Erasing critical scholarship: How attacks on academic freedom undermine democracy

Abstract

Building on a number of case studies, this essay examines the role of university management for ensuring academic freedom in the European context. The emerging pattern points to academic freedom being granted to and withheld from scholars at the discretion of university managers, with attacks on academic freedom targeting mainly critical scholarship: academics who challenge, criticize and debate power differentials and inequality practices are increasingly being silenced, deprived of their livelihoods and intellectually erased from public discourse. Far from being an established professional norm, a civil right, or a legal protection upon which academic research is secured, academic freedom becomes a rhetoric adopted by university managers to punish actual and discourage future challenges to management’s power. As such, it is being used as a repressive tactic that directly undermines democratic processes. While attacks on academic freedom are deliberate acts of purifying the university of critical scholarship, these attacks are preceded by less visible acts of omission revolving around exclusion, marginalization, and exploitation of minoritized groups in academia. Importantly, acts of omission target the same critical scholarship as deliberate attacks on academic freedom. Reinforcing each other, they serve as mechanisms to maintain and reproduce power differentials within academia. The resulting environment favors scholars willing to self-censor, while erasing scholars engaging critically with power, a filter effect negatively affecting quality of research and education.

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.

Rosa Luxemburg

Looking into the future by looking into the past

Erfurt, East Germany, 1976: As everywhere in the socialistic German Democratic Republic (GDR), students aiming to become teachers have to follow lectures in Marxism/ Leninism. Student Wilfried Linke writes an article for the university newspaper in which he offers constructive criticism concerning these rather boring and intellectually underwhelming lectures. The article is never printed. Instead, Wilfried Linke is forcibly unenrolled from the university and banned from studying anywhere in the GDR. Showing courageous solidarity, his fellow students stand up for him and write a letter to Education Minister Margot Honecker, asking for “open discussions.” Honecker reacts with the full force of the Socialist dictatorship. The students are being forced to withdraw their signatures and to publicly distance themselves from the letter in staged public hearings. Those who refuse to conform, face the same fate as Wilfried Linke: they are forcibly unenrolled and banned from all universities in the GDR. Those declared “ringleaders” by university management suffer tremendous disadvantages in their private and professional lives.

The events from 1976 are vividly narrated in the book Ringleaders (Rädelsführer, 2018) by Jochen Voit and Gabriele Stötzer. Voit is director of the Memorial and Education Centre Andreasstraße, which commemorates the oppression and resistance exerted during the Socialist dictatorship in Thuringia in the years 1949–1989. The building is situated in the former remand prison run by the East German Ministry of State Security (Stasi) in Erfurt. Stötzer is a renowned artist who was one of said “ringleaders.” The authors chronicle the events to enable a deep and touching view on the real-life impact of the implementation instruction no. 4/66 of the Minister for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, 1968) on the affected students:

Persons who disseminate hostile ideas [. . .] are to be brought to account under criminal law or in co-operation with the party and state organs [. . .] through the rapid development of sufficient evidence and are to be removed from universities, colleges, technical colleges and advanced secondary schools.

Wilfried Linke’s article was construed as an act of disseminating hostile ideas and accordingly, he was removed from the university. Under Socialist dictatorship, “hostile ideas” referred to any criticism, however well-intended, of the party or the state organs. With the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990, the dictatorship ended. In democratic states, freedom of expression and academic freedom would ensure that criticism is not construed as hostile, and critical academics will not be removed from universities. After all, the UNESCO (1997, VI. A/27) definition of Academic freedom explicitly refers to scholars’ “freedom to express freely their opinion about the institution or system in which they work, freedom from institutional censorship”:

. . ., the principle of academic freedom should be scrupulously observed. Higher-education teaching personnel are entitled to the maintaining of academic freedom, that is to say, the right, without constriction by prescribed doctrine, to freedom of teaching and discussion, freedom in carrying out research and disseminating and publishing the results thereof, freedom to express freely their opinion about the institution or system in which they work, freedom from institutional censorship and freedom to participate in professional or representative academic bodies. All higher-education teaching personnel should have the right to fulfil their functions without discrimination of any kind and without fear of repression by the state or any other source.

Yet, almost 50 years after the events in Erfurt unfolded under Socialist dictatorship, an academic born in Erfurt 4 years after the above events took place is being fired by the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), for publishing an essay critical of university management. As Wilfried Linke’s article, the essay highlighted discrepancies between the university’s policy and practice, not with respect to a Marxism/ Leninism curriculum, but concerning the implementation of a gender diversity program. That academic was me. My employer claimed that my criticism constituted a breach of trust. Accordingly, a court ruled that I could be fired because the publication led to a “permanently disturbed employment relationship”—although the judge acknowledged that the university played an important, if not decisive, role in creating that disturbed relationship (Gulland, 2023). In an open letter, thousands of colleagues globally called for my reinstatement, arguing that I was punished for exerting my academic freedom—to no avail.

Exerting power through violating academic freedom

In this essay, I focus on attacks on academic freedom as a power-wielding tool of university leadership and management. In light of the rapid deterioration of academic freedom in Europe (European Parliament, 2024), the context of my analysis is mostly Europe. Readers interested in a reflection pertaining specifically to the U.S. will find Joan Wallach Scott’s essay Academic Freedom & the Politics of the University (2024) informative. Relating my own to other scholars experiences of violations of academic freedom over the past years, the relevance of asking “Who gets to decide what academic freedom is, and whom is it granted to?” becomes clear. The pursuit of answers reveals that academic freedom is at the discretion of administrators and managers who grant it to academics engaging in non-critical research that leaves those in power unchallenged. In other words, academic freedom is granted to those who do not need its protection. At the same time, academics who challenge, criticize and debate power differentials and inequality practices are increasingly being silenced, deprived of their livelihoods and intellectually erased from public discourse. The derived pattern suggests that academic freedom is used as a domination tactic to punish actual and discourage potential future challenges to management’s power. As a result, granting and withholding academic freedom serves as a mechanism to maintain and reproduce power differentials within academia (Täuber and Moughalian, 2022). It also serves as a filtering mechanism favoring scholars willing to self-censor and conform to management’s wishes, while erasing scholars engaging critically with management, society, and higher education, with all expected consequences of such filtering for the quality of research and education.

The essay is structured as follows: First, I present a number of recent cases to illustrate which scholars are being confronted with violations of their academic freedom. I will then outline the emergent pattern’s potential to undermine democratic processes. In reflecting on who defends academic freedom, I argue that threats to democracy are often recognized and called out by scholars with first-hand experiences with repressive systems. Finally, I demonstrate that, as an organizing principle, withholding academic freedom from critical scholars is only the second, more visible step of “purification” of universities—the first step is the systemic exclusion, marginalization and exploitation of minoritized scholars. I discuss the implications of this analysis to conclude what is at stake: democracy itself.

I have been fired on International Women’s Day 2023 for publishing an essay (Täuber, 2020) in one of the top journals of management studies. My essay detailed the myriad inequality practices undermining the effectiveness of an equal opportunity program geared toward gender at my university. The topic of the essay squarely fit with my scholarly expertise, which focuses on the emergence of discrepancies between policy and practice due to ignoring power differentials and intersectional inequalities. My firing stands out because it prompted interventions from students, colleagues, unions, politicians and legal scholars (e.g. Open Letter, 2023), and due to the media attention it attracted (e.g. Gulland, 2023; Täuber, 2024). Yet, it is not an isolated case. Developments of the past years highlight that what was being done to me is not an incident, but part of a systematic and sweeping marginalization of specific scholars. Below, I share a few examples of colleagues who have been removed from universities physically and/ or intellectually, or who are fearful that this fate awaits them in the future.

United Kingdom

An entire group of scholars were targeted for redundancy in what the affected academics describe as “the purge of Critical Management Studies and Political Economy at the University of Leicester School of Business in 2021.” On a website chronicling the events, they shed light on vice-chancellor Nishan Canagarajah’s University-wide “Shaping for Excellence” program, which boiled down to the plan to “disinvest from scholarship in Critical Management Studies and Political Economy” at the Business School. By August 2021, more than 150 staff had left the University of Leicester, including at least 20 scholars from the School of Business (ULSB16, 2021).

The targeting of an entire group based on their shared research area enabled the affected scholars to fight back and narrate their fate jointly. The opportunity to provide narratives countering management’s framing of why they dismiss critical scholars is crucial in order to bring into focus the power struggle that motivates such dismissals. Challenging the discursive strategies used by university management to hide the hegemonic drive behind the dismissals, the affected scholars have set up a website, they remember the “list of the lost” in videos (UCU Leicester, 2021) and published a book called Shaping for Mediocrity (2024). Aligning with the above reasoning that rather than incidents, we are looking at a systematic pattern of intellectual erasure, the book’s synopsis narrates this bigger picture:

In 2021, as part of a programme called Shaping for Excellence, bosses at the University of Leicester made redundant numerous scholars in what was simultaneously an attack on academic freedom and trade union organisation. . . . Shaping for Mediocrity . . . situates this story within a longer history of struggle to make the university a place where critical thinking is possible, showing how events in Leicester are both reflective of higher education in the UK following four decades of neoliberal ’reform’ and a particularly egregious instance of the increasingly authoritarian management of public institutions such as universities.

Importantly, three of the attacked academics, David Harvie, Geoffrey Lightfoot and Simon Lilley, won an employment tribunal on grounds of unfair dismissal (Employment Tribunal, 2024; UCU Leicester Statement, 2024; Williams, 2024). Besides intending to also claim victimization on the basis of trade-union activities, they intended to claim breach of academic freedom at their employment tribunals. This was important because, despite their academic freedom being protected on paper through both the Education Reform Act and the University of Leicester Ordinance on Academic Freedom (both detailed in Burrell et al., 2024: 149), the University of Leicester added a qualifier: Scholars’ academic freedom is protected “subject to the rights of the University to manage its activity efficiently and economically” (Burrell et al., 2024: 166). As David Harvie explains in personal communication, both the Education Reform Act 1988 and Higher Education and Research Act 2017 guarantee “academic staff [the] freedom within the law to question and test received wisdom, and to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions, without placing themselves in jeopardy of losing their jobs or privileges they may have at their institutions.” Putting the University of Leicester’s qualifier to this protection to a rigorous legal test would have been in the interest of all academics across the U.K.

Instead, Harvie, Lightfoot and Lilley were forced to withdraw their claims of breach of academic freedom and victimization on the basis of trade-union activities by an unlikely party: the University and College Union (UCU) trade union from which they received legal support. In personal communication, David Harvie recounts that 2 weeks before the employment tribunal was scheduled to start, UCU withdrew support for all aspects of the claim apart from the first, namely that managers had failed to follow a fair process. UCU refused to provide a reason for its decision. At such short notice, with insufficient time to consider other legal options, Harvie, Lilley and Lightfoot were forced to drop their claim that their academic freedom had been undermined and (in Harvie’s and Lilley’s case) that they had experienced trade-union victimization.

These demands likely reflect the union’s lawyers’ professional judgment and experience that there was no realistic chance of winning the part of the claim that asserted breaches of academic freedom. Nevertheless, it could have been valuable to demonstrate the division between protection of academic freedom on paper versus in reality in court, if need be through losing this part of the claim. Demonstrating how little formal power unions actually have and how little protection academics enjoy once their freedom is put to the test would have been useful to test in legal proceedings. Rather, it is instrumental for exposing flaws in the protection of academic freedom. In this regard, I would argue that it is more important to fight than to win.

Denmark

Maria Toft initiated the #PleaseDontStealMyWork campaign (Young, 2022) to highlight the extent of stolen ideas, research results and data that PhD researchers face. The campaign was so popular that it was said to “rock Denmark” (Grove, 2022). In addition to the 120 testimonies Maria Toft collected about stolen ideas and denied authorship, the problems she presented were being widely recognized by other academics in junior positions, precariously employed, on fixed-term contracts or otherwise vulnerable and dependent on more powerful colleagues. More than 2000 academics signed a petition calling for a national commission to “set research free.” That notwithstanding, the campaign lead to Toft being driven out of her PhD from the University of Copenhagen’s department of political science. She “was forced to resign her fellowship after managers created a “hostile environment” of threatening and sexist behaviour“ (Upton, 2023). She has since worked as an independent researcher and is a driving force behind the Movement for a Free Academia, which calls for “a free academia grounded in an ethics of care, integrity, and trust.”

Switzerland

In an Open Letter in defense of academic freedom (Open Letter, 2024a), Swiss academics decry “the erosion of academic freedom and the increasingly anti-intellectual climate in Switzerland.” The letter followed administrative investigations in Basel and Bern that were seen as attacks on academic freedom. In Basel, university management took disciplinary measures against the department of Urban Studies after its members published a statement in solidarity with Palestine. This publication prompted university leadership to initiate a comprehensive investigation of the department’s scientific integrity, which resulted in numerous measures severely encroaching department members’ academic freedom (for a detailed account, see Open Letter, 2024b). In Bern, university leadership closed down the entire institute for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Societies (ISNO) and announced that “the academic field is reorganized” (Press Release University of Bern, 2024a). These measures came after a lecturer in this institute was dismissed without notice because they “inappropriately posted on X (formerly Twitter) in October 2023” (Press Release University of Bern, 2024a).

The authors of the Open Letter in defense of academic freedom accordingly point out the “phenomenon of intensified attacks . . . on the social sciences and humanities.” In one of the most concise summaries I have read on the state of academic freedom, the letter explicates the targets of attacks, with two administrative investigations of “entire university institutes that engage in critical scholarship and teaching in academic fields such as gender, critical race, migration, border, postcolonial and settler colonial studies.” Bern university leadership claims that “it cannot detect any erosion of academic freedom in its institution” (Press Release University of Bern, 2024b). Such denials of attacking academic freedom typically rely on framing critical scholarship as inappropriate, opinion-based and/ or a matter of poor quality. Parroting this framing, the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) states that the two administrative investigations concern the academic duties of university employees: “If researchers disregard the rules prescribed by science in their work, for example by adopting untested assumptions or by poorly implementing scientific methods, the SNSF no longer considers this to be scientific. It is a question of quality and not one of academic freedom” (SNFS, 2024).

Germany

In Germany, demonstrators had set up a protest camp at the Free University in Berlin. University leadership quickly called the police and had the site cleared. This prompted around 100 lecturers from various Berlin universities to publish a statement defending students’ right to peaceful protest. Outraged by this statement of solidarity, the Minister of Education sought to sanction the scholars who had signed the statement. The Minister questioned publicly “whether the signatories respected Germany’s constitution” (Kieselbach, 2024). Going even further, and prompting thousands of academics to call for her resignation in an open letter hosted by the Network for Decent Labour in Academia, leaked communications suggest that officials considered to “examine the possibility of sanctions under civil service law and criminal law against civil servants and employees of the federal states, including the option to revoke funding by the BMBF.” These considerations were made public under the title “In response to criticism: Ministry of Education wanted to cancel funding” (Panorama, 2024). The signatories of the Open Statement (2024) point out that “The withdrawal of funding decisions on grounds of adverse public positioning by academics contradicts all principles of constitutionally guaranteed academic freedom.”

Together, three common threads emerge from the above cases. First, the critical scholarship under attack was typically applied to academics’ own academic environment and university management. Second, management and leadership usually deny that their reactions to such criticism—dismissals, administrative investigations, disinvestment from entire research areas—has anything to do with infringements of academic freedom. Instead, and third, attacks on academic freedom are depicted either as imposed by strategic considerations (as in Leicester) and necessary budget cuts (as in the Netherlands at this point in time), or they are depicted as justified measures against individual academics guilty of inappropriate behavior, of sharing unscientific opinions, of disregarding their academic duties, or of delivering poor scientific quality. In Switzerland, those attacked were framed as falling short of fulfilling their academic duties. In Germany, the lecturers defending their students’ right to peaceful protest were accused of antisemitism and anti-constitutionalism. These narratives serve specific purposes. On the one hand, they serve the “pathologization of dissent” (Hartz, 2024: 714) and isolate those targeted by the attacks. On the other hand, they divert attention from the systematic patterns that are driving the attacks on academic freedom across Europe. The resulting fear and apathy turn those “unaffected” by such attacks into “docile academic subjects” (Hartz, 2024: 703). In doing so, these narratives stifle the broad resistance that would be called for by the speed and brazenness with which academic freedom is currently dismantled. On paper, academic freedom appears well-protected across Europe. Yet, when scholars invoke that protection, they typically encounter an impotent paper tiger offering no protection against violations of academic freedom. As the authors of Shaping for Mediocrity observe “. . . ours is not a tale of one flower cut down but rather a broader tale about salting the land of criticality” (p. 102).

Attacks on critical scholarship in particular undermine democratic processes

The above cases paint a bleak picture of academic freedom; attacks are taking place in longstanding democracies such as the U.K., Denmark, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. They are frequently coming from within the university, in particular from management, or from institutions associated with higher education, such as ministries of education (European Parliament, 2024). Contrary to what populist discourse would have us believe, the scholarship under threat mainly involves critical scholars from the social sciences and humanities, who are at a heightened risk of censorship and violations of their academic freedom.

The implications of these selective attacks should not be taken lightly. The social sciences have an essential function for democratic processes. To attack them is to attack democracy. In recommendation no. R (2000) 12 of the Committee of Ministers to member states on the social sciences and the challenge of transition (Council of Europe, 2000), the Council of Europe emphasizes that,

the social sciences play a strategic role in guaranteeing an informed public and in building a society based on democracy,

the process of transition from totalitarian regimes to democracy requires efficient and independent social sciences able to contribute to a true democratic citizenship,

all democracies have a growing need for the social sciences for their economic and social development, to help their institutions to understand and to solve societal problems, to increase the confidence of their citizens in democracy and to enhance the vigour of the democratic process itself, encompassing electoral politics, government, and civil society.

The special role of the social sciences for the democratic process was, as Scott (2024) points out in her essay, also a guiding principle among the scholars who articulated academic freedom in the U.S. She writes “Philosopher and psychologist John Dewey noted that while sciences like biology faced criticism for the concept of evolution, “the right and duty of academic freedom are even greater” in fields like “political economy, sociology, historical interpretation, psychology” that “deal face-to-face with problems of life, not . . . technical theory.” Aligning with the view of the Council of Europe (2000), Dewey and his colleagues recognized that the social sciences “not only enabled progress by challenging traditional beliefs and practices, but also conveyed to students the relationship between intellectual integrity and the values and practices of democracy, and in so doing, prepared them for the critical thinking required for democratic citizenship” (cf Scott, 2024: 151).

Echoing the above, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education Farida Shaheed emphasizes in her report to the Human Rights Council that academic freedom is just as crucial as a free press or independent judiciary. Pointing out the role of governments and educational institutions themselves in attacking academic freedom, she states that such attacks must be taken seriously, as they “threaten both our democracies and our capacities to collectively respond to crises humanity currently faces” (United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 2024).

Similarly, the European Parliament (2024) states in the Academic Freedom Monitor 2023 that “Academic freedom is widely acknowledged both as a fundamental value of present-day higher education and science, and as a prerequisite for well-functioning democratic societies.” This reflects the UNESCO definition (1997, VI. A/27) which explicitly identifies academic freedom as contingent on a democratic atmosphere: “Higher-education teaching personnel can effectively do justice to this principle if the environment in which they operate is conducive, which requires a democratic atmosphere; hence the challenge for all of developing a democratic society.”

Accordingly, the systematic attacks on social scientists and critical scholars more broadly through management’s politicization of academic freedom (Scott, 2024) cannot be taken lightly. Management’s interference with academic freedom—and governments’ complacency regarding such interference—directly undermines democracy. The systematic pattern of granting academic freedom to uncritical and withholding it from critical scholars is in itself undemocratic. Indeed, the two-pronged operation of withholding and granting academic freedom reflects what experts on European dictatorships and the Socialist dictatorship in East Germany call the two faces of dictatorships: repression and privilege. Jörg Ganzenmüller, chairman of the Ettersberg Foundation which is dedicated to investigate dictatorship in order to live democracy, explains on the foundation’s website (Stiftung Etterberg, 2024):

If we want to defend the achievements of our democracy, we need to know the past. We need to understand how dictatorships come into being and the techniques of lies and marginalisation with which they function. We also need to understand that they are never just the tyranny of individuals, but always have a social foundation. Because in all dictatorships there were and are people who ‘go along’, whether out of conviction or because it is associated with material advantages and opportunities for social advancement.

Even university leadership acknowledges the devastating consequences of organizing principles that imbue critical scholars with fear for their career and reputation. The vice-chancellor of the University of Reading, Robert van Noort, warned at a higher education conference that universities risk becoming “uniformities,” echo chambers of rigid ideas, and self-censorship that form a fundamental threat to academic freedom (Adams, 2024). Acknowledging that “coming out as being the divergent voice in the echo chamber can feel like a career-limiting move,” he points to management’s role in creating such echo chambers by means of systematically rewarding conformity: “The desire to do well in official assessments is so important to status and funding that managers have a clear incentive to appoint and promote candidates who show a high degree of conformity and consistency with existing research paradigms, or mainstream pedagogy, rather than seeking out and appointing candidates with divergent views and opinions.”

Tying in with the observation that such practices systematically marginalize specific scholarship, van Noort asserted that government-backed assessments of economics are known to favor researchers using neo-classical economics “to the exclusion of other theoretical approaches such as feminist or development economics.”

Who defends academic freedom?

Especially in the liberal democracies of Europe, it seems that academics who have first-hand experience with repression emerge as canaries in the coalmine. They recognize the signs on the wall and are all too familiar with the silence that bolsters both oppressive and repressive systems (e.g. Mandalaki and Pérezts, 2023; Pérezts and Mandalaki, 2024). Resisting the deafening silence and fear, they are most outspoken about violations of academic freedom. To me, for instance, the fact that academics are afraid to speak up, fear backlash and reprisal for sharing their scholarly insights, that they are actually removed from the university and that the students and colleagues standing with them in solidarity are subjected to police violence (see, for instance, the long list of violence perpetrated by police against student protesters compiled by Scholars at Risk, 2024), compares eerily to what the students in the introductory example experienced under Socialist Dictatorship.

Similarly, two colleagues who came to the Netherlands from Iran and Turkey, respectively, expressed their dismay at seeing me fired. It was harrowing for them to realize that what they had fled from was a reality in a liberal democracy, too. Sepideh Yousefzadeh Faal Daghati, who came to Groningen from Iran as a Scholar At Risk, asks “This is the University of Groningen, not Iran? (Daghati, 2023). She describes witnessing the events of my firing as dreamlike: “I look into the mirror and it is Susanne looking at me. I wake up. I am working at the University of Groningen. This is not happening in Iran. This is not happening in an autocratic country. It is happening at the University of Groningen. Susanne is fired.”

Pelin Gül, who came to the Netherlands in search of freedom and safety, was devastated to find that the same silencing and intimidation that was happening in Turkey, is happening in the Netherlands. She writes (Gül, 2023):

I started my job at the University of Groningen [UG] in 2021. Sure, it was definitely the right place to cycle wearing shorts, but was it also an academically free country? Could academics here write about unpopular, intellectual views on gendered institutions, politics, and culture, without fear of backlash?

A year into working at the UG, I came across Susanne Täuber and her inspiring work on preventing gender harassment in academia. Only a few weeks after this encounter, I found out the UG wanted to fire her for a ‘damaged work relationship’ instead of recognising and rewarding her for all that she has done for social safety. It was the same silencing and intimidation that was happening in Turkey, but now it was happening in the Netherlands.

Strong positioning against repression is also evident in the Open Statement (2024) of the Network for Decent Labour in Academia, which has called for the resignation of Germany’s Education Minister (Braneck, 2024). Aslı Vatansever, a labor sociologist in Berlin and member of the Network, was dismissed from her position as associate professor and banned from public service in Turkey for having signed the Peace Petition of the Academics for Peace in 2016. These experiences shine through in the statement condemning the Minister’s interference: “Repressive reviews of academics who make public their critical stance on governmental decisions are familiar from authoritarian regimes that systematically hinder free discussion, including at universities. Even giving the impression that free social debate is being curtailed by the state damages our democratic society and the reputation of Germany as a centre of research in the world.”

In conversations with students, those whose countries experienced dictatorships in the recent past are very worried. A student from Portugal told me that he experiences the suffocating fear of repression almost as a physical sensation. He shared how afraid he is when he notices scholars engaging in self-censorship and pretending this would be normal. Citing Portugal’s relatively short democratic history after the military dictatorship was upended in 1974 with the Revolution of Carnations, he feared that in a couple of years, such self-censorship will be completely normalized, effectively reinstating repression.

Indeed, a unifying feature of repressive systems is what Hallonsten (2022) describes as the “yawning abyss between surface and substance.” Tellingly, he contextualizes the pervasive divergence between discourse and practice in organizational settings by connecting it to Vaclav Havel’s writings about communist dictatorship. Specifically, Havel describes how the “yawning abyss” creates a pseudo-reality in which discourse and practice are wildly disconnected. In his essay The Power of the Powerless (1978), Havel writes about this disconnect “If an outside observer who knew nothing at all about life in Czechoslovakia were to study only its laws, he or she would be utterly incapable of understanding what we were complaining about.” This could also be said about the laws and rules concerning academic freedom and the actual practice that is exemplified in the above cases.

The Leicester case illustrates this. Clear rules about the protection of academic freedom were in place. These rules, however, did not protect the scholars who were being made redundant: The panels checking whether their redundancies constituted a breach of academic freedom “emphasised that 'the right of academic staff “to carry out research work without interference, or any suppression” is subject to “the rights of the University to manage its activity efficiently and economically” (Burrell et al., 2024: 166). Thus, when trying to rely on rules that should have protected their academic freedom, the targeted scholars came to learn that these were conditional on additional rules which neutralized the original rules. The authors conclude that “an employer that has the foresight to simply claim that a decision to make scholars providing research of a certain type or in a certain area is ‘strategic’ is protected against claims of breach of academic freedom” (p. 168). In other cases, critical scholarship is pathologized and the targeted academics are isolated and framed as maladjusted troublemakers (Hartz, 2024). This then allows to let labor law, for instance “disturbed employment relationships” as in my case, take precedence over the protection of academic freedom. Indeed, the Academic Freedom Monitor pointed out that “the Täuber case also raises fundamental questions about the possible tensions between labour laws and academic freedom” (European Parliament, 2024: 169).

In sum, tensions become obvious between rules and reality, between policy and practice. This point has been highlighted by Applebaum (2023), who states that the “rules-based world order” is an aspirational and idealistic order that describes how the world ought to work rather than how it actually works. Not only documents aimed to protect academic freedom are being ignored and circumvented. Other documents and treaties such as the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the UN Genocide Convention, have been frequently ignored. Nevertheless, these documents allow to point out the discrepancies between policy and practice, the hypocrisies in decision making, and the blatant disrespect for rules and norms written by organizations themselves. Illustrating this, Harvard faculty recently was banned from the university’s main library for holding up signs quoting from the library’s own statements of values. They staged this silent protest in solidarity with students who were suspended from the library for having organized a study-in on Gaza (Moody, 2024). Thus, the rules, norms, and policies that are written down offer a way of holding managers to account. Therefore, our support must not be limited to those suffering from the discrepancies, but must extend to everyone who keeps documenting and showcasing these discrepancies.

Reflecting on the politicization of academic freedom in the U.S., Scott (2024) observes that “once weapons of the weak, [free speech and/or academic freedom] now have been seized as legal instruments by the powerful, who censor what they take to be unacceptable criticism–of state policy, of inequality, of injustice in the name of freedom.” (p. 149). Echoing concerns about the politicization of academic freedom in the U.S., the Open Letter by Swiss academics (2024) highlights their worries that “through administrative investigations in Basel and Bern, universities have indirectly accepted and legitimized a scientifically unqualified and politicized media framing of critical scholarship in the social sciences and humanities as “ideological” and unscientific.” It is extremely worrisome that the attacks on academic freedom target exactly those scholars who are equipped to recognize and call out such processes of manipulation in the service of the privileged and the powerful. Indeed, the Swiss academics insist that “academic research has a responsibility to address social phenomena, particularly those that are marginalized in the public debate or politically highly sensitive.”

Besides the courageous students and academics defending academic freedom, the increasing deterioration of academic freedom across Europe has prompted other stakeholders to join the fight, too. The European Parliament’s Academic Freedom Monitor 2023 (2024) states that “in recent years, major concerns about the state of academic freedom in the European Union have been raised by various stakeholders.” The report reviews my case in its section on the Netherlands (pp. 168–169), concluding that:

The events have given rise to concern among Dutch as well as international academics for what is described as harassment of an employee and an attack on academic freedom. The course of action taken by the Faculty of Economics and Business and the university is seen as highly unprofessional and vindictive, and there are concerns for a potential chilling effect on academics wishing to address issues of management or other controversial issues. This is further indicated by campaigners supporting Täuber’s case, taking to X (formerly Twitter) under the hashtag #AmINext?.

The case is particularly concerning given the background, academic recognition, and employment status of Professor Täuber. High profile cases of abuses of power and harassment in Dutch universities have previously been documented (Bronkhurst, 2020; Hermans, 2020; Mantel, 2017; van der Hee & Strikkers, 2019; Visser, 2020), and there is concern that Täuber’s case further confirms a pattern of academic freedom, and especially the academic freedom of expression, being under threat, in this case of undue responses from university leadership.

Similarly, the board members of the largest education union in The Netherlands stated that, instead of protecting social safety and academic freedom, universities protect professors with prestige and money (ScienceGuide, 2023): “We believe that with this dismissal, the University of Groningen is committing another major mistake - a serious attack on academic freedom. However, critical and outspoken scientists like Täuber should be able to do their work safely and freely.”

Thus, academics and institutional stakeholders agree that attacks on academic freedom, especially where critical scholarship is concerned, increasingly come from university leadership and management, threatening democratic processes. Yet, universities are not being held to account. As a consequence, these attacks operate more and more as organizing principles that seriously affects academia.

Attacks on academic freedom as an organizing principle

The above considerations highlight that granting and withholding academic freedom serves as an organizing principle that purges universities of critical scholarship, opposition and debate. Attacks on academic freedom often mean the intellectual erasure of the affected scholars from public discourse, an erasure that is increasingly widespread in so-called liberal democracies (European Parliament, 2024). While the scholars from the reviewed case studies were in the spotlight and could draw attention to their fate, most affected academics experience no support, for instance because they are being isolated, intimidated and bullied into signing non-disclosure agreements (Fernando and Prasad, 2019), or because they are extremely vulnerable due to language barriers and visa requirements (Verbaal, 2022). Their cases seldom become public, but we know that they exist in the hundreds if not thousands. We hear of them in hushed conversations in hallways. We read of and from them in books such as Critical Storytelling: Experiences of Power Abuse in Academia (Hansen and Nilsson, 2022), At the margins of academia: Exile, precariousness, and subjectivity (Vatansever, 2020), or Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe (Burlyuk and Rahbari, 2023). My fellow volunteers and I meet them through advocacy groups such as the Academic Parity Movement and the Network Against Power Abuse in Science, which support targets of power abuse and violations of academic freedom.

This ties in with my proposition in the introduction, that attacks on academic freedom are only the second and more visible step in a two-step process that begins much earlier. Specifically, when considering academic freedom as an organizing principle, recognizing that the critical scholarship mainly under attack is inextricably intertwined with scholars’ belonging to underrepresented groups is crucial. Building on a large-scale bibliometric analysis, Kozlowski et al. (2022: 6) demonstrate that “minoritized authors tend to publish in scientific disciplines and on research topics that reflect their gendered and racialized social identities.” However, despite the higher rates of scientific novelty that underrepresented groups produce, the discounting and devaluation of their ideas results in less successful careers (Hofstra et al., 2020). This means that the innovation and novelty minoritized groups bring into science are being made invisible, and the specific topics they produce knowledge on are being marginalized and lost. Kozlowski et al. (2022: 6) conclude that the “unequal distribution on topics by race and gender leads to negative effects for marginalized groups and for science itself, as some topics become systematically less studied.” They calculated a cumulative loss of in particular research topics that, if counteracted, would have resulted in “29% more articles in public health, 26% more on gender-based violence, 25% more in gynecology and in gerontology, 20%, and more on immigrants and minorities 18% more on mental health.”

Science as we know it is thus already impoverished and deprived of significant bodies of knowledge. Moa Ekbom (2022) refers to this lost knowledge as phantom libraries of unspoken words, untold stories and unwritten texts. Zuckerberg (2017) calls it the lost library of scholarship written by victims of harassment which is “. . . especially disturbing, because it exists in such an intimate balance with the existing corpus of classical scholarship written by their harassers and all of the people who worked with those harassers to perpetuate a system of silence.” The academics that do manage to forge a career, however difficult the circumstances, on the topics and in the disciplines concerned, are then subjected to attacks on their academic freedom. This suggests that academic freedom is not only being politicized (Scott, 2024), but is misused to further push an ongoing epistemicide (“the killing of knowledge systems,” Chowdhury, 2023; Hall and Tandon, 2017; Ibarra-Colado, 2006), leaving us with scientific insights that are homogeneous, merely incrementally novel and oftentimes trivial, as well as ignorant of large groups of humankind (e.g. Sperber et al., 2023). But most importantly, it leaves us with an academia that cannot and will not challenge power, because universities rid themselves deliberately of those scholars who are uniquely equipped to identify hegemonic tactics, call out repression and hold the powerful to account.

Far from being a bulwark against populism and repression, universities appear to become institutions that are repressive themselves. I have argued above that the attacks on academic freedom are, in fact, just the finalization of a process that starts much earlier, with the exclusion, marginalization, and exploitation of minoritized groups in academia (e.g. Abdallah et al., 2025). Kozlowski et al. (2022) show that scholars from these groups tend to produce knowledge pertaining to what can be broadly described as critical scholarship—gender studies, migration, precarious labor, worker unionization, power struggles, and so on, the disciplines explicitly listed as threatened by Swiss academics (Open Letter, 2024a). Scott (2024) notes that knowledge production has historically been acknowledged as being inherently concerned with challenging and criticizing prevailing norms. University managers’ exiling of the critical scholarship that could do exactly this, carries an explicit hostility to knowledge production that might challenge prevailing norms and established power differentials. However, this process of exclusion is difficult to see, because it essentially means inaction of the powerful concerning making academia more diverse and inclusive—and inaction by those in power is typically seen as “normal.” Accordingly, “inaction presents a formidable obstacle to transformative change by hindering efforts of oppressed groups to mobilise and act, while also producing a dominant narrative of willingness to change” (Täuber and Moughalian, 2022: 1128). Sometimes research brings into sharp focus what we usually only ever sense vaguely when squinting our eyes in our daily academic lives: Mulders et al. (2024: 1) used “the nearly complete population of doctorates (N = 95,130) from Dutch universities across all academic fields between 1990 and 2021, and their publications” to show that “30 years of diversity policies in Dutch academia have done nothing to change the career chances of women and ethnic minority scholars.”

Given the invisibility of the power struggle that typifies the exclusion processes described above, the “advantage” of attacks on academic freedom—even at the individual cost of loss of livelihood, loss of professional advancement, and intellectual erasure—is that they are visible. We move, collectively, from the most insidious form of power, invisible power (Gaventa, 2005), to visible power exertion by the powerful. The increasing attacks on academic freedom from university management can thus be understood as the violent backlash of the powerful against attempts to change the status quo by the powerless. Although this stage is violent and painful, by virtue of its visibility, it also allows to mobilize solidarity and organized resistance. Undeniable violations of our rules-based world order (Applebaum, 2023)—as documented for instance by movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, by genocide, war crimes, and increasing inequality—have brought the division between policy and practice into sharp focus. Allowing ourselves to be hopeful, we might see this division as a much-needed catalyst for global resistance. Thanks in no small part to the critical scholarship that is being ferociously attacked, people increasingly see the narratives pushed by the powerful for what they are: vehicles to maintain and reproduce power and privilege. People do not accept any longer that democracy is “a luxury, only possible under conditions of relative affluence” (Harvie, 2007: 66). But it is essential to remember that fighting for democracy by fighting against repression requires not only resistance against attacks on academic freedom. It is imperative to resist discrimination, marginalization, intersectional inequalities, exploitation, precarious labor conditions, bullying, and power abuse—in short, everything that maintains and reproduces the structural othering that characterizes academia (e.g. Abdallah et al., 2025; Chowdhury, 2023; Ibarra-Colado, 2006; Mandalaki and Pérezts, 2023; Täuber and Mahmoudi, 2022; Vatansever, 2020, 2023).

The attacks on academic freedom, coming from the very institutions that should fiercely defend it, incur great costs from the affected scholars and students—but also from science and society, as the above considerations demonstrate. Individual livelihoods are destroyed, intellectual contributions and whole bodies of knowledge are erased, while power is maintained and reproduced. Wilfried Linke, the student from the introductory example who was banned from university in 1976 under Socialist Dictatorship, said about the effects on his professional life:

My professional existence was literally destroyed. The ‘80s in particular were really tough. I had just started to feel at home in the theatre. I then applied from Schwerin to Meiningen, Eisleben and elsewhere. I think I applied to four or five theatres and to the Literature Institute in Leipzig and was always rejected. My Stasi files show that they always said beforehand: “If he applies, don’t accept him!” I didn’t know that for sure at the time . . . but by the fourth or fifth rejection I thought: “The Stasi must have a hand in this!” And that’s how it was. (Voit and Stötzer, 2018)

In the liberal democracies that allow academic freedom to rapidly deteriorate over the past years, “hostile elements” are not usually threatened with jail or complete career oblivion. However, many affected academics lose their career, are unemployed for extended periods of time, lose the professional networks and opportunities that were related to their positions, and are forced into precarious labor. The trauma of institutional betrayal (Smith and Freyd, 2013) should also not be underestimated. Scholars who are exposed to discrimination and harassment and/ or see their academic freedom violated experience “deliberate acts or acts of omission (e.g., negligence) perpetrated by institutions onto individuals that rely on these institutions for support, resources, protection, and in some cases survival” (Smidt and Freyd, 2018: 491). Research shows that acts of institutional betrayal often concern omissions—institutions failing to protect individuals dependent upon them (Smith and Freyd, 2014).

We have argued elsewhere that omissions by the powerful should be conceptualized normatively: the inaction of dominant groups is system-supporting behavior to preserve the status quo (Täuber and Moughalian, 2022). We built our reasoning on sociological models of inequality and power—exactly the kind of scholarship under attack—to show that system-supporting inaction is “a central and highly effective technique used by dominant group members to hinder processes of change and preserve their power, and it often preludes escalation to violent backlash over time” (p. 1128). Considering the two-step process of purifying the university of critical thought, one might argue that the first step—failing to effectively address the pervasive exclusion, marginalization, and exploitation of minoritized groups (Cech, 2022; Kozlowski et al., 2022; Täuber et al., 2022)—is an omission that serves to protect the power and privilege of the few. The second step—the increasing attacks on critical scholars’ academic freedom—concerns deliberate acts. Put differently, university management utilizes the full spectrum of institutional betrayal, relying on action and omission, to rid itself of critical scholarship. Speaking to the effectiveness of the purge, the very scholars who are uniquely equipped to recognize, describe and counter such power struggles are being prevented from thriving in (step 1) or are being removed from (step 2) academia.

The above considerations also shed some light on relevant forces in the context of attacks on academic freedom. No equivalent to the East-German Stasi can be pointed to nowadays. Rather, it appears that the attacks come from numerous, sometimes unexpected, actors. One concerns university management and leadership who want to maintain their power by attacking, silencing, and erasing critical scholars. They appear as one of the main attackers of academic freedom from within (European Parliament, 2024; Van Houtum and Van Uden, 2022), both through actions and omissions. Many people enable the attacks by means of inaction. These include academics who have been scared into roles as “docile academic subjects” (Hartz, 2024) or who seek to benefit from the removal of competition that accompanies the erasure of their critical colleagues (Täuber and Mahmoudi, 2022). Others play more active roles, such as HR professionals siding with management or lawyers hired by university management to damage targeted scholars’ reputation (Burrell et al., 2024). Then there are groups such as unions, which aim to protect and support the attacked critical scholars. Their effectiveness to do so appears to be systematically undermined by the discrepancies between policy and practice and by the little formal power they hold. Sociological inquiries into these groups, their motivations and intersectional effects would be valuable and welcome. In fact, systematic inquiries would take some of the burden off those under attack, who often have to make sense of what happened to them from a position of isolation and disillusionment.

Conclusion

The task to protect democracy does not exclude those academics who are privileged enough to have been spared othering and attacks on their academic freedom. Academics who engage in self-silencing, self-censoring and conformity to avoid punishment by university management and/ or to gain opportunities for professional advancement, act contrary to the first lesson that historian Snyder (2017) shares in his book On Tyranny. Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century. His first lesson is this: “Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.” Implementing that lesson is even more essential for academics, because they occupy a position that comes with the special responsibility for democratic processes and citizenship (Council of Europe, 2000; Scott, 2024).

Instead, academic freedom appears to be increasingly politicized in order to silence critical scholarship and to reward those who conform to the wishes of those in power. Universities are at severe risk of failing at their foremost task: seeking the truth. As Feder (2003) stated “..there is no such thing as value-free social science. But in “truthful” research, the answers are what they are, regardless of the researcher’s point of view. By contrast, “propaganda” starts with an answer and relies on research not to find out how things work but to prove a predetermined conclusion.” Academics who, in the words of Snyder (2017), obey in advance, are starting with the answer of what management wants to hear. In other words, they are sacrificing science on the altar of propaganda and contribute to academia’s pseudo-reality.

That pseudo-reality, created by the “yawning abyss” between discourse and practice described by Havel (1978), was very evident to me, as well, in both systems. What stayed with me from my childhood in socialist East Germany was a feeling of profound ineptitude concerning the double-hear and double-speak required to bridge this pervasive disconnect. East German adults would exchange words, but there was a delicate subtext of what was not said and how it was not said, that I clearly sensed but did not understand. In fact, I think that this sensation of the unsaid, the overly present silence that permeated all chatter, was decisive for my scholarship. I spent years examining subtexts, infrapolitics (Scott, 1990), discrepancies between policies and practice and how these are affected by identity and power differentials. When I had finally found the language to describe the “yawning abyss” between discourse and practice in a university gender initiative, my words would get me fired.

Echoing Havel’s analysis, Jenny Erpenbeck, an East-German author who won the 2024 Booker Prize, stated in a recent interview that “the untruthful language, let’s say, also played a large part in the demise of the GDR [German Democratic Republic] because there was simply no real dialogue. There was no longer any real dialogue between the government and the people. That’s much worse than you might think” (RBB24, 2024). When we ask what is at stake if academic freedom is not protected, the answer is not only vital knowledge and democracy itself. The untruthful language marking universities as we know them, might be a precursor to the demise of academia itself.