Academic Freedom

The Academic Freedom project aims to inform stakeholders, provide monitoring yardsticks, alter incentive structures, challenge university rankings, facilitate research, and ultimately promote academic freedom.

About

The Academic Freedom Index (AFi) project is a collaborative effort initially launched in 2019 between researchers at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), the V-Dem Institute, the Scholars at Risk Network, and the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi). At present, V-Dem and FAU continue to implement the project with a grant from the German Volkswagen Foundation. AFi scores rely on five separate indicators, which in turn are based on assessments by nearly 2,000 country experts. They are collected and integrated by V-Dem using a Bayesian measurement model.

The AFi project aims to inform stakeholders, provide monitoring yardsticks, alter incentive structures, challenge university rankings, and facilitate research. GPPi and the Scholars at Risk Network have developed detailed policy recommendations on how AFi data can help protect academic freedom.

Resources and Articles

Further information on the indicators’ conceptualisation and policy relevance.

Academic Freedom Index Update 2022

Katrin Kinzelbach, Staffan I. Lindberg, Lars Pelke, and Janika Spannagel

This year’s update of the Academic Freedom Index provides an overview of the state of academic freedom in 177 countries and territories. Based on an assessment of the de facto protection of academic freedom as of December 2021, it details two concerning findings. First, the latest data reveal a substantial and statistically significant decline in academic freedom in 19 cases, with improvements registered in only two cases compared with 2011. Thirty-seven percent of the world’s population live in these 19 countries and territories with major recent drops in academic freedom. Second, the decline in academic freedom accompanies an accelerating and deepening wave of autocratization.

Click here to access the update for 2022

The Academic Freedom Index and Its indicators: Introduction to new global time-series V-Dem data

Janika Spannagel and Katrin Kinzelbach

The Academic Freedom Index is the first conceptually thorough assessment of academic freedom worldwide and a times series dataset going back to 1900. While some previous datasets exist, they are geographically limited and methodologically or conceptually insufficient to offer a comprehensive picture of the levels of academic freedom across time and space. This paper introduces the new expert-coded dataset that includes the overall Academic Freedom Index alongside several specific indicators, to which more than 2050 country experts around the world have contributed and which is freely available as part of V-Dem’s time-series data releases. The paper discusses its advantages compared to other types of data on academic freedom, details the conceptualization of the new indicators, and offers a content and convergent validation of the results. The dataset provides ample opportunities for scholars to conduct in-depth research on academic freedom and its infringements, and for policymakers and advocates to monitor and analyze patterns and trends of academic freedom around the world.

Click here to access the Article