The Weekly: The U.S. Continues Its Fall on the Academic Freedom Index

But the experience of freedom seems increasingly divided along political lines.

This week the Friedrich Alexander Universität Institute for Political Science and the V-Dem Institute released the 2026 update to their Academic Freedom Index. The United States shows a marked decline in just the past year to the bottom 30-40% of nations, with the report noting, “the decline in institutional autonomy in the United States stands out as a case of fast and steep deterioration.” This continues a conspicuous decline for the U.S. on this measure that began in 2019-2020.

The New York Times interviewed several professors to learn about their experiences teaching and conducting research amidst declining academic freedom. Christopher Kutz, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Times, “I have to think very hard about whether it’s worth talking about something that’s obviously clearly relevant to the course.”

Many faculty, who disproportionately lean left, are restricting what they say in the classroom out of fear of political retaliation in a red-dominated climate of government intervention. Not long ago, however, it was right-of-center faculty who were disproportionately self-censoring. Some of these faculty now feel more free in aspects of their classroom expression in a climate where the dominance of left-wing identity politics is fading.

Jessica Trisko Darden, an associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University and HxA member, told the Times her classroom now feels more open for discussion without the pressure to center everything on identity. “My students are no longer circumscribed in their beliefs, opinions, analyses by identity categories that people are ascribing to them,” she explained.

This political dynamic has notably been playing out in the discipline of sociology. As I covered previously, the state of Florida has censored leftist viewpoints from their state-approved textbook for sociology. And many faculty are pushing back against the state censorship by “quietly defying” Florida’s new restrictions. “What I find most concerning is that we’re in this phase now where instead of telling us what not to teach, they’re telling us what to teach,” Zachary Levenson, sociologist at Florida International University, told The Guardian. “That feels especially terrifying and authoritarian.”

Several HxA members have been vocal in their support for reform of the discipline. Jukka Savolainen, a sociologist at Wayne State University, has called the government intervention in Florida “a wake-up call” for the discipline.

Instead of defending the ideologically corrupt status quo, we should listen to critics inside and outside the discipline… If this formerly exciting field of inquiry is to have a future, we must return to its roots. This will demand a collective commitment to impartial research and teaching. This shouldn’t be too much to ask. After all, it was a sociologist, Robert K. Merton (1910-2003), who formulated the enduring norms of science, which include organized skepticism and disinterestedness.

HxA member Ashley Rubin, a sociologist at University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, published an analysis of scholarship in American Journal of Sociology on her Substack this week “to explore whether and how the top articles in the field are homogenizing around ideologically preferred topic areas.” She finds that the identified trend of “woke” scholarship overall having peaked around 2021 has not replicated in this prominent disciplinary journal. Speaking with the Chronicle of Higher Education this week, she said, “if we don’t get our own house in order, we will see more of this government-led scrutiny or rules about what we can and cannot do.”

In other countries, Americans are experiencing broader academic freedom to pursue highly contentious work. Ghent University, located in Belgium, which is among the top 10% of institutions on the Academic Freedom Index, just appointed philosopher Nathan Cofnas to the position of postdoctoral fellow. His research, which focuses on the area of genetic variation among human groups, has drawn controversy in the form of a 300 signatory letter demanding explanation of his appointment, alleging his research violates the university’s code of ethics.

But many academics, including HxA president John Tomasi, have signed a counter-letter in support, arguing that “While we are not endorsing any specific claims Cofnas has made, we believe that academics must be able to put forward controversial or provocative claims without fear of losing their employment.”

Signatory Abhishek Saha, professor of mathematics at Queen Mary University of London and HxA member, explained that the demands to dismiss Cofnas “misunderstands both philosophy and academic freedom” and that “academic freedom exists precisely to protect contentious, controversial and offensive work.”

This gets at the heart of what we must do next. The uneven experience of academic freedom, increasingly along political lines, is a sign that we have failed to sustain genuine viewpoint diversity within our institutions. Without critical introspection and principled reform, outside actors will step in and make changes that sway with the political winds, causing turmoil for our institutions and diverting focus from what they should be doing: producing knowledge.

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