rights record, received the maximum sentence in a mass 2024 trial of 84 defendants that human-rights monitors have said relied on no new evidence and involved coerced testimony.
Azerbaijan produced two of the year’s starkest cases. Political-science doctoral student Bahruz Samadov, whose research examined the region’s Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, was arrested at his grandmother’s house in August 2024 and, after a closed-door trial, sentenced to fifteen years for “high treason.” Historian Igbal Abilov, an ethnic Talysh scholar researching his own minority’s culture, was stopped at the airport, had his passport confiscated, and was later charged with treason and “incitement of ethnic hatred” over what his lawyer says was an academic conversation with an Armenian colleague; he received eighteen years.
Not every case in the chapter ends in a cell. English-literature professor Gokarakonda Naga Saibaba, held in India since 2014 in connection with his advocacy for tribal communities affected by the country’s long-running Maoist insurgency, was finally acquitted and released — and died months later, on October 12, 2024, from complications of gallbladder surgery, his health permanently damaged by a decade behind bars. Before his death, he urged colleagues abroad to keep telling his story, insisting that his own release did not mean the fight for academic freedom in India was over.
When Democracies Turn on Their Own Universities
Two of the report’s most detailed country chapters describe not authoritarian states but elected governments whose response to student-led protest movements, in SAR’s account, began to resemble the same script.
In Georgia, university students led months of demonstrations — first against a Russian-style “foreign agents” law targeting NGOs, later against the ruling Georgian Dream party’s decision to suspend talks on European Union membership. A sit-in at Batumi Shota Rustaveli State University lasted more than eighty days and inspired strikes on at least seven other campuses; police raided the building three times. In November 2024, police dismantled a student encampment at Tbilisi State University using pepper spray and water cannons, arresting sixteen people, with the report noting that the university’s own rector reportedly let police use campus facilities as a staging base. The government subsequently withheld full accreditation from Ilia State University despite a positive review — a decision observers attributed, according to the report, to the university community’s role in the protests.
In Serbia, the trigger was a railway-station roof collapse in Novi Sad that killed fifteen people in November 2024; university students led the ensuing protest movement against government corruption, backed by more than 5,000 faculty members who signed a letter of support. What began as a government campaign to discredit the students — accusing them, without evidence cited in the report, of colluding with unnamed Western powers — escalated into physical confrontation. Pro-government supporters assaulted students commemorating the Novi Sad victims; a driver ploughed a car into a crowd of demonstrators in January 2025, injuring two, and was initially charged with attempted murder before prosecutors quietly reduced the charge and released him pending trial; four men beat two groups of students with baseball bats later that month, and although police arrested them, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić subsequently pardoned all four. The government cut professors’ research time from twenty hours a week to five and threatened university rectors, including the University of Belgrade’s, with criminal liability for supporting the protests.
Washington’s Reversal
No single chapter in Free to Think 2025 runs longer, or carries more weight in the report’s overall argument, than the one devoted to the United States — and SAR states its thesis without hedging: that the twelve months covered by the report mark “an unprecedented, voluntary dismantling of the US as a global education, research, and innovation superpower.”
The scale of the shift is visible in SAR’s own incident count. Before 2023, the Monitoring Project recorded 15 to 20 attacks on US higher education annually, mostly the product of state-level legislative pressure that Free to Think 2024 had already documented. In 2024, that number jumped past 80. In just the first half of 2025, it topped 40 again. The Academic Freedom Index’s own March 2025 update — an independent measure co-developed by the Global Public Policy Institute, the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, the V-Dem Institute, and SAR itself — charted the same trajectory in numerical terms: the AFi’s chart shows the United States holding steady at roughly 0.9, in the index’s “completely free” tier, from 2014 through 2019, before sliding through the early 2020s to 0.68 by 2024, a rating of “mostly free.” The index’s own analysts warned that developments since the start of 2025 had raised “serious concern regarding the future of academic freedom in the United States.”
What changed, according to the report, was less the direction of travel than its speed and its source. Where earlier erosion had come chiefly from state legislatures, the report describes a federal government that, beginning with President Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, moved on university funding, admissions, hiring, curricula, and disciplinary policy simultaneously and, in many cases, through channels the report characterises as extralegal. In early March 2025, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened investigations into 60 colleges and universities over allegations of antisemitic harassment; within weeks, the administration announced funding freezes at seven of them — Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, Northwestern, Brown, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania — with, the report says, the funding cuts announced before any investigation had concluded and the institutions’ formal notice letters arriving only afterwards, skipping statutory response periods. At the University of Virginia, the administration secured the resignation of the university’s president as part of a settlement. At Columbia and Harvard, the government’s demands went on to include changes in departmental governance, curricula, disciplinary policy, and admissions criteria.
State legislatures moved in parallel: by July 2025, the report counts at least 136 bills restricting diversity, equity and inclusion programming introduced across 29 states, with 28 signed into law. Research funding cuts rippled outward — the report cites disrupted projects not only across the United States but in Afghanistan, Australia, Egypt, Malawi, Portugal, and the United Kingdom, and describes the State Department rejecting up to a quarter of already-approved Fulbright fellowship proposals at the last stage of the process. Roughly 2,000 international-student visas were revoked, then reversed, in an episode the report says pushed some students to leave the country voluntarily rather than risk detention. A rarely invoked 1798 wartime statute was used, per the report, as legal grounding to detain and attempt to deport several noncitizen students and scholars without criminal charges — Khalil among them, alongside Georgetown postdoctoral fellow Badar Khan Suri, Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, and Columbia undergraduate Mohsen Mahdawi. None, the report notes, were accused of any crime.
The response from the sector itself, the report is careful to record, was not passive. Faculty senates at more than 50 institutions voted by June 2025 to join “mutual academic defence compacts,” pledging shared legal-defence resources. The American Association of University Professors, the Association of American Universities, the American Council on Education and other higher-education groups filed lawsuits that, as of the report’s writing, had produced preliminary court orders pausing several of the government’s actions, though none of the underlying cases had yet been resolved on the merits. The report’s own assessment of that legal pushback is measured rather than triumphant: even a strong eventual court victory, it notes, does little to offset the years lost to research already paused, admissions cycles already disrupted, and scholars who have already left.
Gaza on the Syllabus
Running underneath several of the report’s country chapters is a second, narrower story: the extent to which speech about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has become a flashpoint on campuses on multiple continents, cutting in more than one political direction at once.
Universities cancelled events tied to the subject on both sides of the debate. In the United States, Notre Dame’s Keough School pulled the keynote address of its own Kroc Institute peace conference over a speaker’s planned remarks on Palestinian activism; the University of California, Berkeley’s law school saw a talk by a far-right Israeli lawmaker forced onto Zoom after protesters disrupted it in person. In Germany, the Free University of Berlin and the University of Leipzig separately cancelled lectures — one by the UN’s special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, one by an Israeli historian accused by student groups of espousing racist views — both citing unspecified security concerns after public pressure campaigns. In France, Sciences Po blocked a lecture hall booking for a sitting member of parliament three times running; a Paris administrative court initially sided with the speaker, only for the country’s highest administrative court to reverse that ruling on appeal. In India, Jawaharlal Nehru University cancelled seminars featuring the Iranian, Palestinian and Lebanese ambassadors over fears the events would draw protest, then fired the staff member who had organised them.
Disciplinary consequences fell in multiple directions as well. In the United States, Muhlenberg College fired a tenured anthropology professor over a social-media post critical of Zionism — a dismissal the American Association of University Professors later found violated her academic freedom — while, separately, two masked attackers punched two students standing outside DePaul University holding a sign inviting passersby to “talk about Israel with an IDF soldier.” Georgetown University declined to renew an Islamic-studies chair’s leadership position over a social-media post he had intended as a call for de-escalation between the US, Israel and Iran. New York University withheld a graduation speaker’s diploma over unscripted remarks describing events in Gaza as genocide; in India, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences withheld a graduate’s diploma over a keffiyeh worn to the ceremony, despite his having removed it before walking the stage.
The report also documents a wave of new, more permanent campus speech policies adopted after the spring 2024 protest wave, many of them — bans on encampments and masks, advance-registration requirements, harsher sanction schedules — put in place quietly over the following summer at American universities, and mirrored, in different form, at institutions in India, Indonesia and Australia. In Singapore, the National University introduced a formal risk-rating system requiring event organisers to Google prospective speakers and rate their “controversy” level before approval — a policy the report notes provides no definition of what counts as high risk, or what additional steps a “high risk” event might require.
The Places the Numbers Can’t Reach
Some of the report’s most consequential findings are not about what SAR documented, but about what it almost certainly missed — and it treats that gap as a finding in its own right.
In Myanmar, four years into the civil war that followed the 2021 military coup, the report notes that verified incident numbers have fallen sharply from the more than 1,300 arrests of students and educators recorded by a partner organisation between 2021 and 2022. The report explicitly warns against reading that decline as improvement: by this point, many scholars and students have either fled the country or transferred into parallel institutions run by the opposition, while armed forces have occupied campuses outright — the University of Technology’s Yatanarpon Cyber City campus among them, seized in August 2024 after the military dropped leaflets warning students and staff to evacuate first.
Nicaragua presents an even starker case. The Academic Freedom Index’s 2025 update rates the country dead last among all 179 nations it tracks — a score of 0.02, the single lowest in the world — after years in which the government has closed universities that were once centres of dissent and tightened political control over those that remain. A UN panel of experts reported in November 2024 that faculty and students there continue to face beatings, arbitrary detention and prolonged solitary confinement.
In Sudan, civil war has done what policy alone could not: the University of Gezira was looted in July 2025, most of the country’s academics and students have been displaced or have fled abroad, and experts cited in the report warn that many may never return. In Gaza, the index’s own numbers chart the collapse most starkly of all — a fall from “severely restricted” (0.36) in 2022 to “completely restricted” (0.13) by 2024, against a backdrop in which the report says the territory’s higher-education infrastructure has been “largely destroyed” by Israel’s military campaign; the West Bank fell over the same span from “mostly free” (0.65) to “severely restricted” (0.35) amid what the report describes as frequent raids, arrests and movement restrictions affecting students, faculty and staff. In Türkiye, police used pepper spray, plastic pellets and water cannon against students protesting the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor in March 2025 — but the country’s own incident count, like Hong Kong’s since its 2020 National Security Law, has fallen even as independent researchers describe self-censorship as increasingly the norm rather than the exception inside political-science departments. China’s rating has sat at “completely restricted” for years running; researchers can no longer determine even the basic health or whereabouts of the country’s highest-profile imprisoned Uyghur academics.
The theoretical underpinning for this pattern, which the report cites directly, comes from the political scientists Hoffman and Kinzelbach, who observed in 2018 that incident-based monitoring can have a “paradoxical effect” of making the most repressive environments look comparatively calm — precisely because repression there has already succeeded in suppressing the evidence of itself.
Elsewhere on the Map
The report’s remaining country chapters describe conditions that, while less prominent in this year’s headlines, illustrate how broadly the pattern extends.
In Afghanistan, already rated by the index as having “completely restricted” academic freedom, the Taliban government moved in December 2024 to ban women from medical education — closing off the last remaining avenue of higher study available to Afghan women after earlier bans on all other fields — a decision that Human Rights Watch warned would leave the country without enough trained female healthcare workers to treat its own female patients. Roughly 35,000 women were enrolled in medical and nursing programs at the time. Compounding the loss, cuts to US foreign-aid programs in early 2025 stripped funding from scholarships that had sent Afghan women to study in Oman and Bangladesh, in one case giving 80 students two weeks’ notice to return home before the funding was briefly restored, then cut again.
In Pakistan, ethnic Baloch scholars and students bore the brunt of a rising number of enforced disappearances — the report’s monitors verified at least 25 cases this year, including students abducted directly from university hostels — alongside a targeted killing: Allah Dad Baloch, a graduate researcher known for his writing on Baloch history and culture, was shot dead while having tea with a friend in February 2025. In Russia, at least twelve scientists working in hypersonic-flight research, a field with military applications, were arrested on treason charges, with one, physicist Alexander Shiplyuk, sentenced to fifteen years; separately, Moscow’s parliament voted in May 2025 to let the government dictate university admissions numbers directly and withhold student loans for disfavored fields of study. In Ukraine, more than a third of the country’s scientists have left their profession or the country entirely since the Russian invasion; university buildings have been struck by Russian airstrikes on at least twelve occasions, and researchers estimate that nearly 289 institutions in Russian-occupied territory have been seized, blocked from operating, or relocated and folded into the Russian system, complete with Russian textbooks justifying the war. In Zimbabwe, authorities arrested the president of the national student union twice in two weeks and suspended student and faculty union leaders for organising and for criticising university administrations on WhatsApp. In Colombia — rated only “moderately restricted,” among the freer environments the report profiles — masked groups repeatedly clashed with police at university gates over budget cuts, a reminder that even comparatively open academic systems are not immune to disruption.
A Fragile Counterweight
Set against all of this, the report devotes real attention to what legal protection exists — and to the argument, made explicitly by SAR, that such protection needs to move from principle to enforceable practice.
Academic freedom is not a free-floating value in international law, the report notes; it is grounded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and both major UN human-rights covenants, elaborated further by UN human-rights bodies and by UNESCO, and recognised in the case law of regional courts in Europe, the Americas and Africa. As of 2024, 100 countries had some form of constitutional protection for academic freedom, explicit or implicit. In 2023, seventy-four states signed a joint statement at the UN Human Rights Council affirming the right’s importance; in 2024, an international working group co-led by SAR released a detailed set of “Principles for Implementing the Right to Academic Freedom,” which the UN’s own special rapporteur on the right to education has urged all states to adopt. On July 7, 2025 — within the very reporting period the report covers — the Human Rights Council adopted a resolution formally recognising academic freedom as central to the right to education and voicing what it called “deep concern at the increasing restrictions” on it worldwide.
SAR’s own recommendations, laid out in the report’s final chapter, run in four directions: support displaced and at-risk scholars directly, through funded academic-refuge placements and emergency grants; build public awareness that individual attacks are not isolated incidents but part of one connected global phenomenon; foster solidarity and coordination among threatened institutions, in part through networks like SAR’s own; and push governments to convert the legal principles above into enforceable domestic protections, backed by real accountability for perpetrators.
The Stakes
The report closes on a note that is less alarmist than it is insistent: universities, it argues, are not incidental casualties of authoritarian politics but early targets of it, because they are among the few institutions positioned to generate the independent research, informed debate, and trained scepticism that autocratic governance cannot tolerate and democratic governance depends on. What distinguishes this year’s edition from its predecessors, in the report’s own account, is less any single new form of attack than the erosion of a line SAR had long assumed would hold — the line between the tactics available to closed, authoritarian states and those available to open, democratic ones. A funding freeze imposed without due process, the report argues, chills a laboratory as effectively as a padlocked gate; a diploma withheld over a speech chills a graduating class as effectively as an arrest does a lecture hall. Whether that argument persuades depends, in no small part, on where a reader already stands on the specific political disputes — over campus speech, over immigration enforcement, over what counts as antisemitism or as legitimate protest — that many of this year’s American cases sit inside. SAR’s own account is unambiguous about where it lands. The underlying facts it documents — the dates, the institutions, the funding freezes, the detentions without charge — are drawn from public records, court filings and news reporting, and stand independently of how any reader weighs the intent behind them.
What is harder to dispute is the shape of the data itself: a year in which a government toppled by its own students in Dhaka, a government cracking down on its own protesters in Belgrade and Tbilisi, and a government reordering its own university system in Washington all appear, in SAR’s accounting, on the same list, for many of the same reasons. Whether that convergence marks a temporary alignment of unrelated crises or the leading edge of something more durable is, as the report’s authors acknowledge, a question this year’s data cannot fully answer. It is one Free to Think‘s researchers will be counting toward again by next July.
This article is based on a complete review of Scholars at Risk’s Free to Think 2025 report, published by the organization’s Academic Freedom Monitoring Project and covering incidents from July 1, 2024, through June 30, 2025. Figures, case details, and quoted material are drawn from the report and the primary and secondary sources it cites, including United Nations bodies, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the American Association of University Professors, and the Academic Freedom Index. Individuals and institutions named in connection with specific allegations were, in several cases documented in the underlying report, reported to have denied those allegations; those denials are noted in the source material. This piece does not represent an independent investigation beyond the cited report and its sourcing, and readers seeking primary documentation, full incident listings, or SAR’s complete recommendations are encouraged to consult the report directly.