2025
Free to Think
Report of the Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Monitoring Project
Executive Summary
In recent years, state leaders have mounted escalating and increasingly aggressive attacks on scholars, students, and universities. These assaults on higher education are not isolated to places where the rule of law is weak and dissent openly punished, and they are not just taking place through extreme means of repression such as targeted killings, disappearances, arrests, and prosecutions. These are occurring, yes. However, attacks on higher education have always gone beyond these contexts and measures. Even in societies that have long had strong and stable democratic institutions, elected officials with autocratic impulses are using both the levers of democracy and extralegal administrative measures to undermine democratic institutions, including universities.
Through the Academic Freedom Monitoring Project (AFMP), Scholars at Risk (SAR) identifies frequent and pervasive attacks on academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and higher education in contexts characterized by authoritarian structures and significant repression against dissent or by armed conflict, insecurity, political violence, and civil unrest. These attacks continue. Since 2018, however, a growing number of the incidents included in the AFMP have taken place in countries with ostensibly strong democratic institutions.[1] This has continued during the current reporting period, with the election of antidemocratic leaders who appear increasingly willing to interfere in the higher education sector and exert pressure on university leaders. Of particular concern in this regard are the actions taken by the US government following the inauguration of President Donald Trump for his second term in office. Beginning in January 2025, US higher education began to experience unprecedented pressures, including a combination of executive orders and policy actions—many of which were extra-legal in nature—and legislative or budgetary measures.
Universities are engines of social and economic development. They are places for critical research, innovation, dialogue, and debate. They are also bulwarks of democracy, generating data and ideas essential to informed public discourse while training students to be critical, engaged members of civil society. But they can only perform these vital functions to the extent they enjoy autonomy from the state or other outside interference, and to the extent that scholars and students enjoy the right to academic freedom. SAR’s data makes clear that universities are among the first targets of attack in places experiencing democratic decline, where autocratic leaders censor discourse and sanction dissent. Attacks on higher education thus not only imperil the lives and well-being of scholars and students, upend their careers, and jeopardize their futures; they also chip away at the foundations of a free society and social progress by degrading the quality of teaching, research, and discourse on campus and beyond.
Through the AFMP, SAR responds to these attacks by identifying and tracking key incidents, with the aim of protecting vulnerable individuals, raising awareness, encouraging accountability, and promoting the dialogue and understanding necessary to prevent future threats. Since 2015, SAR has published Free to Think, a series of annual reports analyzing attacks on higher education communities around the world. This year’s report highlights concerning developments and trends in 16 countries, including Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Colombia, Georgia, Germany, India, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Serbia, Russia, Ukraine, the United States, and Zimbabwe. It also includes brief updates on the situations reported in prior Free to Think reports, including China and Hong Kong, Myanmar, Nicaragua , the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Sudan, and Türkiye.
Attacks on higher education from July 1, 2024–June 30, 2025
Free to Think 2025 documents 395 attacks on scholars, students, and institutions in 49 countries and territories, from July 1, 2024–June 30, 2025. Over this reporting period, students and faculty members fought back against autocracy, corruption, and poor educational conditions by participating in peaceful protests. In some cases, these prompted significant political change, but only after police had responded with violent force. The reporting period also saw the escalation of new illiberal policies, laws, and extralegal actions targeting higher education in democratic contexts, leading to crackdowns on dissent and disfavored speech both in the classroom and outside of it.
Police and military forces responded with violence to university students who led—sometimes with extensive support from faculty members—protest movements against their governments, or in demand of improved educational conditions. Most prominent among these was Bangladesh: university students there mobilized against a quota system for government jobs, sparking nationwide student-led protests that were met with what the United Nations Office for the High Commissioner of Human Rights called “brutal, systematic repression,” leading to the injury of thousands and the deaths of up to 1,400 people, including many students.[2]
Several countries saw government backlash against university students and scholars exercising their rights to the freedom of expression and association. These included Georgia, Pakistan, Serbia, and Zimbabwe. In Pakistan, members of Pakistan’s security forces targeted Baloch student activists, including by abducting them on multiple occasions.[3] In Serbia, university students launched a protest movement against government corruption sparked by the collapse of a roof of a railway station in the city of Novi Sad that killed fifteen people.[4] University faculty and administrations were largely supportive of the students, including by backing a student strike. Serbia’s government responded by publicly discrediting the students, prompting violence against them. The government retaliated against faculty by threatening to defund state universities and withholding the salaries of professors who supported the protests.[5]
Universities often responded to student protests by introducing more restrictive policies on where, when, and how students were permitted to protest. In India, a number of universities put in place new policies that limited student expression by banning students from holding discussions, demonstrations, or sloganeering without prior authorization.[6] In the United States, following the wave of pro-Palestinian protests that occurred during the spring of 2024, many colleges and universities spent the summer developing new time, place, and manner policies that banned student encampments, required advanced registration of protest actions, and implemented harsher disciplinary sanctions.[7]
The US government’s pressures on universities threatened to severely damage higher education both at home and abroad. The AFMP has recorded increasing incidents of attacks on higher education in the US since 2023. Prior to 2023, the AFMP recorded 15-20 incidents on higher education in the US annually. In 2024, that number rose to over 80 incidents. That rate continued in 2025; the AFMP recorded more than 40 incidents of attacks on US higher education during just the first half of the year. Moreover, the nature of these attacks shifted after January 2025. As Free to Think 2024 documented, state governments and local actors had for years exerted pressure on higher education, including by using legislation to suppress disfavored speech. However, from January 2025 the federal government initiated an unprecedented range of actions aimed at controlling university admissions, hiring, research, teaching, departmental structures, policies on speech, disciplinary policies, internal sanctions, and finances. These actions included extralegal executive orders targeting individual universities by revoking their funding; a series of attempts to arrest, detain, and attempt to deport without due legal process US-based, noncitizen scholars and students; and executive, legislative, and other actions aimed at eliminating research, programming, and academic supports related to diversity, equity, and inclusion; gender; environment; and many other areas. Such actions were part of a broader campaign by the US government, paralleling similar actions in authoritarian countries, to weaken democratic pillars of civil society. In the US, in addition to attacks on higher education, this included government disparagement and attacks on members of the judiciary, the media, foundations, and nonprofit organizations, as well as the weaponization of public sentiment and the federal bureaucracy to threaten investigations and sanctions, including loss of leadership positions, legal status, and funding.[8]
The US government’s actions had significant implications for higher education globally. They threatened to reorder international research and educational exchange, with reports that international students and scholars were increasingly less likely to choose the US for study, work, or academic events.[9] Universities in Europe, Asia, and beyond, responded by launching initiatives to attract US-based scholars and students.[10] Moreover, the US government’s cuts to research funding affected research projects and educational opportunities abroad, in countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Australia, Egypt, Malawi, Portugal, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.[11]
Taken together, they represent an unprecedented, voluntary dismantling of the US as a global education, research, and innovation superpower. If the government’s actions are not reversed or otherwise mitigated quickly, compounding generations of talent, innovation, and breakthroughs may be lost to the American people, to the benefit of other countries, if not lost altogether.
A Global Crisis for Academic Freedom
As highlighted in previous editions of Free to Think, the attacks on higher education described in this report are indicative of deteriorating global conditions for academic freedom. Declining levels of academic freedom are also evident in the most recent annual data from the Academic Freedom Index (AFi), which indicates that the space for academic freedom continues to contract in countries globally.[12] In its 2025 update, the AFi found that since 2024, academic freedom had declined significantly in 36 out of the 179 countries analyzed, including in 14 countries or territories included in this report: Afghanistan, Belarus, Gaza, Georgia, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Russia, Türkiye, Ukraine, the United States, and the West Bank. Academic freedom expanded in just eight countries from 2014-24.[13] Additionally, the AFi rated 10 of the 24 countries or territories featured in this report as completely restricted with respect to academic freedom: Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Belarus, China, Gaza, India, Iran, Myanmar, Nicaragua, and Türkiye. Another eight countries were rated as severely restricted: Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Pakistan, Sudan, West Bank, Russia, Ukraine, and Zimbabwe.
As noted in recent editions of Free to Think, the general trend over the past decade is toward declining levels of academic freedom across all contexts spanning the continuum from authoritarian to democratic. In some contexts, these declines have occurred slowly. This is the case, for instance, in the United States, which saw gradual declines in academic freedom from 2014-24.[14] Globally, however, the space for academic freedom has shrunk at an accelerating pace over the past decade.[15] Figure 1, for instance, depicts a turning point around 2019-2020, when academic freedom slid precipitously in a number of the countries illustrated.
Figure 1: Many of the countries featured in this edition of Free to Think have seen statistically significant declines in academic freedom in recent years, according to the Academic Freedom Index (AFi), a tool codeveloped by the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), the V-Dem Institute, and SAR.
Concerns about growing threats to academic freedom across the globe are underscored by lower numbers of reported incidents in some countries which previously saw very high numbers. Among the countries featured in this report, this includes Myanmar, Nicaragua, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and Türkiye. For instance, in Myanmar, from February 2021–August 2022, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP)—an NGO that has monitored the crackdown on anti-coup activists—verified arrests of more than 1,300 students and educators.[16] By 2024, however, that number had dramatically declined.[17] Rather than indicating improved conditions, however, a lower number of reported incidents between years may in fact result from more successful repression of academic freedom,[18] including through increased self-censorship, the closing or destruction of institutions or higher education systems, academic flight of scholars or students seeking academic freedom elsewhere, and closed media environments making it more difficult—especially from outside the territory—to identify incidents (see the methodology section of this report for more on the challenges of data collection). Therefore, countries or territories showing a significantly lower number of reported incidents from prior years may warrant greater attention, not less, precisely because the decrease may be indicative of the highest levels of repression. This report includes updates on a number of these places, including China, Hong Kong, Myanmar, Nicaragua, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Sudan, and Türkiye.
A Global Response
Attacks on higher education are destructive and damaging to higher education communities at the national, institutional, and individual levels. They severely undermine academic freedom and university autonomy and often seem intended to instill fear into anyone on a university campus (or wider) whose views the government may not like. Even more, these attacks undermine the basic rights of wider society to freedom of opinion, to freedom of speech, and to benefit from scientific progress. They stifle academic productivity, depriving society of the full benefits that universities, colleges, and research institutions are uniquely positioned to offer: the advancement of knowledge and the development of solutions to problems that affect everyone. They chill free speech, encourage self-censorship, and deter scholars and students from researching, teaching, and expressing their ideas at all. On an individual level, they are deadly.
Reversing the global decline of academic freedom described above requires three key steps: expanding awareness, building solidarity, and implementing concrete protections for scholars, students, and higher education institutions. With respect to the first step—building awareness—greater effort must be put into understanding, protecting, and promoting academic freedom and its benefit to the public. Policy makers and the wider public must both understand academic freedom as being as crucial to free society as a free press or an independent judiciary. Concretely, this may include investing in training and research on academic freedom, as well as in measuring, monitoring, and reporting on alleged violations and on positive developments which might provide examples of good practices for other states or institutions to follow.
Second, resisting attacks on higher education requires mobilization and solidarity. The current crisis is an opportunity to build solidarity, dialogue, and practices that address these deeper issues. The shrinking space for academic freedom is intrinsically connected to global expansion of authoritarianism. Authoritarian leaders thrive under conditions of isolation, division, and fear, which help them to secure acquiescence. The best way to fight back is by working together to build coalitions, share information, and create joint strategies. Higher education leaders have much they can learn from each other in terms of creating contingency plans to withstand attacks on their institutional autonomy and on the academic freedom of their constituents. The fight will not be easy. It will require long-term commitment, resilience, and endurance on the part of all involved in higher education.
Finally, insulating the higher education sector from attacks requires securing formal legal protections for academic freedom and university autonomy, and the implementation of those protections. The current global crisis of academic freedom is too important to rely merely on vague statements of values and historical practices of restraint. The Principles for Implementing the Right to Academic Freedom, released in March 2024 by an international Working Group on Academic Freedom, co-led by SAR, provides one roadmap for taking practical action to protect higher education. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education has already called on all states to endorse and implement the Principles.[19] States, higher education leaders, and civil society should draw on the Principles—particularly its annexes which include metrics to assess the implementation of the right to higher education and practical guidance for ensuring that right—to create stronger protections for the higher education sector.
With this report, SAR calls on states, higher education communities, and civil society around the world to recognize the urgent need to protect higher education and to safeguard academic freedom. Academic freedom is an essential right. It is essential not only to excellence in research, learning, and innovation, but also to democracy, pluralism, health, economic prosperity, and social and cultural understanding and cohesion. At the current moment, higher education in many places is under severe threat. But the current moment is also an opportunity to work together; to begin to imagine a restored, stronger higher education sector; and to publicly demonstrate that critical discourse is not disloyalty, that ideas are not crimes, and that everyone must be free to think, question, and share their ideas.
[1] See, for example, Freedom House, “The Uphill Battle to Safeguard Rights,” Freedom in the World 2025, https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2025/uphill-battle-to-safeguard-rights.
[2] UN Office for the High Commissioner of Human Rights. “Bangladesh: UN report finds brutal, systematic repression of protests, calls for justice for serious rights violations.” February 12, 2025. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/02/bangladesh-un-report-finds-brutal-systematic-repression-protests-calls.
[3] Scholars at Risk Network, October 10, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-10-10-punjab-university-university-of-lahore-and-superior-university/; and Scholars at Risk Network, October 16, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-10-16-multiple-institutions/.
[4] Dusan Stojanovic, “Daily anti-corruption protests are rattling Serbia’s leader. What might come next?,” AP News, January 29, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/serbia-protests-students-vucic-25de4c2730b3e72609da3c9aaf99f99f.
[5] Associated Press, “Serbians march in 4 cities against government pressure and hate speech,” AP News, March 31, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/serbia-protest-marches-university-students-e1ceec45481b358d0f9ba4a75aeb9915; Associated Press, “Thousands brave heavy rain to protest Serbia’s crackdown on universities,” May 23, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/serbia-students-protests-crackdown-universities-a3dda82a89c991122127337f68106271; Sanja Kljajic, “Serbia’s protesting students, teachers remain defiant,” DW, March 13, 2025, https://www.dw.com/en/serbias-protesting-students-teachers-remain-defiant/video-71914973; Vreme, “Vučić’s potato for professors: Canceled salaries at universities,” Vreme, March 21, 2025, https://vreme.com/en/vesti/vucicev-krompir-za-profesore-ukinute-plate-na-univerzitetima/; and Boban Karović, “Turbulence in higher education: Professors without salaries, inspections at faculties,” NIN, March 27, 2025, https://www.nin.rs/english/news/72425/professors-without-salaries-inspection-at-universities-turmoil-in-higher-education.
[6] Pallavi Smart, “TISS revises honour code: Bans participation in ‘anti-establishment’, ‘unpatriotic’ discussions,” Indian Express, September 4, 2024, https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/revised-honour-code-for-tiss-students-bans-unpatriotic-anti-establishment-discussions-9548808/; Musab Qazi, “Mumbai University Issues Circular Prohibiting Campus Protests Without Permission, Student Organisations Cry Foul,” The Free Press Journal, September 24, 2024, https://www.freepressjournal.in/education/mumbai-university-issues-circular-prohibiting-campus-protests-without-permission-student-organisations-cry-foul; Team Clarion, “Jamia Millia Students Up in Arms Over Ban on Protests, Sloganeering,” Clarion India, December 2, 2024, https://clarionindia.net/jamia-millia-students-up-in-arms-over-ban-on-protests-sloganeering/; Tribune News Service, “Jamia Millia Islamia issues ban on protests sans prior approval,” The Tribune India, December 2, 2024, https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/delhi/jamia-millia-islamia-issues-ban-on-protests-sans-prior-approval/; and India Today News Desk, “Telangana university bans protest on campus, BJP calls it ‘undeclared emergency’,” India Today, March 16, 2025, https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/telangana-university-bans-protest-on-campus-bjp-calls-it-undeclared-emergency-2694175-2025-03-16.
[7] Johanna Alonso, “Anticipating Fall Protests, Colleges Adopt a Range of Approaches,” Inside Higher Ed, August 16, 2024, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/free-speech/2024/08/16/how-universities-are-preparing-fall-protests; Katherine Mangan, “New Rules and Familiar Challenges as Antiwar Protesters Return to Campuses: ‘The Stakes Are Extraordinarily High’,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 5, 2024, https://www.chronicle.com/article/new-rules-and-familiar-challenges-as-antiwar-protesters-return-to-campuses-the-stakes-are-extraordinarily-high; Declan Bradley and Garrett Shanley, “We Looked at Dozens of Colleges’ New Protest Policies. Here’s What We Found,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 12, 2024, https://www.chronicle.com/article/we-looked-at-dozens-of-colleges-new-protest-policies-heres-what-we-found; AAUP, “AAUP Condemns Wave of Administrative Policies Intended to Crack Down on Peaceful Campus Protest,” August 14, 2024, https://www.aaup.org/news/aaup-condemns-wave-administrative-policies-intended-crack-down-peaceful-campus-protest; and Lisa Tolin, “In Preparing for Protests, Are Campuses Going Too Far?” Pen America, August 28, 2024, https://pen.org/in-preparing-for-protests-are-campuses-going-too-far/.
[8] Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, “The Path to American Authoritarianism,” Foreign Affairs, February 11, 2025, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/path-american-authoritarianism-trump; and Erica Bryant, “Trump’s War on Nonprofits Will Make Us All Less Safe,” Vera Institute of Justice, June 10, 2025, https://www.vera.org/news/trumps-war-on-nonprofits-will-make-us-all-less-safe.
[9] Jack Grove, “US conference boycott urged after French scientist deported,” Times Higher Education, June 10, 2025, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/us-conference-boycott-urged-after-french-scientist-deported; Julie Hare and Ayesha de Kretser, “Trump crackdown forces academics to cancel US trips,” Financial Review, April 2, 2025, https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/trump-crackdown-forces-academics-to-cancel-us-trips-20250319-p5lkpu; Yojana Sharma, “Malaysia to stop sending its scholarship students to the US,” University World News, June 4, 2025, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post-mobile.php?story=20250604131453670; and Karin Fischer, “Colleges Across U.S. Fear Chill on Enrollments of Foreign Students,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 28, 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/article/colleges-across-u-s-fear-chill-on-enrollments-of-foreign-students.
[10] Patricia Cohen, “The World Is Wooing U.S. Researchers Shunned by Trump,” New York Times, May 14, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/business/economy/trump-research-brain-drain.html; Helen Packer, “US curbs on Chinese students ‘free kick’ for Asian universities,” Times Higher Education, June 1, 2025, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/us-curbs-chinese-students-free-kick-asian-universities; Yojana Sharma, “Hong Kong eyes Harvard’s students amid broader visa threat,” May 29, 2025, University World News, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20250529114916246; and Suvendrini Kakuchi, “Universities step up plans to accept US scholars, students,” University World News, June 10, 2025, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20250610134526796.
[11] Karin Fischer, “Latitudes: Trump administration’s ideological vetting of Fulbright scholars raises alarm,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 4, 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/latitudes/2025-06-04; Afeez Bolaji, “Trump’s ‘deadly, anti-people policy’ is taking its toll, University World News, February 9, 2025, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20250210001048466; Desmond Thompson, “Trump leaves South African universities reeling,” University World News, February 6, 2025, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20250205183156837; Yogita Limaye, “Afghan women who fled Taliban to study abroad face imminent return after USAID cuts, BBC, March 8, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg4k25wlw21o; Wagdy Sawahel, “Universities ‘save’ students’ amid Trump’s aid pause,” University World News, February 6, 2025, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20250205163734812; Caitlin Cassidy, “Trump administration accused of ‘blatant foreign interference’ in Australian universities over questionnaire on DEI and gender,” The Guardian, March 14, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/mar/14/australian-university-sector-accuses-trump-administration-of-blatant-interference-in-research; John Ross, “Australian scientists demand meeting over Trump grant cuts,” Times Higher Education, March 21, 2025, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/australian-scientists-demand-meeting-over-trump-grant-cuts; Jack Grove, “Trump’s DEI crackdown ‘could block US-UK research collaborations’,” Times Higher Education, February 14, 2025, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/trumps-dei-crackdown-could-block-us-uk-research-collaborations; Joana Mourão Carvalho, “Trump administration sent ideological questionnaire to Portuguese universities and cut support,” Euronews, April 11, 2025, https://www.msn.com/pt-pt/noticias/ultimas/administra%C3%A7%C3%A3o-trump-enviou-question%C3%A1rio-ideol%C3%B3gico-a-universidades-portuguesas-e-cortou-apoios/ar-AA1CJFFz; Ben Farmer, “US aid cuts threaten South Africa’s status as powerhouse of HIV and tuberculosis research,” The Telegraph, June 10. 2025, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/us-aid-cuts-threaten-hiv-tuberculosis-tb-research-south-africa/; and Josef Al Shemary, “Top UK universities forced to cancel projects as Trump pulls funding in ‘assault on science’,” Leading Britain’s Conversation, June 26, 2025, https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/uk/uk-universities-cancel-projects-trump/.
[12] Katrin Kinzelbach, Staffan I. Lindberg, Lars Lott, and Angelo Vito Panaro. Academic Freedom Index 2025 Update. FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and V-Dem Institute. doi:10.25593/open-fau-1637
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Emily Washburn. “Academic Freedom Declined Globally Between 2012 And 2022—And Yes, In The U.S., Too—Experts Say.” Forbes, March 3, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywashburn/2023/03/03/academic-freedom-declined-globally-between-2012-and-2022-and-yes-in-the-us-too-experts-say/.
[16] See AAPP’s data at airtable.com/shr9w3z7dyIoqdUv4/tbl8hVtSci8VifbO9. Note: the figure cited is a result of filtering the data by age (over 18 years old, but including “unknown”) and category (“All Burma Federation of Student Unions,” “Assistant Lecturer,” “Lecturer,” “Professor,” “Rector,” “Student,” and “Teacher”).
[17] Scholars at Risk. Free to Think 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/resources/free-to-think-2024/.
[18] Hoffman, F. and Kinzelbach, K. “Forbidden Knowledge: Academic Freedom and Political Repression in the University Can Be Measured. This is How.” GPPi, April 2018, Retrieved from https://www.gppi.net/media/Kinzelbach_Hoffmann_2018_Forbidden_Knowledge.pdf.
[19] Human Rights Council, “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to education, Farida Shaheed*,” A/HRC/56/58, June 27, 2024, https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/thematic-reports/ahrc5658-right-academic-freedom-report-special-rapporteur-right.
Through the Scholars in Prison program, Scholars at Risk advocates for the freedom of wrongfully imprisoned scholars and students and for their humane treatment in accordance with international law. Photo: Alamy
Scholars in Prison
SAR’s Scholars in Prison Project directs advocacy efforts on behalf of wrongfully imprisoned and prosecuted scholars and students. Its goals are to garner public support within and outside the higher education community; to urge state authorities to uphold legal obligations related to humane treatment and due process; to ensure that those imprisoned know they are not forgotten, and that they have support from an international community of colleagues and friends; and, ultimately, to secure their release. With coordination from SAR’s Student Advocacy Seminars and Academic Freedom Legal Clinics, SAR sections, and partner organizations, SAR can advocate on behalf of imprisoned scholars through several different channels, including, but not limited to, raising cases with responsible governments and other international stakeholders, issuing public letters of appeal and statements, organizing social media campaigns, and building awareness through the press. Through the Scholars in Prison program, SAR invites everyone to join in advocating on behalf of wrongfully imprisoned scholars and students.
Over the past year, SAR has publicly supported the imprisoned scholars and students listed below. Collectively, these individuals—imprisoned for their peaceful academic and expressive activities and associations—are subjected to judicial harassment; unfair or inadequate legal proceedings; lengthy pretrial detention and/or sentences; abuse and torture in custody; denial of access to legal counsel, appropriate medical care, or family; and other forms of mistreatment. While these conditions and practices cause serious physical and psychological damage to the imprisoned students, scholars, and their family members, the effects go beyond those directly targeted. Their academic peers and colleagues also are put on high alert, sending a damaging message to the wider higher education community and society at large that expressing ideas or raising questions can have dire consequences.
Bahruz Samadov
Political Science | Azerbaijan
Bahruz Samadov is an Azerbaijani PhD student in the political science department at Charles University of Prague and a freelance political analyst. On the evening of August 21, 2024, Azerbaijani security forces entered Mr. Samadov’s grandmother’s house, where he was staying while on summer break from university, and arrested him. Three days later, the Baku court charged him with “high treason” under Article 274 of Azerbaijan’s Criminal Code, alleging that he provided sensitive information to Armenia. Human rights organizations suggest that these charges stem from Mr. Samadov’s research on the use of military forces in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict—a decades long, entrenched conflict between Azerbaijan, Armenia, and the self-declared Armenian breakaway state of Artsakh—and connections with Armenian activists. On December 19, the Baku Sabail District Court extended Mr. Samadov’s initial four-month pretrial detention by another four months. On January 22, 2025, the court denied his petition to be moved to house arrest. In a closed-door trial on June 23, 2025, the court sentenced Mr. Samadov to 15 years in prison for “high treason.”
Iqbal Abilov
History and Ethnography | Azerbaijan
Igbal Abilov is a scholar and lecturer at Belarusian State University who specializes in history and ethnography, with a focus on ethnic minorities of the South Caucasus, Türkiye, and Iran. Mr. Abilov is an ethnic Talysh and a member of the Talysh National Academy, a consortium of academics who study the Talysh Indigenous group. At the time of his arrest, he was conducting research into the history and culture of the Talysh people. On June 22, 2024, Azerbaijani security forces detained and questioned Mr. Abilov while he was visiting Azerbaijan for a wedding; he was released later that day. On June 27, Azerbaijani security officials prevented Mr. Abilov from boarding a flight back to Belarus and confiscated his passport and phones. On July 22, security forces summoned Mr. Abilov to a local police station, purportedly to retrieve his personal items, but when he arrived, the authorities arrested him. Two days later, the Sabail District Court of Baku charged Mr. Abilov with “high treason,” “foreign-agent-instructed public appeals against state,” and “incitement of ethnic hatred.” According to a pro-government media outlet, the basis for these charges included alleged actions on behalf of Armenia’s national security services, including communications with Professor Garnik Asatryan, an Armenian professor specializing in Iranistics and Kurdology. Mr. Abilov’s lawyer has stated that Mr. Abilov had been in touch with Professor Asatryan for academic reasons only. The court prohibited him and his lawyer from sharing any documents associated with the case, including with his relatives. On February 26, 2025, the Lankaran Serious Crimes Court began virtual hearings. Mr. Abilov’s lawyer requested an open hearing and home detention; the court denied both requests. On May 20, the court found Mr. Abilov guilty of treason and sentenced him to 18 years in prison.
Abduljalil Al-Singace
Mechanical Engineering | Bahrain
Dr. Abduljalil Al-Singace, a Bahraini scholar and a retired professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Bahrain, is serving a life sentence in connection with his pro-democracy and human rights activism. On March 17, 2011, authorities arrested Dr. Al-Singace from his home and took him to a police station where they allegedly beat and threatened him. He was held incommunicado until June 22, 2011, when a military court sentenced him to life in prison on charges of “plotting to overthrow the government.” Since his arrest, Dr. Al-Singace has been subjected to mistreatment and torture, which have worsened his pre-existing health conditions, including post-polio syndrome, and caused new medical issues, including musculoskeletal issues, sickle cell disease, severe dehydration, fainting, shoulder infection, and two ruptured eardrums.
On July 8, 2021, Dr. Al-Singace began a hunger strike to protest his ill treatment and to demand that the prison return to his family his confiscated manuscript on Bahraini dialects of Arabic, which he spent four years researching and writing. Since then, Dr. Al-Singace’s health has rapidly deteriorated. UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders Mary Lawlor expressed concern that “Mr Al-Singace is unable to walk or exercise properly because of his physical impairment(s) which deteriorated in detention. […] The treatments that are necessary to alleviate his condition have been repeatedly denied.”[1] For the past four years, Dr. Al-Singace has remained on a liquid-only hunger strike, sustaining himself only on multivitamin liquid supplements, tea with milk and sugar, water, and salts. Dr. Al-Singace continues to be held in prolonged solitary confinement within his room in Kanoo Medical Centre. He has been prohibited from going outside, having exposure to direct sunlight, and receiving the physiotherapy he requires for his disability. Dr. Al Singace’s family continues to report that authorities deny him access to appropriate medical care, severely limit his access to visits and video calls with his family, and restrict access to religious programs and books.
Marfa Rabkova
International Law and European Union Law | Belarus
Marfa Rabkova, a third-year student at the International Law and European Union Law program at European Humanities University (EHU), Lithuania, has been imprisoned in Belarus since September 17, 2020. In addition to her studies at EHU, at the time of her arrest Ms. Rabkova was the coordinator of the Volunteer Service at Human Rights Center Viasna. In that capacity, she monitored the nationwide 2020 protests calling for President Lukashenko’s resignation after claims of a fraudulent election spread. Shortly thereafter, officers from the Main Directorate for Combating Organized Crime and Corruption (GUBOPiK) arrested Ms. Rabkova and her husband and searched the couple’s home, seizing their personal belongings. Ms. Rabkova’s husband was later released. Ms. Rabkova has been in custody in Minsk Detention Center No. 1 ever since. Authorities extended Ms. Rabkova’s pretrial detention multiple times and indicted her on several charges. On September 6, 2022, the Minsk city court sentenced Ms. Rabkova to 15 years in prison on 13 charges, including “participating in a criminal organization” and “inciting racial, national, religious or other social hostility by a group of individuals.” The trial was closed to the public and took place over four months. On February 28, 2023, the Supreme Court of Belarus considered an appeal for Rabkova and ruled her sentence be reduced by three months from 15 years to 14 years and nine months. In November 2024, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention called on the Belarusian authorities to immediately release Ms. Rabkova and provide her with compensation for arbitrary detention.[2]
Ilham Tohti
Economics | China
Professor Tohti, an economics professor and public intellectual, promoted open dialogue between Uyghur and Han Chinese individuals through his website, Uyghur Online or Uighurbiz. net, and through research proposals to the Chinese government. He has also been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times, including for the 2025 prize, and was awarded the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 2019.[3] On January 15, 2014, police raided Professor Tohti’s home, seized his personal belongings, and arrested him. In September 2014, the Urumqi Intermediate Court convicted him of separatism and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The charge apparently stemmed from his academic work and expression, as Chinese authorities have not publicly disclosed any evidence against Professor Tohti beyond his articles, interviews, and lectures. Prison authorities have denied him access to family visits and, since 2017, they have not disclosed Professor Tohti’s whereabouts or well-being. In October 2024, the European Parliament passed a resolution on human rights in China, calling for the immediate and unconditional release of Professor Tohti and others arbitrarily detained in the country.[4]
Professor Tohti’s daughter, Jewher Ilham, co-produced the 2023 documentary film All Static & Noise, aimed at bringing attention to her father’s imprisonment and the experiences of Uyghur “re-education camp” survivors and their families in Türkiye, Kazakhstan, Europe, and the United States.[5]
Rahile Dawut
Uyghur Studies and Folklore | China
Professor Rahile Dawut, a world-renowned scholar of Uyghur studies, folklore, and traditions, and professor at Xinjiang University in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), disappeared in China in December 2017. More than three years after her imprisonment, it was revealed that she had been sentenced and imprisoned, and on September 21, 2023, it was confirmed that she was given a life sentence in prison for “endangering state security.” Her sentence includes the deprivation of political rights for life. State authorities have not provided information regarding Professor Dawut’s health, her ability to connect with family members, or her whereabouts. SAR awarded Professor Dawut the 2020 Courage to Think Award for her own work on Uyghur folklore, as well as on behalf of all the scholars and students of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, who together struggle for academic freedom and freedom of opinion, expression, belief, association, and movement. Professor Dawut’s daughter accepted the award on their behalf.
Imprisoned Uyghur Scholars & Students
Various Fields | China
Since 2017, Uyghur scholars and students in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) have been reported missing or detained, including at so-called “re-education camps.” Geography scholar Tashpolat Tiyip and literary scholar Abdulqadir Jalaleddin are among those detained. Their detentions appear connected to a campaign by Chinese authorities targeting ethnic and religious minority communities. Human rights organizations have found that Uyghurs are the most jailed minority group globally.[6] Human rights groups have reported that detainees are subjected to physical and psychological abuse, including beatings, solitary confinement, and sexual harassment. They are also forced to recite anthems of the Chinese Communist Party, attend indoctrination classes, and eat pork and drink alcohol in contravention of their religious beliefs. A large number of detainees have also reportedly been transferred from the camps and forced to work in factories across China, where they experience similar mistreatment. While an official accounting of detainees is unavailable, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) cited in its August 2018 report estimates ranging from “tens of thousands to upwards of a million.”
Authorities have not disclosed the whereabouts or well-being of the scholars, students, and other detainees and have reportedly prosecuted detainees through closed-door trials, during which detainees have been denied access to legal counsel. According to a German media report, some detainees were forced to pick their own infractions from a list they were handed by the court—in essence, the detainees had to retroactively choose the crimes for which they had been imprisoned.[7] On August 31, 2022, the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner published a report that said the detentions in the XUAR “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”[8]
Ahmadreza Djalali
Disaster Medicine | Iran
Dr. Ahmadreza Djalali, a scholar of disaster medicine, was arrested while visiting Iran to participate in a series of academic workshops. In October 2017, after more than 17 months in jail, Dr. Djalali was convicted and sentenced to death for “corruption on earth,” a charge that appears to relate to his ties to the international academic community. Dr. Djalali has spent significant lengths of time in solitary confinement while awaiting the execution of his sentence, during which his health has significantly deteriorated. In May 2022, Iranian authorities began threatening to carry out Dr. Djalali’s execution. He exhausted all potential appellate options to appeal his case in August 2023, leaving no further recourse and escalating the threat of execution. Dr. Djalali continues to be denied access to his lawyer and his family in Iran, calls to his wife and children in Sweden, and the medical care that he urgently needs. In June 2024, Dr. Djalali undertook a week-long hunger strike to protest a prisoner swap negotiated between Sweden and Iran that did not include him. His family reported that he was suffering from “severe” weakness, heart and blood-pressure issues, and “severe stomach problems” worsened by a previous hunger strike. In March 2025, Sweden’s foreign ministry summoned Iran’s ambassador and demanded the immediate release of Dr. Djalali, citing serious concerns about his worsening health.[9] Two months later, on May 8, Dr. Dajalali suffered a heart attack and prison authorities refused him medical support. In June, a group of UN Special Rapporteurs and country experts issued a statement of concern for his well-being. They wrote, “We have reminded Iran of their obligations to treat Mr. Djalali in line with human rights standards. The Iranian authorities are ultimately responsible for providing humane conditions of detention and healthcare of the same standard as those available to Iranians in the community.”[10]
On June 23, 2025, during the nearly two-week period of fighting between Israel and Iran, Israeli forces conducted a missile strike on Evin Prison, including the wing where Dr. Djalali was being held. Shortly after the attack, prison authorities moved Dr. Djalali and other prisoners to an undisclosed area, a move that human rights authorities worried signaled impending execution. At the time of writing this report, Dr. Djalali’s location still remains undisclosed.
In April 2025, SAR conducted a series of interviews with Dr. Djalali’s wife and daughter about Dr. Djalali’s life and role as a husband and father. The excerpts from those conversations, which have been edited for length and clarity, can be read here.
Nasser bin Ghaith
Economics | United Arab Emirates
Dr. Nasser bin Ghaith is an economist, former lecturer at the University of Paris IV Abu Dhabi, and prominent human rights defender who was arrested in 2015. Dr. bin Ghaith was initially convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2017 on charges stemming from a series of tweets in which he criticized the UAE government’s human rights record. Since his imprisonment, Dr. bin Ghaith has undertaken several hunger strikes to protest his sentence, ill-treatment, and torture in prison. Despite drastically worsening health, Dr. bin Ghaith reports that he has been denied medical care, including much-needed blood pressure medication.
On January 6, 2024, the UAE’s state-run news agency announced new charges connected to the Justice and Dignity Committee, which defenders claim is a cultural and educational group but which the government considers a terrorist organization.[11] The announcement said that Dr. bin Ghaith would be tried along with 83 other defendants, many already prisoners of conscience, in the UAE’s second largest mass political trial, which human rights defenders have called the “UAE84” trial. While no information about the trial was publicly available, human rights experts believe that Dr. bin Ghaith and the others were charged under Federal Law No. 7 of 2014 on Combating Terrorist Offences, which allows for the death penalty or life imprisonment. During the trial, no new evidence supporting the charges was provided; the prosecutor used evidence based solely on the July 2013 UAE94 trial, a mass trial of 69 government critics that was condemned for its many due process violations.[12] On July 10, 2024, the Abu Dhabi Federal Appeals Court convicted Dr. bin Ghaith, along with 40 other defendants in the mass trial. The sentences ranged from 10 years to life in prison, with Dr. bin Ghaith receiving the maximum sentence for “establishing and managing a clandestine terrorist organisation.” On March 4, 2025, an Emirati court rejected Dr. bin Ghaith’s appeal, as well as the appeals of the other 84 defendants. The decision is final and cannot be further appealed. Human rights organizations raised concerns about the lack of due process during the trial; it has been reported that Emirati officials had coerced defendants into giving false statements and that their lawyers were prevented from accessing case files and court documents.
In Memoriam: Gokarakonda Naga Saibaba
English Literature | India
SAR was saddened to learn that on October 12, 2024, Professor Gokarakonda Naga Saibaba, an English literature professor, died from medical complications after a gall-bladder surgery. Prior to his passing, Professor Saibaba had been acquitted and released from prison where he had been held since 2014 in apparent connection to his activism on behalf of vulnerable groups in India, such as tribal groups who suffer from poverty and human rights violations due to the prolonged conflict between India and the separatist Communist Party of India (Maoist). Professor Saibaba suffered from severe health conditions, including post-polio syndrome and a heart condition, which only worsened during his time in prison. His tireless advocacy for vulnerable groups in India, despite facing violations to his academic freedom, must never be forgotten.
For years, SAR partnered with colleagues across the globe, including our Student Advocacy Seminars, to raise awareness about Professor Saibaba’s plight and to seek his release. Following that release, Professor Saibaba made time to share his story with the international community, noting that his own freedom did not mean the campaign for academic freedom in India was over. He urged global civil society and the academic community to continue telling his story to others as a means of demonstrating the reality detained scholars face in India, and urged all scholars to keep working and questioning.
[1] United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Bahrain: UN expert alarmed by health of human rights defenders in prison. September 15, 2023. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/09/bahrain-un-expert-alarmed-health-human-rights-defenders-prison.
[2] United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Opinion No. 54/2024 concerning Maria Rabkova (Belarus). A/HRC/WGAD/2024/54. March 18, 2025. https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/issues/detention-wg/opinions/session101/a-hrc-wgad-2024-54-belarus-aev.pdf; and Viasna, “’The case requires urgent attention.’” The UN recognized Marfa Rabkova’s imprisonment as arbitrary and called for her release,” Viasna, March 19, 2025, https://spring96.org/en/news/117635.
[3] European Parliament. Ilham Tohti wins 2019 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. October 24, 2019. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/eu-affairs/20191018STO64607/ilham-tohti-wins-2019-sakharov-prize-for-freedom-of-thought.
[4] European Parliament. Human rights breaches in Türkiye, China and Iraq. October 10, 2024. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20241003IPR24422/human-rights-breaches-in-turkiye-china-and-iraq.
[5] Jewher Ilham and Janice Englehart. “All Static & Noise.” 2023. https://www.allstaticandnoise.com/.
[6] Ruth Ingram. “Uyghurs in China: The Most Heavily Jailed Group in the World.” Uyghur Human Rights Project, June 28, 2024, https://uhrp.org/news/uyghurs-in-china-the-most-heavily-jailed-group-in-the-world/.
[7] Julia Bayer, Cherie Chan, and Naomi Conrad, “Exclusive: China’s sham trials for detained Uighurs,” Deutsche Welle, June 8, 2020, https://www.dw.com/en/china-convicts-uighurs-in-sham-trials-at-xinjiang-camps/a-53699982.
[8] UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. OHCHR Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China. August 31, 2022. www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ohchr-assessment-human-rights-concerns-xinjiang-uyghur-autonomous-region.
[9] Iran International, “Sweden summons Iran’s ambassador to seek release of dual national,” Iran International, March 7, 2025, https://www.iranintl.com/en/202503073617.
[10] United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Detention taking its toll on hostage Ahmadreza Djalali: UN experts call on Iran to release him without delay. June 25, 2025, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/06/detention-taking-its-toll-hostage-ahmadreza-djalali-un-experts-call-iran.
[11] According to Amnesty International, the Justice and Dignity Committee is “a branch of the al-Islah movement, which is considered to be the Emirati version of the Muslim Brotherhood group.” The Committee’s goals included rais[ing] society’s awareness of its rights,” “publish[ing] articles about those rights,” and “work[ing] to communicate with international rights organizations.” Amnesty International, UAE: Authorities “make mockery of justice” with mass trial of dissidents already behind bars, February 5, 2024, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/uae-authorities-make-mockery-of-justice-with-mass-trial-of-dissidents-already-behind-bars/.
[12] Human Rights Watch. UAE: Unfair Trial, Unjust Sentences. July 3, 2013. https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/07/03/uae-unfair-trial-unjust-sentences.
Students march against government corruption in Belgrade, Serbia on January 10, 2025, as part of a nationwide, student-led movement against democratic backsliding in Serbia Photo: AP Newsroom
Regional Pressures on Higher Education Communities
Attacks on higher education communities occur across the globe. They violate the rights of those targeted and have the potential to limit academic freedom and the right to education for large numbers of scholars and students at higher education institutions worldwide. Countries and territories suffering from heightened attacks and pressures warrant the attention of the international community.
In this edition of Free to Think, Scholars at Risk (SAR) reported 395 attacks on higher education communities in 49 countries and territories from July 1, 2024, to June 30, 2025. In this section, SAR examines diverse country-level developments and trends from this reporting period. These include patterns of attacks found in SAR’s Monitoring Project data, such as arrests and disciplinary actions targeting scholars or repeated violations of students’ right to peacefully assemble and express themselves. They also include particular events, novel pressures, or under-discussed phenomena that threaten academic freedom and related values for entire higher education communities, such as restrictive legislative and administrative actions and threats to university governance.
Given resource constraints and challenges in gathering and verifying information, this report features only a representative and illustrative sample of the global state of attacks on higher education. Countries and territories not highlighted in Free to Think 2025 are not necessarily free of attacks on higher education communities or restraints on academic freedom, and countries highlighted in previous years but not included here have not necessarily seen improved conditions. Rather, decisions about highlighting the countries that follow were based on factors including severity of attacks during the current reporting period, diversity of geography, political systems, and forms of attacks on higher education.
Readers interested in learning more about attacks on higher education and academic freedom conditions around the world are encouraged to review national-level incident data on SAR’s website and country-level expert assessments in the Academic Freedom Index, a tool co-developed by the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), the V-Dem Institute, and SAR.[1] SAR invites readers to contribute information on attacks on higher education communities wherever and whenever they occur. By building a more comprehensive dataset, SAR can more effectively expose this global phenomenon and work with governments, higher education communities, and civil society to protect higher education from attack and to promote academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and related higher education values.
Afghanistan
At the start of the reporting period, academic freedom was already “completely restricted” in Afghanistan, according to the AFi. Even so, the Taliban government took new actions to exert ideological control over the higher education system and to undermine women’s right to education.
Figure 2: According to AFi, academic freedom declined significantly in Afghanistan from 2023 to 2024. The Index rated Afghanistan as “completely restricted” (0.08) with respect to academic freedom.
Figure 3: According to the AFi, since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan’s government in 2021, academic freedom has declined most significantly with respect to institutional autonomy and the freedom of academic and cultural expression.
The Taliban government took measures to silence opposition voices within Afghanistan’s universities and to impose ideological conformity. These included beating and detaining vocal scholars. For instance, on December 1, 2024, after Hassamuddin Rahimzai, a professor in the Faculty of Islamic Jurisprudence at Sheikh Zayed University, objected to the process for evaluating existing faculty members, Taliban guards beat him so severely that he lost consciousness. According to reports, the evaluation was part of an effort by the Taliban to replace existing faculty members with madrasa graduates who were ideologically aligned with the group. Rahimzai was then detained in the Khost governor’s detention facility, where he was reportedly also tortured.[2]
Also in December 2024, the Taliban forced 12 professors to resign from their positions at Sayed Jamaluddin Afghani University in Kunar province after they expressed ideological disagreement with the Taliban.[3] An anonymous commentary by an Afghan scholar based in Afghanistan published by Times Higher Education around the same time indicated that the Taliban was expanding its authority over decisions about faculty employment. According to the author, the Taliban had recently announced that university lecturers were barred from traveling abroad for education or training without written permission from the office of the supreme leader, Mullah Haibatullah.[4]
In April and May 2025, media reports indicated that the Taliban government was continuing to purge public university faculty and staff on gender, ethnic, and ideological grounds. The stated justification for the firings was a 14 percent reduction in staff employed under the Ministry of Higher Education, mirroring staffing reductions taking place across the Afghan government more broadly. However, there were widespread reports that those fired were disproportionately women and ethnic and religious minorities.[5] For example, on May 11, 2025, it was reported that the Taliban’s Ministry of Higher Education had dismissed more than 50 faculty and staff members from Bamiyan University. Most of those dismissed were reportedly from the minority Hazara ethnic group.[6] Likewise, on May 13, 2025, around 120 faculty and staff members were dismissed from Sheikh Zayed University. Most were either affiliated with the former US-backed Afghan government or had clashed ideologically with the Taliban.[7]
In addition, the Taliban further limited educational opportunities available to women. On December 3, 2024, a ban on women’s access to medical education went into effect. Training as midwives and nurses had been the last higher educational option after the Taliban banned women from all other forms of higher education in December 2022.[8] At the time of the 2024 ban, around 35,000 women studied at public and private Afghan health institutes, according to the Ministry of Health.[9] Global rights groups decried the ban and its anticipated impact on women’s health. For example, Human Rights Watch warned that it would “result in unnecessary pain, misery, sickness, and death for the women forced to go without health care, as there won’t be female healthcare workers to treat them.”[10]
In addition, following the inauguration of US President Donald Trump and the new US administration’s actions to reduce spending (described in more detail in the US section below), Afghan women who sought educational opportunities outside of the country found their US-supported programs cut. In late February 2025, more than 80 Afghan women studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in Oman on scholarships supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) were told that their funding had been terminated and that they would need to return to Afghanistan within two weeks.[11] USAID later told the women that their funding would be extended to June 20, 2025. However, on April 5, the agency backtracked, informing the students that their scholarships would end immediately. The withdrawal of funding left them unable to complete their degrees and without legal status in Qatar.[12]
Amid confusion over the US government’s spending cuts, some programs aimed at supporting Afghan women’s education and other scholarships for Afghan students were suspended—either temporarily or permanently.[13] The American University of Afghanistan (AUAF), which was exiled to Qatar when the Taliban took control of the Afghan government in August 2021, announced in February that it had decided to suspend its Spring 2025 semester.[14] The university later announced that the semester would start after Nowruz, the Persian new year (which is widely celebrated among many Afghans).[15] In early February 2025, the US government suspended its support for the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh, which has offered educational opportunities to hundreds of Afghan women since 2021. The decision affected around 330 students who had been scheduled to arrive at the university during the following weeks.[16]
Azerbaijan
For the past decade, academic freedom has been severely restricted in Azerbaijan, with higher education systems having very little autonomy.[17] In 2024, Azerbaijan’s government further cracked down on dissent as it prepared to host the COP29 climate conference.[18] According to the AFi, the space for academic and cultural expression shrank considerably, reflecting in part the high profile arrests of several academics.[19]
Figure 4: In 2024, the AFi rated Azerbaijan as “completely restricted” in terms of academic freedom (0.16), putting it in the bottom 20 percent of all countries with respect to academic freedom.
Figure 5: According to the AFi, the freedom of academic and cultural expression declined considerably from 2023 to 2024.
On July 27, 2024, Azerbaijan’s intelligence service arrested Igbal Abilov, an ethnic Talysh scholar born in Azerbaijan who is a researcher and lecturer at Belarusian State University and expert on ethnic minorities in the South Caucasus, Türkiye, and Iran. At the time of his arrest, he was boarding a flight back to Belarus after attending a wedding in Azerbaijan. Authorities charged Abilov with “high treason,” “foreign-agent-instructed public appeals against state,” and “incitement of ethnic hatred” for allegedly “organising activities” against Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity, “attracting disruptive forces from different countries,” and “taking action aimed at creating hatred and enmity on ethnic grounds.” These charges were apparently based on a conversation that he had with an Armenian scholar related to an academic report he was writing on the region’s Talysh community. Abilov’s family and lawyer have denied all charges. In May 2025, the Lankaran Serious Crimes Court found Abilov guilty and sentenced him to 18 years in prison.[20]
In a similar case, on August 21, 2024, Azerbaijan’s intelligence forces arrested Bahruz Samadov, a doctoral student in political science at Charles University of Prague and a freelance political analyst. Samadov’s prior writing had criticized Azerbaijan’s military offenses in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. The police who arrested Samadov informed his grandmother, with whom he was staying while on break from his studies, that he was being arrested for suspected illegal drug activities, an accusation that authorities have used to silence critics of the government over the years, according to rights groups.[21] Three days later, the Baku court updated Samadov’s charges to “high treason,” accusing him of providing sensitive information to Armenia. Human rights organizations have suggested that these charges stem from Samadov’s research on the use of military forces in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.[22] Samadov’s family and lawyer deny all charges. In a closed-door trial on June 23, 2025, the court sentenced Samadov to 15 years in prison for “high treason.”[23]
Bangladesh
In Bangladesh, nationwide student protests that broke out in July 2024 had a dramatic effect on the higher education landscape. Bangladesh’s government met the protests with what the United Nations Office for the High Commissioner of Human Rights called “brutal, systematic repression,” leading to thousands of injuries and deaths of up to 1,400 people between July 15 and August 5, 2024. The UN attributed much of the violence to gunshot wounds by Bangladesh’s security forces. While university students led the protests, it was not clear what percentage of those killed were students.[24] Despite the violent landscape, the AFi found that academic freedom improved slightly in Bangladesh in comparison to previous years, although university autonomy did not improve and freedom of academic exchange decreased, reflecting a mixed picture overall.
Figure 6: While in 2024 the AFi rated Bangladesh as “severely restricted” (0.21) with respect to academic freedom, its score was slightly higher than in 2023.
Figure 7: Academic freedom increased in Bangladesh primarily with respect to campus integrity.
The spark for the protests was a June 2024 ruling by Bangladesh’s high court, which reinstated a quota system for government jobs. Prior to 2018, over 50 percent of government jobs were reserved for particular groups, including 30 percent which were reserved for descendants of those who had fought in the country’s 1971 War of Independence from Pakistan. In 2018, students mobilized against the quota system, leading to its abolition. In June 2024, however, the high court ruled that the cancellation of the quota system was illegal, prompting new nationwide protests led by university students.[25]
The protests were initially peaceful. On July 14, however, Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s prime minister at the time, publicly called the protesters “razakars,” a slur used for those who collaborated with Pakistan’s army during the 1971 independence war (roughly equivalent to “traitors”).[26] Her comments appeared to embolden the pro-government Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL) – the student wing of the Awami League, which on July 15 began attacking antiquota student protesters at and around Dhaka University. (As consistently documented in SAR’s AFMP, the BCL has been responsible for much of the violence on university campuses in Bangladesh.[27] To a large extent this violence has occurred with impunity.[28]) Police aided the BCL, firing teargas and rubber bullets to disperse the protesters. Over 100 students were injured.[29] Later that evening, BCL members attacked a group of students demonstrating at Jahangirnagar University, also in Dhaka. Around 70 students were injured.[30] In response, Bangladesh’s University Grants Commission closed all of the country’s public and private universities and colleges.[31]
In the days that followed, protests continued, and violence escalated. According to an Amnesty International analysis, police used unlawful force against student protesters.[32] At least six students were killed.[33] Among these was Abu Sayed, a student and antiquota movement organizer studying English at Begum Rokeya University. On July 16, at least two police officers fired at Sayed from close range using birdshot—an extremely dangerous and inaccurate form of ammunition designed for hunting—despite the fact that “Sayed posed no apparent physical threat.”[34] Two days later, on July 18, police officers shot Shykh Aashhabul Yamin, a student at the Military Institute of Science and Technology, before loading him onto the top of an armored personnel carrier and driving him down the road, injured and unconscious. Afterward, they pulled him off the vehicle and tossed his body over the road’s median barriers before driving away. He later died from his injuries.[35]
The deaths sparked a series of “absentee funerals” in the days that followed. In response, Bangladeshi authorities implemented an internet blackout and countrywide curfew and deployed military troops across the country.[36] Police and BCL members continued to attack student gatherings using lethal force, including assault rifles, grenade launchers, and gunfire from police helicopters.[37] On July 18, students gathered on the campus of BRAC University to give funeral prayers for those recently killed. Police fired rubber bullets and teargas at the students. As news of the events at BRAC University spread, students from nearby colleges joined the protests. Some students threw bricks and stones at police, who fired indiscriminately at students. Around 30 people were injured. Dhaka Imperial College student Zillur Sheikh was killed by police.[38]
As protests continued, Bangladeshi authorities opened investigations against tens of thousands of people, arresting more than 10,000 in what some termed a witch hunt.[39] Among those arrested were student leaders, including Nur Nabi,[40] Asif Mahmud,[41] Abu Bakar Majumder,[42] and Nahid Islam.[43] Some students were arrested repeatedly. Police initially abducted Asif Mahmud and Abu Bakar Majumder on July 19, holding them both for four days before releasing them and leaving them blindfolded near a city road. Both student leaders were admitted to Gonoshasthaya Nagar Hospital for treatment, but were again abducted from the hospital on July 26.[44] Students reported ill-treatment;[45] e.g., Nur Nabi described being blindfolded, stripped, and subjected to torture while in police custody.
On July 21, Bangladesh’s high court responded to the protests by abolishing most quotas for civil service jobs. On July 23, the government issued a directive for 9 percent of civil service jobs to be filled based on merit rather than reserved for particular groups. Internet service was restored, and universities reopened. Nevertheless, student leaders announced that they would continue to protest, demanding justice for those killed and injured in the previous weeks.[46]
Protests continued, with police forcibly dispersing protests and detaining students,[47] until August 5, when Bangladesh’s prime minister Sheikh Hasina announced her resignation.[48] An interim government was formed, headed by Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus. Prominent student leaders, including Nahid Islam and Asif Mahmud, were given cabinet positions in the new government.[49]
Despite democratic reforms, tensions continued. Widespread reprisal violence occurred against Awami League supporters, religious minorities, and police. Security forces again used arbitrary arrests and mass criminal complaints, but at this point mostly against those supportive of the Awami League and prior regime.[50] On October 23, the interim government banned the BCL.[51] On campuses, those affiliated with the BCL found themselves at risk of retributive violence and imprisonment.[52] On September 18, a group of Jahangirnagar University students beat to death Shamim Ahmed, a BCL leader claiming that he had been a leader of the attack that occurred at the university on July 15.[53]
Politics on campus was divisive,[54] with clashes breaking out as different student groups vied for power. On November 21, members of Jatiyabadi Chatra Dal (JCD), the student wing of the Bangladesh National Party, and Islami Chhatra Shibir (Shibir), the student wing of Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, clashed at Chattogram Polytechnic College after the college’s administration released a list of students assigned to rooms in a student hostel. Students at the college had previously demanded that rooms be allocated equally so that no single group would be able to exert control over the hostel and were apparently dissatisfied with the administration’s allocation. The clash injured several students and caused damage to college buildings.[55] Likewise, on January 12, 2024, members of the antidiscrimination student movement, the JCD, and the former BCL clashed at Ananda Mohan College. Earlier in the day, BCL members carrying large wooden sticks gathered on campus to express their dissatisfaction that the college principal, Professor Md Aman Ullah, was meeting with JDC members to discuss dormitory fees. BCL members engaged in a clash with the students. At least 20 were injured.[56]
Belarus
Since the 2020 presidential election in Belarus, Belarusian authorities have escalated repression against protestors, students, and scholars, including through imprisonment, prosecution, expulsions, and firings. According to the AFi, academic freedom declined precipitously in 2020 and remained extremely low after that point. Belarus’s involvement in Russia’s war in Ukraine has resulted in further repression against the higher education sector.[57]
Figure 8: In 2024, the AFi rated Belarus as “completely restricted” with respect to academic freedom. Its score of 0.04 made it one of the 10 percent of countries with the lowest levels of academic freedom.
Figure 9: According to the AFi, academic freedom declined with respect to all indicators from 2019 to 2020 and remained low after that point.
From 2024-2025, university autonomy was extremely restricted in Belarus. The Belarusian government either directly appointed in public universities, or controlled in private universities, key administrative positions including rectors.[58] University administrations included a “deputy rector for security” position, to which members of the intelligence services (KGB) were appointed.[59] Universities also functioned as centers for militarization and political indoctrination; for example, through a required course on “The History of Belarusian Statehood,” which was introduced in 2022.
In addition, the ability of Belarusian scholars to travel abroad for conferences was severely constrained. Scholars working in state universities were required to obtain official permission from the administrations of their universities to travel abroad for conference, lectures, or other events.[60] Likewise, Belarusian students who wished to study abroad were required to obtain government permission after navigating significant administrative obstacles.[61]
The repressive environment in Belarus made it difficult to report on attacks on higher education in the country, particularly the precise number of students and scholars who had been imprisoned or dismissed between 2020 and the reporting period.[62] Many of those affected avoided making information about their status known for fear of reprisals.[63] Nevertheless, there was enough information to suggest that imprisonments and prosecutions of students and scholars were widespread. Imprisoned students like Marfa Rabkova, a third-year student at the International Law and European Union Law program at European Humanities University (EHU) at the time of her arrest, received lengthy prison sentences. In 2022, Rabkova was sentenced to 15 years in prison.[64] Moreover, even official statistics tracked a declining number of university staff and students after 2020—a trend that may have been partially shaped by demographic factors, but which was also likely linked to state repression.[65]
Authorities used criminal law to silence dissent by members of the higher education community, frequently bringing false accusations or pursuing disproportionate charges of defamation, disturbing public order, or extremism. By 2025, the official historical narrative of the Belarusian state had been enshrined into law, empowering authorities to prosecute publishing houses and media outlets that contradict it.[66]
Extremism charges were used against several scholars prosecuted in 2024-2025. On July 1, 2024, the Minsk Regional Court sentenced 20 intellectuals living in exile abroad—including scholars, political analysts, and experts—to between 10 and 11.5 years in prison on spurious charges related to extremism and endangering national security. The Belarusian government arbitrarily referred to the group as “Tsikhanouskaya’s Analysts.” Those convicted include several who worked in the office of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, a Belarusian politician in exile who ran against President Alexander Lukashenko during the 2020 presidential election and led the political opposition to Lukashenko’s government after the election. However, the group also included independent scholars and intellectuals unaffiliated with Tsikhanouskaya.[67]
Likewise, on September 13, 2024, the Minsk prosecutor’s office announced that a historian at Belarusian State Medical University had been convicted and sentenced to four years in prison for “facilitating extremist activities.” The charges apparently stemmed from an interview he gave two years earlier to Euroradio, an independent Belarusian news organization with offices in both Poland and Belarus. Euroradio itself was designated an extremist organization, but only after the interview.[68]
China & Hong Kong
As in recent years, the 2024 AFi rated China as “completely restricted” and Hong Kong as “severely restricted.” Rights groups and media reported that the Chinese government exerted political and ideological control over universities, including through surveillance cameras installed in classrooms, the use of student informants, and the appointment of top university officials.[69] There were indications that China sought to expand its international influence through higher education, including by expanding international exchange[70] and transnational repression of Chinese scholars and students abroad.[71] The status and whereabouts of imprisoned scholars, including Rahile Dawut,[72] Ilham Tohti,[73] Tashpolat Tiyip,[74] and Abdulqadir Jalaleddin,[75] was unknown. In Hong Kong, Human Rights Watch issued a report in September 2024 showing that academic freedom had significantly declined since the passage of the National Security Law in 2020 (see Free to Think 2024 for more details on the law).[76] The law particularly affected political science departments, where self-censorship was reportedly prevalent.[77] Conditions such as censorship, including a restrictive media environment, made tracking and verifying reports of attacks on higher education particularly challenging in both Hong Kong and China.
Figure 10: According to the AFi, academic freedom was “completely restricted” in China (0.07) and “severely restricted” Hong Kong (0.24) in 2024.
Colombia
As in recent years, Colombian universities were affected by protests, clashes, and acts of vandalism. While academic freedom is generally respected in Colombia,[78] the country’s score on the AFi declined slightly from 2023 to 2024, particularly with respect to academic exchange and dissemination and the freedom of academic and cultural expression.
Figure 11: In 2024, the AFi rated Colombia as “moderately restricted” (0.59) with respect to academic freedom.
Figure 12: From 2023 to 2024, academic freedom declined in Colombia primarily with respect to academic exchange and dissemination and the freedom of academic and cultural expression.
From 2023 to 2024, groups of unidentified individuals disrupted university operations or vandalized university property on several occasions. On September 13, 2024, a group of hooded individuals vandalized building facades at the University of Antioquia while protesting the university’s budget deficit.[79] On September 26, 2024, a group of hooded individuals vandalized the rector’s office at the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca University.[80]
In other cases, clashes between police and hooded protesters occurred at the gates of Colombian universities, disrupting students’ access. On December 10, 2024, a group of hooded individuals clashed with police outside of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. During the clash, the group forcibly entered a university building where a graduation ceremony was taking place. There were no reports of injuries.[81] On March 27, 2025, a group of hooded individuals, who were reported to be students demanding increased investments in education and improvements to university infrastructure, threw homemade explosives at police near the gates of the National Pedagogical University, prompting clashes. Police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse the protesters.[82] On April 30, 2025, hooded protesters threw explosives at police from inside the gates of the University of Antioquia. Police responded with water cannons. The university temporarily suspended campus operations because of the unrest.[83] A very similar incident occurred, also at the University of Antioquia, on June 6, 2025, prompting the university to suspend campus operations for the day.[84]
Georgia
In Georgia, university students played a central role in nationwide protests against the pro-Russia, Georgian Dream-led government. While university administrations were largely supportive of student protesters, in recent years, Georgia’s government has increasingly taken actions to restrict university autonomy. These actions are reflected in Georgia’s AFi score, which has progressively declined since 2020, with the pace of decline appearing to accelerate from 2023 to 2024.
Figure 13: While the AFi rated Georgia as “mostly free” (0.73) in 2024, it also noted a statistically significant decline in the country’s level of academic freedom from 2014 to 2024.
Figure 14: Academic freedom has declined in Georgia with respect to all five indicators included in the AFi.
Beginning in the spring of 2024 through the reporting period, nationwide protests took place in Georgia. University students played a leading role in these movements.[85] From May through August, the prospect of a new “foreign agents” law sparked protests among students and other young people across the country.[86] Modeled after a Russian regulation, the law required that NGOs receiving 20 percent or more of their funding from sources abroad register with the government as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power.” The law was enacted on August 1, 2024. It was broadly viewed as intended to limit dissent prior to Georgia’s parliamentary l elections in October 2024.[87]
After the Georgia Dream party won in October, university students and other young people again took to the streets.[88] In November 2024, they protested against Georgia’s Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhize suspending negotiations for membership in the European Union. Students at Batumi Shota Rustaveli State University (TAFU) began a sit-in and strike,[89] inspiring strikes on at least seven other university campuses across the country.[90] Mass protests continued during the months that followed.[91] The sit-in at TAFU lasted for more than 80 days, with police raiding the building three times before it came to an end.[92]
Police responded to the protests with force, arresting protesters. Dozens of students reportedly face prosecution for their participation in protests, both in public spaces and on university grounds.[93] While university administrations were largely supportive of student protesters, in some cases, universities worked closely with police. On November 19, 2024, police dismantled a student encampment and used pepper spray and water cannons to forcibly disperse students protesting at Tbilisi State University (TSU). At least 16 people were arrested and two injured.[94] TSU’s rector reportedly allowed police to use university facilities as a base during the operation.[95]
Against the backdrop of student protests, the Georgian government took actions to limit university autonomy and coerce universities into compliance. In recent years, according to experts, it has become increasingly clear that government authorities informally nominate rectors of universities.[96] More specifically, observers attributed the Ministry of Education’s decision to withhold full accreditation from Ilia State University, despite the university’s positive evaluation, to students’ and staff members’ protests. The university was granted accreditation contingent on monitoring after one year.[97] Likewise, the government’s decision to form a new commission on university reform—announced in January 2025 by Prime Minister Kobakhidze, together with the education minister and education and science advisers—was viewed as cover for a government crackdown on universities.[98]
Germany
While academic freedom remained high in Germany, it declined gradually from 2014 to 2024. The AFi scored the country as “mostly free” in 2024 but simultaneously noted that its score was significantly lower than it had been 10 years prior.
Figure 15: The AFi rated Germany as “mostly free” in 2024. This contrasts from 2022, when the Index rated Germany as “completely free.”
Figure 16: In Germany, declines in academic freedom appear to have occurred in the areas of the freedom of academic and cultural expression and the freedom to research and teach.
In recent years, factors contributing to a more restricted environment for academic freedom in Germany have included controversies over how universities handled pro-Palestinian protests that occurred during the 2023-2024 academic year and a funding scandal that occurred in June and July 2024.[99] The funding scandal took place after the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) called for an investigation into whether a letter signed by more than 1,000 university professors could be grounds for disciplinary action under either civil service code or criminal law, and whether the signatories’ research funding could be cut. (The professors’ letter called on administrators of universities in Berlin to refrain from calling the police against or criminally prosecuting their own students. It is described in more detail in Free to Think 2024.)
According to data from the AFi, restrictions on academic freedom in Germany appear to be linked to the freedom of academic and cultural expression and the freedom to research and teach. SAR’s AFMP confirmed this: during the current reporting period, the incidents included in the AFMP that took place in Germany included several cases of universities choosing to cancel previously approved events in the face of public pressure and negative media campaigns. On December 1, 2024, the University of Leipzig canceled a lecture by Israeli historian Benny Morris, an emeritus professor of history at Ben Gurion University. The cancellation came following pressure from student groups arguing that Morris had expressed racist views on Palestinians. The university chose to cancel the lecture, pointing to security concerns.[100] Likewise, in January and February 2024, two universities—Ludwig Maximilian University[101] and Free University of Berlin (FUB)[102]—canceled lectures by Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, who is also an international human rights lawyer. The FUB event was also planned to feature remarks from Eyal Weizman, the director of the research agency Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London . Weizman is also Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures. The cancellation came following a negative media campaign and public pressure from German officials.
Concerns about academic freedom mounted in February 2025, when the far-right populist party Alternative for Germany became—and remains as of this writing—the second largest party in the country’s parliament.[103] The party has called for mass deportations of immigrants, raising concerns among international students, and for the closure of gender studies departments.[104]
India
In India, the central government, led by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), took actions to extend its authority over the country’s system of higher education, undermining university autonomy.[105] University administrators made decisions that chilled speech on campus, including firing faculty members and developing and implementing new policies restricting the space for student expression. According to the AFi, academic freedom was “completely restricted” in 2024.
Figure 17: India’s 2024 score on the AFi was “completely restricted” (0.16).
Figure 18: Since 2022, greater restrictions on the freedom to research and teach appear to have driven declines in India’s score on the AFi.
India’s central government vied for control over universities in states governed by opposition-led governments. Among the actions that the central government took was to implement reforms to the University Grants Commission (UGC). While originally created to ensure higher education standards, over time the central government has increasingly used it as a tool for exerting political influence.[106] For instance, in January 2025, the UGC introduced new regulations that would allow for non-academics to become university vice-chancellors. The regulations were framed as a way to clarify the vice-chancellor appointment process, including by allowing for their selection by a committee made up of “impartial statutory bodies.” However, observers interpreted these changes as enabling the central government to circumvent state government recommendations for the appointment of vice chancellors and to allow for the BJP government to appoint ideologically aligned individuals.[107]
Some states pushed back against these reforms, causing universities to be caught up in political battles.[108] In a battle described in Free to Think 2024, the Kerala state government sought to pass an amendment to expand the authority of the pro-chancellor over higher education. The state’s governor, a BJP appointee, was the chancellor of the state universities, while the pro-chancellor was the opposition-affiliated state minister of higher education.
The Indian government also used funding to extend its control over universities, such as the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). Beginning in 2023, the UGC provided more than 50 percent of the university’s funding. The memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed between the UGC and TISS gave the UGC the authority to appoint the vice-chancellor and pro-vice-chancellor of the institute. After the MOU was signed, TISS’s administration more frequently made academic decisions without faculty consultation, and faculty reported feeling more hesitant to express themselves freely.[109]
The reporting period also saw efforts to restrict academic discourse, suppress dissent, and prevent criticism of India’s government. On July 31, 2024, Sasanka Perera, a professor of sociology at SAU and previously its vice president and dean, resigned from his position at the university. His resignation came after SAU’s administration opened an investigation into a PhD student who included in his dissertation proposal a quote by linguist Noam Chomsky that criticized Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and the BJP party.[110] In September 2024, it was reported that three scientists had been dropped from the final stage of selection for the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar, a national award for scientific research, apparently because they had been critical of government policies.[111]
A growing number of universities across India put in place new policies that limited student expression. These policies mirrored actions taken by Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and South Asian University (SAU) in 2023, as previously reported in Free to Think 2024. As of September 2024, Tata Institute of Social Science (TISS) began asking students to sign a revised honor code that bars participation in demonstrations deemed “anti-establishment.” The honor code asks students to commit that they will not “indulge in any political, anti-establishment, unpatriotic discussions, demonstrations, dharna or any form of activities that disturbs the academic environment of the institute.” Students who do not follow the honor code risk penalties that include expulsion.[112] Also in September 2024, Mumbai University issued a circular banning students from holding meetings, protests, hunger strikes, rallies, and other gatherings without prior approval.[113] Likewise, in December 2024, Jamia Millia Islamia issued a directive banning all student demonstrations, sit-ins, and sloganeering without prior permission. The directive came after a protest that was critical of the Indian government and followed a prior directive issued in 2022 that banned unauthorized protests on campus.[114] Osmania University in Telangana state issued a similar circular in March 2025 threatening legal action against anyone who participated in protests and the raising of slogans on campus.[115]
Some universities suspended students in connection with their participation in acts of protest. On August 21, 2024, Delhi University (DU) temporarily suspended Jyoti Karki, a Master’s student in the Department of Slavonic and Finno-Ugrian Studies and member of the student activist group Disha Student Organization (DSO), after she wrote slogans on a campus wall.[116] Karki’s suspension took place amid widespread student protests against India’s National Testing Agency after material was leaked for both the national entrance exam for medical education and the exam for entry-level teaching jobs in universities and admissions to PhD programs.[117] Karki and her DSO colleagues had observed that the wall where DU permitted slogans to be written was full and, therefore, chose to write the protest slogans on another wall. On September 30, Karki appealed to the Delhi High Court, arguing that her suspension was “arbitrary and illegal” as the university did not follow due process and did not issue a show-cause notice allowing Karki to defend her case. On November 25, the High Court stayed Karki’s suspension.
Police repeatedly used force or detained students for exercising their rights to freedom of expression and assembly through peaceful protests. On July 18, 2024, police beat members of the National Students’ Union of India who were protesting at Rajasthan University to demand student union elections. Two students reportedly sustained minor injuries and eighteen students were detained.[118] This was followed by a second protest that took place at Rajasthan University, also calling for student union elections, during which 25 students were detained.[119] On March 30, 2025, police forcibly detained 52 students peacefully protesting the Telangana state government’s plans to develop a 400-acre tract of forest land in the Kancha Gachibowli area, located next to the University of Hyderabad. Videos showed police dragging and pushing students into police vehicles. Most students were released later that evening.[120] Three days later, at least 20 University of Hyderabad students were injured when police used batons to disperse students and faculty protesting the same government plans.[121] On April 11, 2025, Ambedekar University guards and Delhi police used physical force, including batons, to disperse members of the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) who were peacefully protesting harassment and bullying on campus. The university later suspended five students for allegedly attempting to assault the university’s vice-chancellor, obstructing the police, and putting university officials at risk during the protest. SFI denied the accusations.[122]
As in previous years, political struggles played out on campus—often violently—as students from opposing groups attacked scholars and each other. On March 11, 2025, members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), which, over the years, has frequently been responsible for acts of violence on campus, clashed with members of SFI at Himachal Pradesh University using rods, knives, and sickles. At least seven students were injured. It was not clear what had sparked the clash, but it followed several weeks of escalating violence between the two groups on campus.[123] On May 24, 2025, members of ABVP clashed with members of several other student groups who were participating in a Palestinian solidarity protest at Delhi University.
Finally, Indian higher education was also affected by violence related to armed conflict. At the end of April 2025, gunmen killed 26 tourists and one local resident of Kashmir’s Pahalgam Valley, leading India to engage in a military response and an exchange of fire between India and Pakistan after India accused the Pakistani government of indirectly supporting the attack.[124] As tensions escalated, Kashmiri students studying across India reportedly faced threats, harassment, and assault, with some deciding to return home to Kashmir.[125] Against this backdrop, Delhi University received criticism for issuing a directive asking Kashmiri students to submit their personal details to the university. While the university framed the directive as an initiative to keep those students safe, the Jammu and Kashmir Students Association (JKSA) argued that it was discriminatory.[126]
In the weeks that followed, students and scholars who spoke critically of India’s actions in response to the Pahalgam faced arrests by police or disciplinary action from their universities. On May 9, 2025, police arrested a second-year student at Singhad Academy of Engineering and filed a First Information Report against her after she shared an Instagram story critical of India’s military action. The university also suspended the student, claiming that she had brought “disrepute” to the university and harbored “anti-national sentiments,” posing a “risk to the campus community and society.” On May 27, the Bombay High Court strongly rebuked both the college and the police. It was not clear whether any further disciplinary or legal actions followed.[127] On May 18, 2025, police arrested Ali Khan Mahmudabad, an associate professor with the Department of Political Science at Ashoka University, based on a complaint that a youth member of the BJP filed against him for social media posts relating to India’s military action against Pakistan. Mahmudabad was accused of endangering national security and promoting enmity. On May 21, India’s Supreme Court ordered that police release Mahmudabad on bail. At the time of writing, Mahmudabad was still under police investigation.[128]
Iran
Academic freedom has been under continuous pressure in Iran for decades. However, the situation deteriorated significantly after the death of Mahsa (Zhina) Amini while in custody of Iran’s “morality police.” Her death ignited the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement, which was met with escalating repression targeting students, faculty, and universities, as documented in Free to Think 2023 and 2024. According to the AFi, in 2024, Iran was a “completely restricted environment with respect to academic freedom.
Figure 19: In 2024, the AFi rated Iran as “completely restricted” (0.14)
Figure 20: According to the AFi, academic freedom was particularly restricted in Iran with respect to campus integrity—likely due to the increased presence of security forces on campus following the implementation of more stringent hijab regulations in April 2024.
In June 2024, following Iran’s presidential election, the country’s leadership made promises to restore a degree of university autonomy and to review the cases of suspended students and dismissed faculty. These promises went unfulfilled. According to the UN, state repression intensified rather than eased. Women continue to face surveillance, physical violence, and increasingly harsh penalties for refusing to comply with mandatory hijab laws. The academic community remains one of the main targets of this ongoing crackdown.[129]
The situation of students and academics imprisoned in Iran continues to be grave. Swedish-Iranian academic Ahmadreza Djalali remains in prison under a death sentence since 2016. Even as concerns mounted that Djalali’s execution was imminent, his health deteriorated significantly.[130] On May 8, 2025, Djalali suffered a heart attack. He was transferred to the prison hospital but was initially denied proper medical care, apparently because it occurred on the weekend.[131] On June 23, 2025, amid 12 days of armed conflict between Israel and Iran (see below for more details), Iranian authorities transferred Djalali to an undisclosed location; rights groups expressed fears that the move indicated his imminent execution.[132] At the time of writing, Djalali’s location remained unknown.[133]
Following the death of former Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in May 2024, Iran elected a new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, in July 2024. Pezeshkian’s election prompted hopes that Iranians would see a greater degree of human rights, including academic freedom. Pezeshkian had campaigned stating that he would refrain from imposing headscarf regulations by force, and from the use of force against university protesters.[134] Any hopes that observers had for openings under Pezeshkian, however, were quickly quelled after he nominated Hossein Simayi Sarraf as Minister of Science, Research, and Technology. Sarraf had been tied to Iran’s conservative establishment and had previously been involved in enforcing ideological conformity in the country’s universities. Sarraf’s appointment was interpreted as an indication that the Iranian government would continue to limit the space for dissent within universities—a prediction that proved accurate.[135] In the leadup to the 2024-25 academic year, students, faculty, and others called for Pezeshkian to fulfill his campaign promises to reinstate students and scholars who had been dismissed for participating in the Women, Life, Freedom movement. As of this writing, the reinstatements have not occurred.[136]
Against this backdrop, observers raised concerns about brain drain weakening Iranian universities. At the end of 2024, Iranian officials revealed that, in recent years, 25 percent of university faculty had left their positions, either because they had left the education sector or emigrated from the country. While Iranian authorities have primarily attributed the flight of Iranian academics to economic issues (including the impact of international sanctions relating to government policies), others have pointed out that political repression is an equally significant factor.[137]
Beginning in the spring of 2024, Iran’s university campuses saw an increased number of police forces, members of the Basij, and plainclothes officers, placed there in order to enforce more stringent hijab regulations passed in April of that year. On November 3, 2024, Iranian security forces assaulted Ahoo Daryaei, a student in the science and research department at Islamic Azad University in Tehran. According to a student witness, the security guards grabbed Daryaei after they saw her without the required hijab. The officers began to beat her and pulled her by her clothing toward a security post near the university’s entrance, ripping her top in the process. Daryaei responded by screaming “shameless,” and stripping off her clothing. As Daryaei left the university, plainclothes police officers grabbed her and forced her into a car, causing her to hit her head in the process. Following her arrest, Iranian state media sought to discredit Daryaei, announcing that she had a “mental disorder” and that she was being taken to a facility for treatment. To date, no updates have been provided regarding Daryaei’s situation. According to rights groups, the government often uses the pretext of “mental disorders” to justify its crackdown on dissenters.[138]
In February 2025, protests broke out at the University of Tehran after robbers shot and killed an undergraduate student, Amir Mohammad Khaleghi, near the university dormitory. Students demanded that university officials do more to ensure their safety on campus. Police responded to the protests with arrests and force. At least four students were arrested, and one student reported a broken nose from police violence.[139]
On June 13, 2025, Israel launched military strikes on Iran, ostensibly aimed at degrading or eliminating Iran’s nuclear program. That same day, Iran retaliated with strikes on targets inside Israel, leading to twelve days of armed conflict between the two countries. The violence disrupted higher education and research, both in Iran and in Israel.[140] In Iran, airstrikes damaged university infrastructure and reportedly killed students. According to media reports, Israel assassinated at least 11 Iranian nuclear scientists.[141] Universities suspended classes, evacuated student dormitories, and postponed final examinations until September.[142] International students, including refugees from Afghanistan, fled the country.[143] As the violence escalated, Iran began to crackdown on members of the opposition, arresting hundreds and accusing them of spying for Israel and carrying out more frequent executions of prisoners.[144] Student activists were among those arrested. On June 14, 2025, Iranian police arrested Motahareh Goonehi (also written Goonei), a student activist who had previously been barred from continuing her studies at Tehran University of Medical Sciences, in retaliation for a social media post that she made criticizing the Iranian government’s response to Israeli airstrikes. Goonehi, who had completed a one-year prison sentence in March 2025 after being arrested for her activism, was taken to an unknown location.[145] On June 15, 2025, Iranian police arrested Mostafa Mehr Ayeen, an assistant professor of sociology at the Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies in Tehran. Ayeen had published an open letter demanding an end to the war, calling for dialogue and for the resignation of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. At the time of writing, Ayeen was being held in Evin Prison in Tehran.[146]
Myanmar
February 1, 2025, marked four years since a military coup sparked a civil war between the governing military junta and groups associated with the People’s Defense Forces in Myanmar. According to the AFi, academic freedom was “completely restricted” in the country in 2024. Media reports indicated that by the current reporting period, the country’s higher education sector had undergone significant change. Many students and scholars had either left the country or had transferred to independent higher education institutions run by the oppositional National Unity Government.[147] There were also reports indicating that armed forces and armed groups used university campuses as military bases and that armed combat affected those campuses. For example, on August 7, 2024, military junta forces occupied the University of Technology’s Yatanarpon Cyber City campus. Students and professors fled in advance of the occupation, after the military dropped leaflets warning them that it would happen.[148] However, the ongoing armed conflict made it challenging to verify information.
Figure 21: Academic freedom was “completely restricted” (0.03) in Myanmar in 2024, according to the AFi.
Nicaragua
By the 2024-25 reporting period, Nicaragua’s government had essentially eliminated academic freedom and university autonomy. In November 2024, the three-person Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua, appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, reported extensive human rights violations against university faculty and students, including threats, beating, arbitrary detentions, and prolonged solitary confinement. According to the report, the government had closed universities that had previously been centers of dissent and instituted stronger mechanisms of political control at those universities that remained open.[149] According to the 2025 update to the AFi, Nicaragua ranked lowest among all countries where academic freedom is “completely restricted.”[150]
Figure 22: Academic freedom was essentially nonexistent in Nicaragua in 2024-25. The AFi rated it as “completely restricted;” its score of 0.02, ranked it as the least free country globally with respect to academic freedom.
Nigeria
In Nigeria, the portions of the higher education sector faced insecurity despite a relatively high level of academic freedom nationwide; the AFi rated Nigeria as “fully free” in 2024. Small non-state armed groups opportunistically targeted university students and instructors in the country’s north and northeast, demanding ransom for their release.
Figure 23: The AFi rated Nigeria as “fully free” (0.86) in 2024.
Figure 24: The picture for academic freedom is complex in Nigeria, according to the AFi. Whereas some indicators point to an expansion of academic freedom (i.e., in the areas of freedom of academic and cultural expression and institutional autonomy), others point to a contraction (i.e., in the areas of freedom to research and teach, freedom of academic exchange and dissemination, and campus integrity).
As in previous years, opportunistic abductions of university students by criminals and armed groups took place, notably in northern Nigerian states. Sources have frequently described groups of “bandits” kidnapping students and staff in pursuit of ransom. For example, on July 11, 2024, unknown gunmen abducted three staff members including the acting rector from Benue State Polytechnic’s Ugbokolo campus as the group was returning to the university after a trip to the capital.[151] At the time of writing, it was not clear what had happened to the abducted staff members. On August 15, 2024, unknown gunmen abducted 20 University of Jos and University of Maiduguri medical students, along with a doctor accompanying them, as they were en route to the Federation of Catholic Medical and Dental Students’ annual convention in Benue State; one week later, the students and the doctor were released.[152] Also on August 15, unknown armed gunmen abducted five Enugu State College of Health Technology students as they were leaving the college; three students remained missing at the time of writing.[153] On February 25, 2025, a group of fived armed individuals kidnapped four Joseph Sarwan Tarka University, Makurdi students, all women, while they were on their way to a lecture hall on campus.[154] At the time of writing, the women remained missing. On March 2, 2025, unknown gunmen kidnapped four Federal University Dutsin-Ma (FUDM) students from their private hostel behind the campus;[155] two weeks later, unknown gunmen kidnapped two other FUDM students from their private hostel near the campus.[156] What had happened to the students was not known at the time of writing.
University students protested in demand of increased security; police frequently responded with force. For example, on March 17, 2025, police fired tear gas at students from Akwa Ibom State Polytechnic who were protesting on campus against insecurity in the region.[157] Police violence was prevalent enough that some students reported that they had stopped participating in protests because they were afraid of being attacked by security officials.[158] Some student leaders called for the creation of a police-student relationship committee to address allegations of police brutality, harassment, and extortion.[159]
Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT)
Palestinian students, scholars, and universities faced extreme challenges in the context of Israel’s ongoing military action in Gaza and raids in the West Bank.[160] By 2024-25, Gaza’s higher education infrastructure had been largely destroyed.[161] In the West Bank, there were frequent reports of raids at universities, arrests and detentions of students, faculty and staff, and significant movement restrictions that blocked access to university campuses.[162] Information on specific incidents was challenging to verify for several reasons, including the ongoing conflict and restrictions on the media landscape. Academic freedom was severely impacted across the OPT. In 2022, the AFi rated the West Bank as “mostly free” and Gaza as “severely restricted.” In 2024, the West Bank was categorized as “severely restricted,” while Gaza was categorized as “completely restricted.”
Pakistan
In Pakistan, scholars and university students, particularly Baloch scholars and students, faced attacks on their academic freedom and freedom of expression that have imperiled their lives and livelihoods. These included violent attacks, abduction, disciplinary action, and violence between student groups. According to the AFi, academic freedom dropped from “moderately restricted” in 2022 to “severely restricted” in 2024.
Figure 26: According to the AFi, academic freedom has declined in Pakistan over the past two years, falling from “moderately restricted” (0.55) in 2022 to “severely restricted” (0.35) in 2024.
Figure 27: Data from the AFi shows that the greatest declines in academic freedom in Pakistan are in the areas of the freedom of academic exchange and dissemination and institutional autonomy.
During 2024, there were multiple cases in which unidentified attackers threatened to kill university personnel or destroy higher education infrastructure. On September 9, 2024, unidentified gunmen opened fire on the Gomel University Vice Chancellor Dr. Shakibullah as he was leaving the University of Agriculture in Dera Ismail Khan city, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The reason for the attack was unclear, but violence targeting public figures, including academics, increased in the northwest region of Pakistan in 2024.[163]
Baloch students and scholars were particularly at risk during the reporting period. On February 2, 2025, unidentified attackers shot and killed Allah Dad Baloch, a MPhil scholar at Quaid-e-Azam University and Baloch intellectual, in an attack that appeared to be targeted. Allah Dad was known for working to promote Baloch history, culture, and national identity through his writing and translation work. He was shot multiple times while sitting at a hotel, drinking tea with a friend; his friend was not shot.[164]
The AFMP verified reports involving the disappearances of at least 25 Baloch students. On October 10, 2024, members of Pakistan’s armed forces abducted three Baloch students studying at Punjab University, Superior University Lahore, and the University of Lahore from their university hostels.[165] Less than a week later, on October 16, 2024, nine Baloch university students were abducted. Eight of them disappeared from their shared residence in Karachi. Separately, a ninth student studying history at Karachi University was also abducted. At the time of writing, there was no information on their status.[166] On May 29, 2025, Pakistani security forces abducted Mahjabeen Baloch, a Library Science major at the University of Balochistan. At the time of writing, the location of Mahjabeen, who was disabled by polio, remained unknown.[167] Mahjabeen’s brother, Muhammad Younus Baloch, a student at Khuzdar University, was abducted under similar circumstances five days earlier.[168]
In at least one case, a Baloch university student who spoke out against the abductions was disciplined by her university. On August 12, 2024, Punjab University suspended Sadia Baloch, a law student and member of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee, for delivering a speech during a June 10 rally in which she called for the release of an abducted Baloch student. The university alleged that her intervention damaged the reputation of the institution.[169]
In early 2025, Pakistani police conducted a series of raids on book stalls set up by members of the Baloch Student Action Committee (BSAC), a student-led political group founded in 2009 by students from the Balochistan University of Information Technology, Engineering, and Management Sciences. The book stalls were part of the Kitab Karawan, a traveling book campaign aimed at promoting education and literacy in underserved regions of Balochistan. On January 21, 2025, police raided a book stall in Gwadar. They seized the books and arrested several students, accusing them of blocking traffic and of selling books with provocative material.[170] Similar incidents occurred in Taunsa Sharif on January 27 and Dajal on January 29.[171]
A series of student protests took place at Punjab Group of Colleges (PGC) campuses across Punjab province in October 2024, resulting in damage to higher education facilities and the injury or arrest of dozens of students. The protests erupted on October 14 following online reports claiming that a security guard had raped a woman student. That day, anti-riot and other police personnel used batons to disperse protesters, injuring at least 28 students.[172] By October 16, the protests had expanded across the province, leading to the vandalism of college property and clashes between students and police. The violence resulted in the death of a security guard at a PGC campus in Gujarat city.[173] The following day, on October 17, Pakistani police arrested at least 150 students who were protesting in Rawalpindi against the alleged rape. During the protests, police beat students with batons and fired tear gas, and students burned college furniture, looted a university building, and blocked a road.[174]
Clashes between student groups disrupted education on college and university campuses and made the learning environment unwelcoming and unsafe. At Quaid-e-Azam University (QAU), clashes broke out between members of the Punjabi Students Council and the Pakhtun Students Council on two separate occasions in September and October 2024. On September 29, violence erupted after members of the Punjabi Students Council beat Muzammil Marwat, a member of the Pakhtun Students Council, causing head injuries. Following reports of the attack, several dozen members of the Punjabi Students Council gathered at a student hostel with sticks and iron rods. Meanwhile, around 300 students led by the Pakhtun Students Council gathered at the cafeteria, also with sticks and rods, before attacking the hostel where the Punjabi students were gathered. The fight lasted for about 40 minutes before police intervened and de-escalated the situation. At least 25 students were injured.[175] Less than two weeks later, clashes again broke out between the two groups, injuring at least five students.
Russia
Russia’s war in Ukraine put significant pressure on Russian scholars, students, and higher education institutions. As in previous reporting periods, the Russian government increasingly sought to control the content of higher education and to quell dissent within academia, turning university classroom lessons into political echo chambers. The AFi rated the country as “severely restricted.”
Figure 28: According to the AFi, academic freedom was “severely restricted” (0.21) in Russia.
Figure 29: Data from the AFi shows that academic freedom in Russia was most significantly constrained with respect to the freedom of academic and cultural expression.
Russian authorities cracked down on dissent in the country, targeting academics and students alike, particularly those working on sensitive areas. From 2025 to 2025, Russian authorities arrested at least 12 scientists working on hypersonic flight, which is relevant to military missile technology, charging them with treason.[176] The accusations stemmed from alleged leaks of classified information to foreign entities, though specific details surrounding the “treasonous” acts are rarely made public, raising concerns about due process. On September 3, 2024, the Moscow City Court convicted Alexander Shiplyuk, a hypersonic research scientist and director of the Khristianovich Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ITAM) at the Siberian branch, sentencing him to 15 years in prison.[177]
Students were arrested for opposing the war in Ukraine. On February 14, 2025, a Saint Petersburg court sentenced two students from Saint Petersburg State University of Telecommunications (SPbSUT) to five days in jail for shouting pro-Ukrainian slogans on campus.[178] University administrators penalized students and faculty who criticized the Russian government or opposed the war in Ukraine. Between 2017 and 2024, 86 students were expelled and 92 professors dismissed from Russian universities for political reasons; most of these expulsions occurred after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.[179]
As in previous years, the Russian government sought to expand its control over universities. In May 2025, Russia’s parliament adopted a law authorizing the government to set the admissions numbers for state universities and to withhold student loans for disfavored areas of study.[180]
Academic centers and departments with links to the United States or Europe were at risk of closure. The European University in Saint Petersburg announced the closure of the Faculty of Political Science in July 2024.[181] The reasoning behind the closure was not made public; the university had previously been fined in 2023 for having kept books published by organizations that had been designated as “undesirable,” such as the Open Society Institute and the Kennan Institute.[182] Entities registered as undesirable are banned from operating in Russia. First-time violations are typically punished by a fine; the second offense carries up to four years in prison. On June 5, 2025, Russia’s prosecutor general announced the designation of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)—a US-based scholarly society focused on studying the former Soviet countries, Central Asia, and Central and Eastern Europe—as an “undesirable organization.” The reason for the designation was unclear.[183]
Russian scientists reported feeling increasingly isolated from international academic exchange, including conferences and collaborations with scholars from the US and Europe, in part because of sweeping sanctions implemented after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.[184] Russian academics instead sought partnership and opportunities with universities in India, Vietnam, some Latin American countries, and China.[185]
Serbia
In Serbia, nationwide student-led peaceful protests against government corruption became a daily occurrence by the end of January 2025.[186] By March 2025, Serbia’s government had resigned, only to be reconstituted under a new administration that was led by the same party and many of the same ministers, prompting protests to continue.[187] The university sector broadly backed the protest movement: by February 2025, more than 5,000 faculty members had signed an open letter in support of the protests.[188] The upheaval disrupted higher education,[189] and Serbia’s populist government launched a retaliatory assault on higher education that threatened to undermine both academic freedom and university autonomy.[190] In late 2024, as protests were just beginning to gain momentum, the AFi rated Serbia as “mostly free.”
Figure 30: Data from the AFi shows that academic freedom was stable as of 2024—prior to most of the ongoing protests—with the country scoring as “mostly free” (0.76).
Figure 31: Disaggregated data from the AFi shows a more complicated picture. While the freedom of academic and cultural expression declined from 2023 to 2024, institutional autonomy increased. Other indicators of academic freedom were stable.
The protests broke out in November 2024 after the roof of a railway station in the city of Novi Sad collapsed, killing 15 people. Police at first refrained from using violence against protesters; Serbian officials instead mounted a campaign to discredit the university students involved in the protests, including by accusing them of allying with unspecified Western powers to overthrow the government.[191] This appeared to shift in the spring of 2025. On March 15, 2025, police reportedly used a Long-Range Acoustic Device to disperse peaceful demonstrators participating in a student-organized protest. The protest took the form of a silent vigil to commemorate the 15 people killed. Attended by hundreds of thousands of people, it turned out to be the largest in Serbia’s history. More than 3,000 people reported having experienced disorientation, a sense of loss of control, and headaches.[192] In April 2025, the government indicated that it would continue to crack down on higher education when it appointed a new Minister of Education known for opposing the protest movement.[193] In late June 2025, police violence against peaceful student protesters intensified after demonstrators began calling for the dissolution of the parliament. Police responded to demonstrations during the last week of June 2025 by using pepper spray, batons, and shields. Some students were left hospitalized after being beaten by police.[194]
The Serbian government’s efforts to delegitimize university students and scholars involved in the protests triggered public violence targeting students and faculty members. On November 22, 2024, around ten supporters of the Serbian government physically assaulted a group of students who had gathered on the road in front of the University of Arts in Belgrade to commemorate those killed in the Novi Stad railway station collapse. Videos submitted to the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade showed several different individuals repeatedly hitting and pushing students, causing minor injuries to one.[195] On January 16, 2025, a driver drove a car into a group of students protesting on a main road in Belgrade, seriously injuring one student.[196]
Serbian officials dropped or reduced charges against those responsible for violence against student demonstrators. On January 24, 2025, a driver struck a crowd of university student demonstrators with their car during a protest march in Belgrad, injuring two students. The driver was initially charged with attempted aggravated murder, but the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade later reclassified the indictment as aggravated offenses against public safety. The reduced charges meant that the driver was released from prison pending trial.[197] On January 27, 2025, four men used baseball bats to assault two separate groups of university students who were hanging signs for an upcoming demonstration. Several students were injured, including one whose jaw was dislocated. Police arrested the attackers and charged them with “inflicting serious bodily harm” and “violent behavior committed by prior agreement.” However, Serbian President Vučić later pardoned all four. They were released from custody, and the charges were annulled.
The Serbian government took actions that were widely viewed as retaliatory against the universities and faculty members for supporting the protests. As part of the protest movement, students blockaded universities. The Serbian government responded by threatening to defund state universities and by withholding the salaries of professors who supported the protests by refusing to teach.[198]
In March 2025, the government issued a new regulation reducing the amount of time that scholars can spend on research from 20 to just five hours per week.[199] In response, more than 450 professors, teaching assistants, and teaching associates filed a motion with Serbia’s Constitutional Court questioning the legality of the regulation.[200]
The government also threatened university deans and rectors would face criminal liability for their support of the protests.[201] In April 2025, police summoned Vladan Đokić, the rector of the University of Belgrade, to appear at a police station as part of a preliminary investigation into whether he abused his official position by supporting the protests.[202] At the time of writing, no further action had been taken against Đokić.
Sudan
By the 2024-25 reporting period, Sudan’s civil war had brought significant destruction to the country’s higher education sector. University infrastructure had been either destroyed, looted, or occupied by armed groups; for example, University of Gezira was looted on July 23, 2025.[203] The overwhelming majority of faculty and students had been internally displaced or fled the country, bringing higher education to a standstill. While higher education continued to some degree,[204] access was uneven and unstable.[205] Some experts warned that those academics and students who had fled the country might never return.[206] Against the backdrop of the war, the AFi scored the country as “severely restricted” with respect to academic freedom.
Figure 32: Academic freedom was “severely restricted” (0.21) in Sudan in 2024.
Türkiye
The space for academic freedom in Türkiye was extremely limited during the 2024-25 reporting period, with significant restrictions on university autonomy and shrinking space for scholars and students to express dissenting opinions, either inside or outside the academic space. In March 2025, police violently repressed a series of student protests that took place after students objected to the government’s arrest of Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul and the Republican People’s Party’s candidate for the 2028 presidential elections. On March 20, 21, and 27, police used pepper spray, plastic pellets, and water cannons to disperse students protesting at the Middle East Technical University. Twenty students were reportedly detained during the March 27 incident.[207]
Figure 33: According to the AFi, in 2024, Türkiye was “completely restricted” (0.12) and ranked in the bottom 10 percent of countries globally with respect to academic freedom.
Ukraine
The war in Ukraine had a severe impact on Ukraine’s higher education and research institutions. According to the AFi, academic freedom fell from “moderately restricted” in 2023 to “severely restricted” in 2024.
Figure 34: According to the AFi, academic freedom has declined in Ukraine from 2023 to 2024, falling from “moderately restricted” (0.48) to “severely restricted” (0.28).
Figure 35: Data from the AFi shows that Ukraine’s most significant decline in academic freedom from 2023 to 2024 occurred with respect to the freedom of academic exchange and dissemination.
According to a study conducted by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, by mid-2024, more than 33 percent of scientists had either left Ukraine or their professions.[208] In addition, one fifth of the country’s universities and colleges and one third of its research facilities had been damaged or destroyed by early 2025.[209] Even in relatively safe areas of the country, scholars reported that classes were frequently interrupted by air raid sirens and power cuts.[210] Russian airstrikes damaged university buildings on at least 12 separate occasions, including at Sumy State University, Donbas State Pedagogical University, Zaporizhzhia Polytechnic National University, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kharkiv National University of Urban Economy, Dnipro State Medical University, Ivan Puluj Ternopil National Technical University, South Ukrainian National Pedagogical University, and Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute.[211] Some institutions were struck more than once.
Moreover, a study conducted for Vox Ukraine found that since 2014, Russia had seized control of nearly 289 Ukrainian institutions of higher education in the eastern regions of the country, including Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Kherson, and Kharkiv oblasts, as well as Crimea. Among these, 242 have been blocked from carrying out any activities, while 53 were relocated to areas controlled by Russia. In addition to appearing as Russian institutions in international academic publications, these universities began using Russian textbooks, including history books that justify the war in Ukraine.[212]
Amid ongoing war, Ukraine made changes to encourage university students to stay in the country,[213] along with changes to the university curriculum. The Ukrainian government announced in early 2025 that it would mandate basic military training for all university students beginning during the fall 2025 semester, including 90 hours of theoretical study and 210 hours of practical training. Men would be required to take both the theoretical and practical courses, while women would attend practical training upon their request. Students who refuse to take the course will risk expulsion, and failure to complete the course will disqualify students from government jobs that require a higher education degree.[214]
United States
In the United States, the government weakened academic freedom and university autonomy and undermined equitable access to higher education. These efforts were not entirely new: as Free to Think has previously documented, the US has seen significant erosion of academic freedom since 2020, largely because of actions taken by elected officials at the state and local levels. However, the inauguration of President Donald Trump in January 2025 marked a turning point. From January 2025 onwards, the federal government exerted pressure on the US higher education sector through a combination of unilateral executive actions and policy and budgetary measures. Many of these actions were either clearly extralegal or pushed the boundaries of the law, and they appeared to be motivated by either a general animus toward higher education or a more specific hostility to pluralism and activities promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, particularly related to race or gender identity. Even those policy and budgetary measures undertaken through legal channels were extraordinary in that they facilitated the dismantling of the research and knowledge production capabilities of the country. The 2024 AFI update, published in March 2025, highlighted declining levels of academic freedom in the US, and warned that developments since the beginning of 2025 gave “rise to serious concern regarding the future of academic freedom in the United States.”[215]
Figure 36: According to the AFi, academic freedom has declined significantly in the United States since 2020. While in 2019, the AFi rated the United States as “completely free,” (0.19), by 2024, the country was rated as “mostly free” (0.68).
Figure 37: According to the AFi, the biggest declines in academic freedom in the United States have been in the areas of freedom to teach and research, and institutional autonomy. In addition, the freedom of academic and cultural expression saw a significant decline from 2022–2024.
Actions Undermining University Autonomy
Almost immediately upon coming into office in January 2025, the administration issued a series of executive orders and agency actions affecting higher education, with little apparent concern for resulting harm to ongoing research or the American public. These included accelerated civil rights investigations;[216] more than 30 pieces of legislation related to higher education introduced during the first 75 days of the new administration;[217] and executive orders eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion; gender equity programming; and prohibiting accreditors from setting diversity, equity, and inclusion standards.[218]
In addition, the federal government targeted specific higher education institutions with actions that seemed designed either to coerce them into acquiescence or to destroy their operational capacity.[219] In early March, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights notified 60 colleges and universities that they were under investigation for alleged violations relating to antisemitic harassment and discrimination.[220] This was followed by announcements that the government would freeze unrelated government grants and contracts to seven of the institutions listed—Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, Northwestern, Brown, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania[221]—for allegedly failing to respond properly to allegations of antisemitic and discriminatory conduct on campus. Notices to the institutions were vague and failed to follow normal procedures (which include statutorily prescribed periods for an institution to respond and resolve any deficiencies), suggesting bad faith (members of the administration and its supporters have long complained, without rigorous evidence, of liberal bias at elite institutions).[222] The Department of Justice, for example, rather than the Department of Education (which had traditionally been responsible for investigating alleged civil rights violations at the country’s colleges and universities), took on an unusually active and aggressive role in investigations (adding an implicit threat of civil or criminal sanctions). Some cases were resolved in months despite allegations that would previously have taken years to investigate, interview witnesses, receive and review responses and counter-witnesses, deliberate, and negotiate a resolution. In one example, the administration forced a settlement on the University of Virginia that included, as a demand by the government, the resignation of the university’s president, James Ryan.[223] In the two most highly publicized cases—Columbia and Harvard universities—the funding freeze announcements preceded the government’s sending each university a letter with a list of extraordinary demands, meaning the sanctions preceded any meaningful investigations. The demands included the removal of faculty control of an academic department; changes to curriculum, disciplinary policies, hiring and admissions; and expanded cooperation with law enforcement on immigration matters unrelated to higher education.
At the state level, as in previous years, elected officials signed into law bills or executive orders that eroded university autonomy, including in West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Idaho.[224] These efforts accelerated during the first half of 2025. By July 2025, elected officials had introduced at least 136 pieces of legislation restricting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in higher education institutions in 29 states, with 28 signed into law and another 28 approved by their state legislatures but either vetoed by the governor or not yet signed into law.[225] Almost half of these bills (13) were signed into law after January 2025. Like the federal orders, most state-level regulations used broad language and undefined terms that conflated discriminatory activity—which was already prohibited under Titles VI and IX of the federal Civil Rights Act, among other provisions—and nondiscriminatory research, teaching, or discussion of important and contested political, social, cultural, and economic issues concerning race, gender and sexuality, among other topics.
Both the federal and state actions directly shaped the behavior of universities and university systems, many of which preemptively took steps to avoid attracting negative attention from elected officials or their supporters; for example, removing the word “diversity” or other disfavored terms from their websites and changing the titles of or eliminating courses, positions, departments, and centers.[226] These actions often went beyond what was required by law,[227] demonstrating how easily the threat of investigations and funding cuts can undermine institutional autonomy.
Actions Undermining Academic Freedom
Beginning in January 2025, the US government introduced a series of measures to reduce federal research funding, often bypassing existing procedures and regulations.[228] These measures significantly undermined the academic freedom of individual scholars, inhibiting their ability to conduct vital research.[229] The measures included a freeze on federal grant payments and new grant awards;[230] indefinite pauses in the review of new funding proposals;[231] reductions in cost-recovery rates on existing grants (indirect costs rates);[232] and an intervention by the US Department of State to reject at the last minute up to a quarter of Fulbright Fellowship proposals that had already gone through the final stages of approval.[233] Colleges and universities responded to the uncertainty by cutting their expenses, reducing research staff, freezing hiring, and reducing the number of incoming doctoral students.[234]
The impact of the US government’s funding cuts went beyond the country’s borders. Cuts to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) affected higher education institutions doing HIV research, malaria, and vaccines in Africa;[235] programs for Afghan women to access higher education outside of their own country (see the section above on Afghanistan for more detail);[236] and scholarships for Egyptian students.[237] Universities in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Portugal also reported cuts in their US-funded projects.[238] In March 2025, overseas researchers with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USAID, and other US federal government sources received surveys that screened grants for disfavored topics. Among its questions, the survey asked respondents to confirm that their grants were not environmental justice projects and included no diversity, equity, and inclusion or “gender ideology” components, as well as that their organization had received no funding from China, Russia, Cuba, or Iran.[239]
As in previous Free to Think reports, scholars and students who engaged in disfavored speech found themselves at risk of disciplinary action; much of this occurred in the context of continuing heightened tensions on campus related to the ongoing Israeli military action in Gaza. While student protests occurred much less frequently than described in Free to Think 2024, students engaged in pro-Palestinian activism found their speech constrained. During the summer of 2024, students who had been involved in the campus protests the previous spring found themselves caught up in lengthy disciplinary processes,[240] and colleges and universities spent the summer developing new time, place, and manner policies for protests on their campuses.[241] As previously, the charge of antisemitism was levied against faculty members and students in ways that threatened academic freedom and free speech on campus. External groups, including Canary Mission, targeted critics of Israeli government policies, published their names, and accused them of antisemitism, flagging international students for potential deportation. The US government apparently used this information to target students for investigation.[242] For instance, Tufts University international student Rümeysa Öztürk appeared on Canary Mission’s website just weeks before being detained, arrested, and threatened with deportation, apparently on the sole basis of an op-ed she co-authored regarding the situation in Gaza (see below for more detail on the detention and attempted deportation of international students and scholars).[243]
Often under pressure from elected officials or external groups, university administrations disciplined faculty members and students protesting Israeli military actions in Gaza and cancelled events. Muhlenberg College took the unusual step of firing a tenured associate professor of anthropology, Maura Finkelstein, for a social media post she shared that was critical of Zionism. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) later found that Muhlenberg had violated Finkelstein’s academic freedom.[244] During the fall of 2024, Harvard University libraries temporarily banned dozens of students and faculty from entering after they engaged in a series of silent study-ins protesting Israeli military action.[245] (The students had attached the signs to the backs of their computers and donned keffiyehs but otherwise sat silently in a library reading room.)
The reporting period also saw multiple attacks targeting pro-Israel expression. On September 24, 2024, protesters disrupted a talk by Simcha Rothman, a far-right member of the Israeli Knesset, at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, forcing the talk to be moved to Zoom.[246] On November 6, 2024, two masked attackers punched two students who were standing outside of the DePaul University student center with a sign reading, “Come talk about Israel with an IDF soldier.”[247]
Actions Undermining Equitable Access to Higher Education
Beginning in early 2025, the federal government engaged in a campaign to limit international students’ access to higher education in the US. This included an extralegal campaign to arrest, detain, and attempt to deport without due process several US-based, noncitizen scholars and students.[248] Rather than following normal procedures, immigration officials—frequently dressed in plain-clothes and sometimes wearing masks—arrested the students on public streets, from university housing, and on university campuses, without first notifying their universities. They then transported them, often at night, to sites that in some cases were over a thousand miles away, in an apparent attempt to place the case in a judicial venue more friendly to the administration. None of these individuals were charged with violating the terms of their visas or any other crime. Government officials indicated that they cancelled or revoked the visas and permits on the sole authority of executive officials, without advance notice and without any hearings or opportunity to contest the alleged factual basis. In a number of the cases, they relied on a rarely used law from 1798 intended for wartime enemies.[249] The absence of evidence of wrongdoing, coupled with statements from public officials condemning the detainees for their publicly expressed opinions, strongly suggested that these individuals were targeted not because they posed a threat to public safety, but merely for their views and expression.
Simultaneously, the government took broader action to prevent international students from studying in the US. This included the revocation of nearly 2,000 student visas (later reversed),[250] prompting many to leave the country fearing ending up in a Louisiana detention center;[251] the development of a new policy for termination of students’ legal residency status;[252] a temporary freeze of interviews for all new student visas;[253] and an announcement that the State Department would review the social media accounts of all student and scholar visa applicants.[254] International students comprise up to 50 percent of the student body at some institutions, and experts warned that a decline in their numbers could lead to the closure of many US colleges and universities.[255]
Federal government actions diminished access to higher education not just for foreign scholars and students, but also for US citizens and residents. In the face of the research cuts described above, universities froze, or even rescinded, graduate student admissions.[256] The federal budget bill signed into law on July 4, 2025, capped student loan amounts, eliminated multiple repayment options, and restricted eligibility for Pell grants, which are awarded to students with significant financial need, raising the cost of higher education and making it more difficult for low- and middle-income students to attend higher education. The bill also imposed a higher tax rate on colleges with endowments, making it more difficult for them to subsidize tuition and provide financial aid to students.
Higher Education Responses
As the US administration’s actions against higher education grew, many actors in the sector pushed back. Several higher education leaders prominently voiced their opposition to the government’s actions, pointing out how these actions would damage US research, economy, and global status.[257] They signed statements speaking out against the danger of unrestrained state interference in core administrative and educational functions.[258] Faculty and staff at individual universities began to organize, with faculty and university senates voting to join mutual academic defense compacts (MADCs), asking their administrations to commit resources to legal defense funds for faculty or students facing threats, and other collective responses.[259] By June 2025, more than 50 institutions had passed an MADC.[260] A number of institutions and associations – including the American Association of University Professors, the Association of American Universities, the American Council on Education, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities – brought legal actions challenging the administration actions.[261] Many of these resulted in preliminary court orders reversing or placing the government’s actions on hold pending appeal or further proceedings; as of this writing none of the cases had been fully adjudicated on the merits. Even if these cases are successful in the long run, the normally slow pace of judicial review coupled with the government’s ongoing threats of investigations, funding reductions, visa restrictions, and other actions will force higher education leaders, scholars, and students to reevaluate their actions to mitigate near-term risks, inevitably resulting in a restriction on academic freedom, autonomy, and equitable access.
In sum, the recent US government actions threaten the financial operations of many colleges and universities. They weaken university autonomy, academic freedom, and equitable access, and will have profound implications for the health, wellbeing, and future prosperity of the American people. Taken together, they represent an unprecedented, voluntary dismantling of the US as a global education, research, and innovation superpower. They are creating an intellectual vacuum that universities and governments in Europe, Asia, and beyond are already exploiting, including by offering grants and fellowships to researchers, scholars, and students who previously would have made their careers in the US. If the government’s actions are not reversed or otherwise mitigated quickly, compounding generations of talent, innovation, and breakthroughs may be lost to the American people, to the benefit of other countries, if not lost altogether.
Zimbabwe
For decades, Zimbabwe’s government has systematically surveilled, arrested, and prosecuted students in connection with their nonviolent expressive activity, targeting in particular those affiliated with the Zimbabwe National Students Union (ZINASU). Universities, which are controlled by the state, have often disciplined students in connection to their expressive and associative activity. This pattern is reflected in Zimbabwe’s AFi rating of “severely restricted.”
Figure 38: According to the AFi, academic freedom was “severely restricted” (0.21) in Zimbabwe in 2024.
Figure 39: Academic freedom in Zimbabwe was limited across all indicators, with institutional autonomy score particularly low.
During the reporting period, government forces forcibly arrested, prosecuted, and allegedly tortured student leaders. Several cases occurred against the backdrop of a broader crackdown on dissent by Zimbabwe’s government ahead of the Southern African Development Community summit, which took place on August 17, 2024, in Harare, Zimbabwe.[262] On July 24, Zimbabwean police arrested several dozen students after the police were called to a ZINASU meeting. During the arrests, they beat unarmed students, breaking their bones. Emmanuel Sitima, ZINASU’s president, spent one night in police custody before being released on bail. He was charged with “criminal nuisance.”[263] On August 2, ZINASU president Sitima was arrested a second time, this time at the airport as he arrived home from attending that same conference.[264] According to Sitima, police raided ZINASU’s offices on August 7.[265]
Universities in Zimbabwe also disciplined student and teachers union leaders in apparent retaliation for their expressive activity and association. On February 25, 2025, Midlands State University suspended Takunda, along with four other students—Tanaka Sibanda, Nester Moyo, Fanuel Gona, and Keegan Mathe—for allegedly violating the university’s Rules of Student Conduct and Discipline by conducting a ZINASU recruitment drive. Mhuka was expelled after a disciplinary hearing on March 12.[266] On April 9, Great Zimbabwe University suspended Darlington Matola for making “disparaging remarks” against the university’s administration, after he criticized the university’s management on a WhatsApp group.[267]
In April 2025, lecturers at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) went on strike to demand higher wages.[268] On May 12, police arrested six student leaders as they were participating in a spontaneous peace protest on campus in support of the lecturers. The students were objecting to the scheduling of end-of-semester exams, arguing that they could not take them because they had received no recent instruction. They demanded that the university resolve the situation by paying lecturers fairly. In July, UZ temporarily suspended all six students for their participation in the protest. The suspensions were reversed a few days later; the university informed the students that it had reconsidered its decision.[269] On June 26, UZ fired four Association of University Teacher (AUT) leaders for their role in leading lecturers’ strike.[270]
[1] See Katrin Kinzelbach, Ilyas Saliba, Janika Spannagel, and Robert Quinn, Free Universities: Putting the Academic Freedom Index into Action, March 11, 2021, https://www.gppi.net/2021/03/11/free-universities.
[2] SAR AFMP, Sheikh Zayed University, December 1, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-12-01-sheikh-zayed-university/.
[3] SAR AFMP, Sayed Jamaluddin Afghani University, December 15, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-12-15-sayed-jamaluddin-afghani-university/.
[4] Anonymous, “Now the Taliban is banning lecturers from pursuing higher study abroad,” Times Higher Education, December 2, 2024, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/now-taliban-banning-lecturers-pursuing-higher-study-abroad.
[5] Amin Kawa, “A 14% Cut That Erased Every Woman: Inside the Taliban’s Academic Purge,” Hasht e Subh, April 6, 2025, https://8am.media/eng/a-14-cut-that-erased-every-woman-inside-the-talibans-academic-purge/; Bais Hayat, “Taliban expand academic staff purge to western Afghanistan, sources say,” Amu TV, May 16, 2025, https://amu.tv/174502/; and Milad Sayer, Taliban dismiss more than 200 university staff in southeastern Afghanistan, sources say, Amu TV, May 14, 2025, https://amu.tv/173924/.
[6] Scholars at Risk (SAR), Academic Freedom Monitoring Project (AFMP), Bamiyan University May 11, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-05-11-bamyan-university/.
[7] SAR AFMP. Sheikh Zayed University. May 13, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-05-13-sheikh-zayed-university/.
[8] SAR AFMP. Country Wide. December 20, 2022. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2022-12-20-country-wide/.
[9] SAR AFMP. Multiple Institutions. December 2, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-12-02-multiple-institutions/.
[10] Ayaz Gul, “Global outcry grows over new Taliban decree targeting Afghan women,” Voice of America, December 4, 2024, https://www.voanews.com/a/global-outcry-grows-over-new-taliban-decree-targeting-afghan-women/7887435.html.
[11] Yogita Limaye, “Afghan women who fled Taliban to study abroad face imminent return after USAID cuts, BBC, March 8, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg4k25wlw21o.
[12] Kabul Now, “US Ends Scholarship Funding for Over 200 Afghan Women, Leaving Students in Limbo, Kabul Now, April 9, 2025, https://kabulnow.com/2025/04/us-ends-scholarship-funding-for-over-200-afghan-women-leaving-students-in-limbo/; Yogita Limaye, “Reprieve for Afghan women students facing forced return after US aid cuts,” BBC, March 19, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyd0l5w6l6o; and Aryn Baker, “‘They Will Label Us as Spies’: The Afghan Students Abandoned by America,” New York Times, March 30, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/30/world/asia/afghanistan-students-qatar-funding.html.
[13] Manija Mirzaie and Shadi Khan Saif, “US funding cuts, scholarship ban deal students a double blow,” University World News, May 1, 2025, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20250430130443213.
[14] Rick Noack, “Trump’s foreign aid pause imperils education programs for Afghan women,” Washington Post, February 21, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/02/21/afghanistan-women-education-taliban-trump-foreign-aid/.
[15] Scholarships AF, “American University of Afghanistan resumes its online activity After Nawroz,” March 17, 2025, Scholarships AF, https://scholarships.af/82823/auaf-resumes-classes-after-funding-crisis/.
[16] Noack, “Trump’s foreign aid pause.”
[17] Freedom House. “Azerbaijan.” Freedom in the World 2025. https://freedomhouse.org/country/azerbaijan/freedom-world/2025.
[18] Human Rights Watch. “Azerbaijan: Escalating Crackdown on Critics.” Human Rights Watch, August 30, 2024, https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/08/30/azerbaijan-escalating-crackdown-critics/; and Helen Packer, “Calls to free Azerbaijani academic as climate summit kicks off,” Times Higher Education, November 13, 2024, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/calls-free-azerbaijani-academic-climate-summit-kicks.
[19] Amnesty International, “Azerbaijan: Academics Arrested on Fabricated Charges: Igbal Abilov and Bahruz Samadov.” Amnesty International, September 23, 2024, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur55/8554/2024/en/.
[20] SAR AFMP. Belarusian State University. July 22, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-07-22-belarusian-state-university/.
[21] Human Rights House Foundation. “Escalating Crackdown on Critics and Persistent Human Rights Violations in Azerbaijan.” Human Rights House Foundation, September 25, 2024, https://humanrightshouse.org/statements/escalating-crackdown-on-critics-and-persistent-human-rights-violations-in-azerbaijan/.
[22] Scholars at Risk, “Igbal Abilov, Azerbaijan,” Scholars at Risk, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/actions/igbal-abilov-azerbaijan/.
[23] Amnesty International. “Azerbaijan: Academics dealt long prison sentences on spurious charges, Amnesty International, June 26, 2025, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur55/9545/2025/en/.
[24] United Nations. “Bangladesh: UN report finds brutal, systematic repression of protests, calls for justice for serious rights violations,” UN Office for the High Commissioner of Human Rights, February 12, 2025, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/02/bangladesh-un-report-finds-brutal-systematic-repression-protests-calls.
[25] Tazreena Sajjad, “Bangladesh’s protests explained: What led to PM’s ouster and the challenges that lie ahead, The Conversation, August 6, 2024, https://theconversation.com/bangladeshs-protests-explained-what-led-to-pms-ouster-and-the-challenges-that-lie-ahead-236190; and Sabir Mustafa, “Timeline of events leading to the resignation of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina,” Voice of America, August 5, 2024, https://www.voanews.com/a/timeline-of-events-leading-to-the-resignation-of-bangladesh-prime-minister-sheikh-hasina/7731456.html.
[26] Kamal Ahmed, “As Bangladesh boils over, Sheikh Hasina’s peril is of her own making, Himil, July 21, 2024, https://www.himalmag.com/politics/bangladesh-sheikh-hasina-awami-league-quota-protest-employment-razakar.
[27] See: https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/academic-freedom-monitoring-project-index/?_snk_keyword=&taxes%5Bregions%5D%5Bbangladesh%5D=on&_snk_dt%5Bshowall%5D=y.
[28] C. Rashaad Shabab, “Bangladesh’s students paid a high price for a freedom that may not last,” Times Higher Education, August 7, 2024, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/bangladeshs-students-paid-high-price-freedom-may-not-last.
[29] SAR AFMP. Various Institutions. July 15, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-07-15-various/.
[30] SAR AFMP. Jahangirnagar University, July 15, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-07-15-jahangirnagar-university/.
[31] Daily Star, “Universities closed until further notice,” Daily Star, July 16, 2024, https://www.thedailystar.net/news/bangladesh/news/quota-protest-live-updates-3658146.
[32] Amnesty International. “Bangladesh: Witness testimony, video and photographic analysis confirm police used unlawful force against protesters.” Amnesty International, July 17, 2024, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/07/bangladesh-witness-testimony-video-and-photographic-analysis-confirm-police-used-unlawful-force-against-protesters/.
[33] Julhas Alam, “5 killed and dozens injured in Bangladesh in violent clashes over government jobs quota, Associated Press, July 16, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/bangladesh-quota-violence-hasina-student-protests-c3982590332a1639c88a22257e20f7d2; and Julhas Alam, “Universities in Bangladesh shut their doors and authorities raid opposition HQ after deadly protests,” Associated Press, July 17, 2024 https://apnews.com/article/bangladesh-universities-close-hasina-quota-student-protest-77f82215bf8fce35f288ea39d812bcdb.
[34] SAR AFMP. Begum Rokeya University. July 16, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-07-16-begum-rokeya-university/.
[35] SAR AFMP. Military Institute of Science and Technology. July 18, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-07-18-military-institute-of-science-and-technology/.
[36] Md. Tahmid Zami, “Bangladesh’s internet shutdown isolates citizens, disrupts business,” Reuters, July 26, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/bangladeshs-internet-shutdown-isolates-citizens-disrupts-business-2024-07-26/.
[37] C. Rashaad Shabab, “Bangladesh’s students paid a high price for a freedom that may not last,” Times Higher Education, updated August 7, 2024, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/bangladeshs-students-paid-high-price-freedom-may-not-last.
[38] SAR AFMP, BRAC University, July 18, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-07-18-brac-university/.
[39] Mujib Mashal and Saif Hasnat. “After Protest Crackdown, Bangladesh Accuses Tens of Thousands of Crimes,” New York Times, July 30, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/30/world/asia/bangladesh-protests-charges-crime.html.
[40] SAR AFMP, Jagannath University, July 19, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-07-19-jagannath-university/.
[41] SAR AFMP, Dhaka University, July 19, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-07-19-dhaka-university-2/.
[42] SAR AFMP, Dhaka University, July 19, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-07-19-dhaka-university/.
[43] SAR AFMP, Dhaka University, July 20, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-07-20-dhaka-university/.
[44] SAR AFMP, Various Institutions, July 26, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-07-26-various-institutions/.
[45] SAR AFMP, Jagannath University, July 19, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-07-19-jagannath-university/.
[46] Mohiuddin Alamgir, “Students win jobs quota reform despite campus crackdown,” University World News, July 24 2024, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20240724204753725.
[47] SAR AFMP, Multiple Institutions, July 29, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-07-29-multiple-institutions-2/.
[48] Saif Hasnat and Andrés R. Martínez, “What We Know About the Ouster of Bangladesh’s Leader,” New York Times, August 5, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/article/bangladesh-student-protests.html.
[49] Al Jazeera, “Muhammad Yunus takes oath as head of Bangladesh’s interim government,” Al Jazeera, August 8, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/8/muhammad-yunus-takes-oath-as-head-of-bangladeshs-interim-government; and Mohiuddin Alamgir, “In historic first, students form part of interim government,” University World News, August 12, 2024, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20240812163757270.
[50] Human Rights Watch. “After the Monsoon Revolution: A Roadmap to Lasting Security Sector Reform in Bangladesh’” Human Rights Watch, January 27, 2025. https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/01/27/after-monsoon-revolution/roadmap-lasting-security-sector-reform-bangladesh.
[51] Mohiuddin Alamgir, “Student group banned as criminal cases against members mount, University World News, October 30, 2024, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20241030151131344.
[52] Mehedi Hasan Marof, “Bangladesh’s new outcasts: Students from ex-PM Hasina’s party now in hiding,” Al Jazeera, October 27, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/27/once-powerful-student-members-of-hasinas-party-bangladeshs-new-outcastes.
[53] SAR AFMP. Jahangirnagar University, September 18, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-09-18-jahangirnagar-university/.
[54] Mohiuddin Alamgir, “Campuses reopen but struggle to deal with political rifts,” University World News, September 27, 2024, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=202409271205374; and Helen Packer, “What’s next for Bangladesh’s divisive student politics?”, Times Higher Education, August 19, 2024, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/whats-next-bangladeshs-divisive-student-politics.
[55] SAR AFMP. Chattogram Polytechnic College. November 21, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-11-21-chattogram-polytechnic-college/.
[56] SAR AFMP. Ananda Mohan College. January 12, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-01-12-ananda-mohan-college/.
[57] Maryia Rohava, “The triple challenge to academic freedom in Belarus: the impact of repression, ideological indoctrination, and isolation. 2020-2024,” in Academic Freedom in Belarus: State Repression and its Consequences at Home and Abroad, ed. Julia Meirau (Science at Risk Monitoring Report, 2024), https://science-at-risk.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/report_belarus_2024_print2-1.pdf.
[58] Rohava, 2025.
[59] Tereshkovich, 2024.
[60] Rohava, 2025.
[61] Belarusian Students Association, “Belarus academic community under siege: Here’s how to help,” University World News, June 11, 2025, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20250611102011509.
[62] A. Lastouski, and P. A. Rudlin, “A Silent Death: The Destruction of Academic Scholarship in Belarus,” in A World Order in Transformation? : A Comparative Study of Consequences of the War and Reactions to These Changes in the Region (Stockholm, Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, 2024), https://sh.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1846696/FULLTEXT01.pdf#page=99, 101.
[63] Pavel Tereshkovich, “Current trends in the development of the education sector in the Republic of Belarus,” Belarus Research Network on Neighborhood Policy, 2024, https://belarusnetwork.org/publications/analytical-article-no-10-current-trends-in-the-development-of-the-education-sector-in-the-republic-of-belarus/.
[64] SAR, “Marfa Rabkova, Belarus,” Scholars at Risk, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/actions/marfa-rabkova-belarus/#Case%20Information.
[65] Maryia Rohava, “The triple challenge to academic freedom in Belarus: the impact of repression, ideological indoctrination, and isolation. 2020-2024,” in Academic Freedom in Belarus: State Repression and its Consequences at Home and Abroad, ed. Julia Meirau (Science at Risk Monitoring Report, 2024), https://science-at-risk.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/report_belarus_2024_print2-1.pdf.
[66] Rohava, 2025.
[67] SAR AFMP, Multiple Institutions, July 1, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-07-01-multiple-institutions/.
[68] SAR AFMP, September 13, 2024, Belarusian State Medical University, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-09-13-belarusian-statemedical-university/.
[69] Daniel Fu, “Xi Jinping’s Ideologization of the Chinese Academy.” The Diplomat, June 22, 2024, https://thediplomat.com/2024/06/xi-jinpings-ideologization-of-the-chinese-academy/; and Freedom House, “China,” Freedom in the World, 2025, https://freedomhouse.org/country/china/freedom-world/2025.
[70] Amber Wang and Yojana Sharma, “China expands tie-ups with global partners, including US,” University World News, May 23, 2025, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20250523133930870; and Helen Packer, “China hopes for increased cross-border scientific collaboration,” Times Higher Education, January 24, 2025, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/china-hopes-increased-cross-border-scientific-collaboration.
[71] Adam Ruzicka, “China is successfully trying to silence universities. It’s a huge problem, says expert,” Aktualne, March 23, 2025, https://zpravy.aktualne.cz/cina-se-uspesne-snazi-umlcet-univerzity-je-to-obrovsky-probl/r~6c209296065c11f0b589ac1f6b220ee8.
[72] SAR Scholars in Prison Project, Rahile Dawut, China, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/actions/rahile-dawut-china/#Case%20Information.
[73] SAR AFMP, Central University Nationalities, January 15, 2014, www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2014-01-15-central-university-nationalities/.
[74] SAR AFMP, October 4, 2018, Unaffiliated, www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2018-10-04-unaffiliated/.
[75] SAR AFMP, January 29, 2018, Xinjiang Pedagogical University, www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2018-01-29-xinjiang-pedagogical-university/.
[76] Human Rights Watch. “We Can’t Write the Truth Anymore.” Human Rights Watch, September 24, 2024. https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/09/24/we-cant-write-truth-anymore/academic-freedom-hong-kong-under-national-security-0.
[77] Yojana Sharma, “Political science: An ‘endangered species’ in Hong Kong,” University World News, September 12, 2024, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20240912115237227.
[78] Freedom House. “Colombia.” Freedom in the World, 2024. https://freedomhouse.org/country/colombia/freedom-world/2024.
[79] SAR AFMP. University of Antioquia, September 13, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-09-13-university-of-antioquia/.
[80] SAR AFMP. Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca University. September 26, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-09-26-colegio-mayor-de-cundinamarca-university/.
[81] SAR AFMP, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, December 10, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-12-10-universidad-nacional-de-colombia/.
[82] SAR AFMP, National Pedagogical University, March 27, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-27-national-pedagogical-university/.
[83] SAR AFMP, University of Antioquia, April 30, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-04-30-university-of-antioquia/.
[84] SAR AFMP, University of Antioquia, June 6, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-06-06-university-of-antioquia/.
[85] Giorgi Meladze and Nana Shamatava, Universities at the centre of national democracy struggles,” University World News, March 12, 2025, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=202503110907119.
[86] Nils Adler, “Angered by Georgia’s ‘foreign agent’ law, young protesters try new tactic,” Al Jazeera, July 1, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/1/angered-by-georgias-foreign-agent-law-gen-x-protesters-try-new-tactic.
[87] Marc Goedemans, “What Georgia’s Foreign Agent Law Means for Its Democracy,” Council on Foreign Relations, August 21, 2024, https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/what-georgias-foreign-agent-law-means-its-democracy.
[88] Josephine Hale, “Georgia’s October 2024 Protests: Exposing the Dangers of Power Consolidation and Pro-Putin Corruption,” Democracy Erosion Consortium, February 13, 2024, https://democratic-erosion.org/2025/02/13/georgias-october-2024-protests-exposing-the-dangers-of-power-consolidation-and-pro-putin-corruption/.
[89] JAM News, “Student protests in Batumi spark solidarity across Georgian universities,” JAM News, November 15, 2024, https://jam-news.net/student-protests-in-batumi-spark-solidarity-across-georgian-universities/.
[90] Giorgi Meladze and Nana Shamatava, “Universities at the centre of national democracy struggles,” University World News, March 12, 2025, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=202503110907119; Aino Mielo, “En aio totella tätä lakia tai sensuroida itseäni” – georgialaiset yliopistot lakkoilevat vastauksena maan Venäjä-mielisen hallituksen toimille [“I will not obey this law or censor myself” – Georgian universities strike in response to the country’s pro-Russian government]. Hämeen Sanomat, December 3, 2024, 3).https://www.hameensanomat.fi/uutissuomalainen/8112298; JAM News, “Student protests in Batumi spark solidarity across Georgian universities,” JAM News, November 15, 2024, https://jam-news.net/student-protests-in-batumi-spark-solidarity-across-georgian-universities/; and OC Media. “‘Our voice is heard the loudest from here’: Georgia’s students occupy their universities,” OC Media, March 11, 2025, https://oc-media.org/our-voice-is-heard-the-loudest-from-here-georgias-students-occupy-their-universities/.
[91] Emily Dixon, “Georgian scholars fear reforms will entrench government control,” Times Higher Education, January 27, 2025, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/georgian-scholars-fear-reforms-will-entrench-government-control; and Louis Titz, “Georgian Students at the ’Front Line’ : Three Months of Struggle for Europe,” The New Federalist, February 25, 2025, https://www.thenewfederalist.eu/georgian-students-at-the-front-line-three-months-of-struggle-for-europe?lang=fr.
[92] OC Media, “Students at Tbilisi’s Theatre and Film University end their sit-in,” OC Media, March 10, 2025, https://oc-media.org/students-at-tbilisis-theatre-and-film-university-end-their-sit-in/.
[93] Amnesty International, “Georgia: Protesters face arrests, abuse, and denial of fair trial rights,” Amnesty International, December 2, 2024, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/georgia-protesters-face-arrests-abuse-and-denial-of-fair-trial-rights/; Zviad, “’We have practically lost’: Georgian student reveals brutal reality behind 128 days of protests,” Euromaidan, April 4, 2025, https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/04/04/we-have-practically-lost-georgian-student-reveals-brutal-reality-behind-128-days-of-protests/; and Giorgi Meladze and Nana Shamatava, “Universities at the centre of national democracy struggles,” University World News, March 12, 2025, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=202503110907119.
[94] SAR AFMP. Tbilisi State University. November 19, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-11-19-tbilisi-state-university/.
[95] Louis Titz, “Georgian Students at the ’Front Line’ : Three Months of Struggle for Europe,” The New Federalist, February 25, 2025, https://www.thenewfederalist.eu/georgian-students-at-the-front-line-three-months-of-struggle-for-europe?lang=fr; and Giorgi Meladze and Nana Shamatava, “Universities at the centre of national democracy struggles,” University World News, March 12, 2025, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=202503110907119.
[96] Emily Dixon, “Georgian scholars fear reforms will entrench government control,” Times Higher Education, January 27, 2025, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/georgian-scholars-fear-reforms-will-entrench-government-control.
[97] Emily Dixon, “Eastern European scholars stuck between Brussels hope and Kremlin,” Times Higher Education, November 6, 2024, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/eastern-european-scholars-stuck-between-brussels-hope-and-kremlin; and Shota Kincha, “Georgia’s Education Ministry withholds full accreditation from Ilia State University,” OC Media, October 1, 2024, https://oc-media.org/georgias-education-ministry-withholds-full-accreditation-from-ilia-state-university/.
[98] Giorgi Meladze and Nana Shamatava, “Universities at the centre of national democracy struggles,” University World News, March 12, 2025, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=202503110907119; and Civil Georgia, “Kobakhidze Announces State Commission to Reform Universities,” Civil Georgia, January 20, 2025, https://civil.ge/archives/653796.
[99] Jan-Martin Wiarda (2025, March 13). “Nicht mehr internationale Spitze” [“No longer international top]. Blog Post. https://www.jmwiarda.de/2025/03/13/nicht-mehr-internationale-spitze/.
[100] SAR AFMP. University of Leipzig. December 1, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-12-01-university-of-leipzig/.
[101] SAR AFMP. Ludwig Maximillion University. January 31, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-01-31-ludwig-maximilian-university/.
[102] SAR AFMP. Free University Berlin. February 12, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-02-12-free-university-of-berlin/.
[103] Emily Dixon, “‘Sense of unease’ for overseas students in Germany amid AfD rise,” Times Higher Education, March 16, 2025, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/sense-unease-overseas-students-germany-amid-afd-rise.
[104] Emily Dixon, “What could the rise of the AfD mean for German universities?” Times Higher Education, February 21, 2025, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/what-could-rise-afd-mean-german-universities.
[105] Team Clarion, “Jamia Millia Students Up in Arms Over Ban on Protests, Sloganeering,” Clarion India, December 2, 2024, https://clarionindia.net/jamia-millia-students-up-in-arms-over-ban-on-protests-sloganeering/.
[106] Nabeel Kolothumthodi, “Higher Education: How Centre is Undermining State Autonomy & Politicising UGC,” News Click, April 25, 2025, https://www.newsclick.in/higher-education-how-centre-undermining-state-autonomy-politicising-ugc.
[107] Helen Packer, “New rules for Indian vice-chancellor hires ‘disastrous’,” Times Higher Education, January 19, 2025, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/new-rules-indian-vice-chancellor-hires-disastrous; Sandhya Devesan, “Why the UGC Draft Regulations Amount to a Fresh Assault on Academic Freedoms,” The Wire, February 5, 2025, https://thewire.in/education/why-the-ugc-draft-regulations-amount-to-a-fresh-assault-on-academic-freedoms; and Nabeel Kolothumthodi, “How Centre is Undermining State Autonomy and Politicising UGC,” News Click, April 4, 2025, https://www.newsclick.in/higher-education-how-centre-undermining-state-autonomy-politicising-ugc.
[108] Helen Packer, “‘Bleak future’ for Kerala universities as political spats rage on,” Times Higher Education, March 7, 2025, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/bleak-future-kerala-universities-political-spats-rage.
[109] Johanna Deeksha, “How the government undercut TISS over the past decade,” Scroll.in, August 21, 2024, https://scroll.in/article/1072240/how-the-government-undercut-tiss-over-the-past-decade.
[110] SAR AFMP, South Asian University, July 27, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-07-27-south-asian-university/; Committee of Concerned Scientists, “Sri Lankan Professor of Sociology Leaves South Asian University After Launching Politically Motivated Investigation into his PhD Student’s Proposal,” Committee of Concerned Scientists, September 12, 2024, https://concernedscientists.org/2024/09/sri-lankan-professor-of-sociology-leaves-south-asian-university-after-launching-politically-motivated-investigation-into-his-phd-students-proposal/; and Helen Packer, “Professor departs South Asian University after Modi criticism row,” Times Higher Education, August 7, 2024, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/professor-departs-south-asian-university-after-modi-criticism-row.
[111] Abhik Deb, “‘Unfair considerations?’: 26 scientists express concern about new process for prestigious award,” Scroll.in, September 17, 2024, https://scroll.in/article/1073359/unfair-considerations-26-scientists-express-concern-about-new-process-for-prestigious-award.
[112] Pallavi Smart, “TISS revises honour code: Bans participation in ‘anti-establishment’, ‘unpatriotic’ discussions,” Indian Express, September 4, 2024, https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/revised-honour-code-for-tiss-students-bans-unpatriotic-anti-establishment-discussions-9548808/.
[113] Musab Qazi, “Mumbai University Issues Circular Prohibiting Campus Protests Without Permission, Student Organisations Cry Foul,” The Free Press Journal, September 24, 2024, https://www.freepressjournal.in/education/mumbai-university-issues-circular-prohibiting-campus-protests-without-permission-student-organisations-cry-foul.
[114] Team Clarion, “Jamia Millia Students Up in Arms Over Ban on Protests, Sloganeering,” Clarion India, December 2, 2024, https://clarionindia.net/jamia-millia-students-up-in-arms-over-ban-on-protests-sloganeering/; and Tribune News Service, “Jamia Millia Islamia issues ban on protests sans prior approval,” The Tribune India, December 2, (2024, https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/delhi/jamia-millia-islamia-issues-ban-on-protests-sans-prior-approval/.
[115] India Today News Desk, “Telangana university bans protest on campus, BJP calls it ‘undeclared emergency’,” India Today, March 16, 2025, https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/telangana-university-bans-protest-on-campus-bjp-calls-it-undeclared-emergency-2694175-2025-03-16.
[116] SAR AFMP. Delhi University. August 21, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-08-21-delhi-university/.
[117] Saher Hiba Khan, “Court Stays Delhi Univ Student’s Expulsion Over Slogan On A Wall, But Crackdown On Student Dissent Grows Nationwide,” Article 14, December 10, 2024, https://article-14.com/post/court-stays-delhi-univ-student-s-expulsion-over-slogan-on-a-wall-but-crackdown-on-student-dissent-grows-nationwide–6757a96cb8439.
[118] SAR AFMP. Rajasthan University. July 18, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-07-18-rajasthan-university/.
[119] SAR AFMP. Rajasthan University, August 7, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-08-07-rajasthan-university/.
[120] SAR AFMP. University of Hyderabad. March 30, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-30-university-of-hyderabad/.
[121] SAR AFMP. University of Hyderabad. April 2, 2025. .https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-04-02-university-of-hyderabad/.
[122] SAR AFMP. Ambedekar University. April 11, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-04-11-ambedkar-university-delhi/.
[123] SAR AFMP. March 11, 2025. Himachal Pradesh University. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-11-himachal-pradesh-university/.
[124] Abid Hussain, “Pahalgam attack: A simple guide to the Kashmir conflict,” Al Jazeera, May 2, 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/2/pahalgam-attack-a-simple-guide-to-the-kashmir-conflict.
[125] Umer Farooq and Ilhak Tantray, “Amid over 17 attacks, Kashmiri Students Abandon Studies or Live in Fear,” Kashmir Times, April 30, 2025, https://kashmirtimes.com/news/kashmiri-students-abandon-studies-or-live-in-fear; and Wire Staff, “In Photos: Protest in Srinagar Calls For End to Harassment of Kashmiri Students Across Country,” The Wire, April 30, 2025, https://thewire.in/rights/in-photos-protest-in-srinagar-calls-for-end-to-harassment-of-kashmiri-students-across-country.
[126] Press Trust of India, “Delhi University under Fire for Asking Only Kashmiri Students for Personal Details; JKSA Calls Move Discriminatory, Seeks Centre’s Intervention,” Times of India, May 7, 2025, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/education/news/delhi-university-under-fire-for-asking-only-kashmiri-students-for-personal-details-jksa-calls-move-discriminatory-seeks-centres-intervention/articleshow/120948548.cms.
[127] SAR AFMP, Sinhgad Academy of Engineering, May 9, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-05-09-sinhgad-academy-of-engineering/.
[128] SAR AFMP, Ashoka University, May 18, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-05-18-ashoka-university/.
[129] UN OHCHR. Iran intensifying efforts to repress women and girls on second anniversary of nation-wide protests, UN Fact-Finding Mission says. September 13, 2024. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/09/iran-intensifying-efforts-repress-women-and-girls-second-anniversary-nation.
[130] Iran International, “Swedish-Iranian academic faces imminent execution in Iran, Amnesty warns,” Iran International, July 10, 2024, https://www.iranintl.com/en/202407099581; Dagens Nyheter, “Djalali’s health has deteriorated significantly: ‘Do something before it’s too late’,” Dagens Nyheter, July 3, 2025, https://www.dn.se/sverige/djalalis-halsa-kraftigt-forsamrad-gor-nagot-innan-det-ar-for-sent/; and Committee on Academic Freedom, Letter protesting the ongoing unjust incarceration of Dr. Ahmadreza Djalali, Middle East Studies Association, March 6, 2025, https://mesana.org/advocacy/committee-on-academic-freedom/2025/03/06/letter-protesting-the-ongoing-unjust-incarceration-of-dr.-ahmadreza-djalali.
[131] Sweden Herald, “Ahmadreza Djalali Suffers Heart Attack in Iranian Prison, Life at Risk,” Sweden Herald, May 9, 2025, https://swedenherald.com/article/swedishiranian-researcher-ahmadreza-djalali-suffers-heart-attack-in-prison.
[132] Middle East Studies Association. Letter expressing alarm regarding the imminent risk of execution of Ahmadreza Djalali, Iranian-Swedish scholar on death row in Iran. June 30, 2025, https://mesana.org/advocacy/committee-on-academic-freedom/2025/06/30/letter-expressing-alarm-regarding-the-imminent-risk-of-execution-of-ahmadreza-djalali-iranian-swedish-scholar-on-death-row-in-iran; Iran Human Rights, “Concerns Over Imminent Execution of Ahmadreza Djalali Amid Transfer of Political Prisoners From Evin Prison,” June 23, 2025, https://iranhr.net/en/articles/7681/; and Amnesty International, “Iran: Growing fears over torture and executions of individuals accused of ‘espionage’ for Israel,” Amnesty International, June 20, 2025, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/06/iran-growing-fears-over-torture-and-executions-of-individuals-accused-of-espionage-for-israel/.
[133] Margherita Stancati, “Israel Struck a Notorious Iranian Prison. Its Inmates Are Paying a Price,” Wall Street Journal, July 14. 2025, https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israel-iran-tehran-evin-prison-be85fa9a.
[134] Michele Catanzaro, “Iran elects heart surgeon as president: scientists are hopeful,” Nature, July 9 , 2024, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02262-3; Ali Arab, Rana Dadpour, Shideh Dashti, and Encieh Erfani, “Iran’s presidential election is no breakthrough for reform or for science,” Nature, August 20, 2024; and Ali Arab, Rana Dadpour, Shideh Dashti, and Encieh Erfani, “Presidential Election in Iran: A Reality Check,” International Community of Iranian Academics, n.d., https://drive.google.com/file/d/1inOKaf3-_ibhGQNAPCeCIw-gvkj07DXK/view.
[135] Iran International, “Cabinet choices signal dark days ahead for Iran’s academia,” Iran International, August 15, 2024, https://www.iranintl.com/en/202408144109.
[136] Shafigeh Shirazi, “Calls to reinstate students, professors fall on deaf ears,” University World News, October 3, 2024, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20241003124507222.
[137] Roohola Ramezani, “Iran’s brain drain will not be stemmed by repression,” Times Higher Education, December 13, 2024, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/irans-brain-drain-will-not-be-stemmed-repression; and Jubin Katiraie, “Wave of Faculty Exodus Reaches Iran’s Major Universities,” Iran Focus, March 26, 2025, https://iranfocus.com/iran/53790-wave-of-faculty-exodus-reaches-irans-major-universities/.
[138] SAR AFMP. Islamic Azad University. November 3, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-11-03-islamic-azad-university/.
[139] SAR AFMP. University of Tehran. February 15, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-02-15-univerity-of-tehran/; Iran International, “IRAN: Protests persist over death of Iranian university student,” Iran International, February 15, 2025, https://www.iranintl.com/en/202502152909; and Iran International, “IRAN: Protests persist over death of Iranian university student,” Iran International, February 15, 2025, https://www.iranintl.com/en/202502152909.
[140] Rachel Fieldhouse, “Escalating Israel–Iran conflict damages science labs,” Nature, June 17, 2025, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01915-1.
[141] Jenna Jordan and Rachel Whitlark, “Nuclear scientists have long been targets in covert ops – Israel has brought that policy out of the shadows, “The Conversation, June 19, 2025, https://theconversation.com/nuclear-scientists-have-long-been-targets-in-covert-ops-israel-has-brought-that-policy-out-of-the-shadows-259263; John Leicester, “Israel killed at least 14 scientists in an unprecedented attack on Iran’s nuclear know-how,” Associated Press, June 24, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/israel-iran-nuclear-science-attacks-e298f00ba261debba4499a48c9df8b3d; and Institute for Science and International Security, “Significance of the Targeted Nuclear Scientists in the 12-Day War,” July 15, 2025, https://isis-online.org/isis-reports/significance-of-the-targeted-nuclear-scientists-in-the-12-day-war.
[142] Roohola Ramezani, “Israel’s strikes have sent shockwaves through Iran’s academic community,” Times Higher Education, June 27, 2025, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/israels-strikes-have-sent-shockwaves-through-irans-academic-community.
[143] Manija Mirzaie, “Afghan academics, students fleeing Iran face bleak future, University World News, July 25, 2025, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20250702181302973; Shafigeh Shirazi and Shuriah Niazi, “Foreign students flee Tehran as campuses adopt ‘war footing’,” University World News, June 19, 2025, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20250619014857263; and Angela Mary Thomas, “’Will we live?’: Indian medical students trapped in Iran plead for a way out as conflict escalates,” Edex, June 14, 2025, https://www.edexlive.com/news/2025/Jun/14/will-we-live-indian-medical-students-trapped-in-iran-plead-for-a-way-out-as-war-escalates-israel.
[144] Arezou Rezvani, “Iran cracking down on people suspected of aiding Israel in war last month, NPR, July 2, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/07/03/nx-s1-5450291/iran-cracking-down-on-people-suspected-of-aiding-israel-in-war-last-month; And Reuters, “Iran intensifies internal security crackdown with executions and mass arrests,” The Guardian, June 25, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/25/iran-intensifies-internal-security-crackdown-with-executions-and-mass-arrests.
[145] SAR AFMP. Tehran University of Medical Science. June 14, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-06-14-tehran-university-of-medical-science/.
[146] SAR AFMP. Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies. June 15, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-06-15-institute-for-humanities-and-cultural-studies/.
[147] See, e.g., Padone, “Physical university in ‘liberated’ area continues to expand,” University World News, December 10, 2024, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20241210155255366. Kiana Duncan, “In divided Myanmar, graduates of a parallel education system struggle for recognition,” Radio Free Asia, December 11, 2024, https://www.rfa.org/english/myanmar/2024/12/12/myanmar-nug-university-12122024/; Helen Packer, “No education ‘better than oppressive one’ for Myanmar students,” Times Higher Education, September 2, 2024, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/no-education-better-oppressive-one-myanmar-students; and Tuang Za Kha, “The Academic Brain Drain Since Myanmar’s Military Coup,” The Diplomat, August 27, 2024, https://thediplomat.com/2024/08/the-academic-brain-drain-since-myanmars-military-coup/.
[148] SAR AFMP. University of Technology, Yatanarpon Cyber City. August 7, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-08-07-university-of-technology-yatanarpon-cyber-city/.
[149] UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Nicaragua: UN Experts document serious human rights violations targeting university sector in new report. Press Release. November 8, 2024, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/11/nicaragua-un-experts-document-serious-human-rights-violations-targeting.
[150] Katrin Kinzelbach, Staffan I. Lindberg, Lars Lott, and Angelo Vito Panaro. Academic Freedom Index 2025 Update. FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and V-Dem Institute. 2025. doi:10.25593/open-fau-1637.
[151] SAR AFMP. Benue State Polytechnic, Ugbokolo. July 11, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-07-11-benue-state-polytechnic-ugbokolo/
[152] SAR AFMP. University of Jos and University of Maiduguri. August 15, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-08-15-university-of-jos-and-university-of-maiduguri/
[153] SAR AFMP. Enugu State College of Health Technology. August 15, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-08-15-enugu-state-college-of-health-technology/
[154] SAR AFMP. Joseph Sarwan Tarka University, Makurdi. February 25, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-02-25-joseph-sarwan-tarka-university/
[155] SAR AFMP. Federal University Dutsin-Ma. March 2, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-02-federal-university-dutsin-ma/
[156] SAR AFMP. Federal University Dutsin-Ma. March 18, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-18-federal-university-of-dutsin-ma/
[157] SAR AFMP. Akwa Ibom State Polytechnic. March 17, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-17-akwa-ibom-state-polytechnic/
[158] Glorious Olajire, “Beyond the Placards: The Reality of Nigerian Youths Participation in Protests,” Campus Reporter, January 20, 2025, .https://campusreporter.africa/beyond-the-placards-the-reality-of-nigerian-youths-participation-in-protests/
[159] Ibid.
[160] Paul Cochrane, “90,000 students have lost access to HE in Gaza – Academic,” University World News, January 16, 2025, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20250116095244357; and Katrina Miller, “The Plight of the Palestinian Scientist,” New York Times, December 10, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/10/science/palestinian-scientists-gaza-west-bank.html.
[161] Juliette Rowsell, (2025, February 6). “War damage to endure, but Gazan universities ‘must be rebuilt’,” Times Higher Education, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/war-damage-endure-gazan-universities-must-be-rebuilt.
[162] Middle East Studies Association. Letter to protest the intensification of Israel’s assaults on the education sector in the occupied West Bank. June 23, 2025, https://mesana.org/advocacy/committee-on-academic-freedom/2025/06/23/letter-to-protest-the-intensification-of-israels-assaults-on-the-education-sector-in-the-occupied-west-bank.
[163] Scholars at Risk, Gomel University, September 9, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-09-09-agriculture-university/.
[164] SAR AFMP. Quaid-e-Azam University. February 2, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-02-02-quaid-e-azam-university/.
[165] Scholars at Risk, Punjab University, University of Lahore, Superior University, October 10, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-10-10-punjab-university-university-of-lahore-and-superior-university/.
[166] Scholars at Risk, Multiple Institutions, October 16, 2024, https://www.sc holarsatrisk.org/report/2024-10-16-multiple-institutions/.
[167] SAR AFMP. University of Balochistan. May 29, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-05-29-university-of-balochistan/.
[168] SAR AFMP. Khuzdar University. May 24, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-05-24-khuzdar-university/.
[169] Scholars at Risk, Punjab University, August 24, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-08-24-punjab-university/.
[170] SAR AFMP. Unaffiliated. January 21, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-01-21-unaffiliated/.
[171] SAR AFMP. Unaffiliated. January 27, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-01-27-unaffiliated/. SAR AFMP. Unaffiliated. January 29, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-01-29-unaffiliated/.
[172] Scholars at Risk, Punjab Group of Colleges, October 14, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-10-14-punjab-group-of-colleges-lahore/.
[173] Scholars at Risk, Punjab Group of Colleges, October 16, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-10-16-punjab-group-of-colleges/.
[174] Scholars at Risk, Punjab Group of Colleges, October 16, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-10-17-punjab-group-of-colleges/.
[175] Scholars at Risk, Quaid-e-Azam University, September 29, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-09-29-quaid-e-azam-university/.
[176] Sergei Goryashko and Sean Seddon, “Russian hypersonic scientist jailed for treason,” BBC, September 3, 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjw3gdxed60o.
[177] SAR AFMP. Khristianovich Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. September 3, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-09-03-khristianovich-institute-of-theoretical-and-applied-mechanics/.
[178] SAR AFMP. St. Petersburg State University of Telecommunications. February 14, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-02-15-st-petersburg-state-university-of-telecommunications/
[179] Alyona Lobankova, “’My own classmates turned me in’: How Russian universities are cracking down on anti-war activists,” The Insider, January 4, 2025, https://theins.ru/en/society/277684.
[180] A UWN Reporter, “New law hands control over student numbers to government,” University World News, May 30, 2025, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20250529202925924.
[181] Global Voices, “University unexpectedly closes political science department,” University World News, July 13, 2024, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20240713151123237#:~:text=Global%20Voices%20translated%20and%20republished,Institute%20and%20the%20Kennan%20Institute.
[182] Ibid.
[183] SAR AFMP. Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. June 5, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-06-05-association-for-slavic-east-european-and-eurasian-studies/.
[184] David Matthews, “Publication data sees Russian science increasingly isolated,” Science|Business, March 16, 2025, https://sciencebusiness.net/news/fnw/publication-data-sees-russian-science-increasingly-isolated; and Nicholas Fenton and Alexander Kolyandr, “Down But Not Out: The Russian Economy Under Western Sanctions,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, April 11, 2025, https://www.csis.org/analysis/down-not-out-russian-economy-under-western-sanctions.
[185] Ilya Matveev and Evgeny Roshchin, “Insights from Russia on Academic Freedom During War,” American Association of University Professors, 2025, https://www.aaup.org/article/insights-russia-academic-freedom-during-war.
[186] Eldar Emric, “Serbia’s students lead Danube bridge blockades as protest draws tens of thousands calling for change,” AP News, February 1, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/serbia-protest-students-blockade-bridges-ae5e665a4e1fde8196ff8283e76a9c1c; and Sanja Kljajic, “How Serbia’s student protesters organize fight for justice,” DW, February 16, 2025, https://www.dw.com/en/how-serbias-student-protesters-organize-fight-for-justice/a-71608717.
[187] Dusan Stojanovic, “Daily anti-corruption protests are rattling Serbia’s leader. What might come next?,” AP News, January 29, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/serbia-protests-students-vucic-25de4c2730b3e72609da3c9aaf99f99f; and Csongor Körömi and Šejla Ahmatović, “Serbia’s government resigns as Vučić floats idea of fresh elections,” Politico, March 19, 2025, https://www.politico.eu/article/serbia-government-resign-milos-vucevic-aleksandar-vucic-floats-new-elections/.
[188] Emily Dixon, “Serbia protests ‘about protecting present and future’, students say,” Times Higher Education, February 3, 2025, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/serbia-protests-about-protecting-present-and-future-students-say.
[189] Mićo Tatalović and Nenad Jarić Daunhauer, “Serbian universities feel the strain as student protests enter fourth month,” Science | Business, February 20, 2025, https://sciencebusiness.net/news/partnerships/serbian-universities-feel-strain-student-protests-enter-fourth-month.
[190] Jovana Karaulić, “When academia stands up: Serbia’s higher education under siege,” The Progressive Post, May 27, 2025, https://feps-europe.eu/when-academia-stands-up-serbias-higher-education-under-siege.
[191] Associated Press, “Serbians march in 4 cities against government pressure and hate speech,” AP News, March 31, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/serbia-protest-marches-university-students-e1ceec45481b358d0f9ba4a75aeb9915; Associated Press, “Thousands brave heavy rain to protest Serbia’s crackdown on universities,” Associated Press, May 23, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/serbia-students-protests-crackdown-universities-a3dda82a89c991122127337f68106271; and Marta Szpala, “Students vs the system – protest strategies in Serbia,” OSW Centre for Eastern Studies, May 21, 2025, https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-commentary/2025-05-21/students-vs-system-protest-strategies-serbia.
[192] SAR AFMP. Multiple Institutions. March 15, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-15-multiple-institutions-2/.
[193] Emily Dixon, “Serbia appoints ‘harmful’ new education minister amid protests, “Times Higher Education, April 27, 2025, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/serbia-appoints-harmful-new-education-minister-amid-protests.
[194] Amnesty International. “Serbia: Authorities must end unlawful use of force against protesters and investigate reports of police violence.” Amnesty International, July 4, 2025, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/07/serbia-authorities-must-end-unlawful-use-of-force-against-protesters-and-investigate-reports-of-police-violence/; and Jovana Gec (AP), “Massive anti-government protest in Serbia’s capital leads to dozens of arrests,” PBS, June 29, 2025, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/massive-anti-government-protest-in-serbias-capital-leads-to-dozens-of-arrests.
[195] AFMP. University of Arts in Belgrade. November 22, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-11-22-university-of-arts-in-belgrade/.
[196] SAR AFMP. Multiple Institutions. January 16, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-01-16-multiple-institutions/.
[197] AFMP. Multiple Institutions. January 24, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-01-24-multiple-institutions/.
[198] AP, “Thousands brave heavy rain to protest Serbia’s crackdown on universities,” Associated Press, May 23, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/serbia-students-protests-crackdown-universities-a3dda82a89c991122127337f68106271; Mićo Tatalović, “Serbia’s academics call for research chapter in EU accession process to be reopened,” Science | Business, May 14, 2025, https://sciencebusiness.net/news/research-and-innovation-gap/serbias-academics-call-research-chapter-eu-accession-process-be; Sanja Kljajic, “Serbia’s protesting students, teachers remain defiant,” DW, March 13, 2025, https://www.dw.com/en/serbias-protesting-students-teachers-remain-defiant/video-71914973; Vreme, “Vučić’s potato for professors: Canceled salaries at universities,” Vreme, March 21, 2025, https://vreme.com/en/vesti/vucicev-krompir-za-profesore-ukinute-plate-na-univerzitetima/; and Boban Karović, “Turbulence in higher education: Professors without salaries, inspections at faculties,” NIN, March 27, 2025, https://www.nin.rs/english/news/72425/professors-without-salaries-inspection-at-universities-turmoil-in-higher-education.
[199] Mićo Tatalović, “Serbia’s academics call for research chapter in EU accession process.”
[200] Mićo Tatalović, “Serbia’s academics outraged over limits to research, disappointed by EU response,” Science | Business, April 22, 2025, https://sciencebusiness.net/news/research-and-innovation-gap/serbias-academics-outraged-over-limits-research-disappointed-eu; and Jelena Tušup, “OTKRIVAMO Tekst inicijative profesora Ustavnom sudu za obaranje Uredbe kojom im Vlada nezakonito smanjuje plate [WE REVEAL the text of the professor’s initiative to the Constitutional Court to overturn the Decree by which the Government illegally reduces their salaries],” Nova.rs, March 26, 2025, https://nova.rs/vesti/drustvo/otkrivamo-tekst-inicijative-profesora-ustavnom-sudu-za-obaranje-uredbe-kojom-im-vlada-nezakonito-smanjuje-plate/.
[201] Katarina Baletic, “Serbian Police Enter University Faculty, Detain Journalist, in Protest Clampdown,” Balkan Insight, April 11, 2025, https://balkaninsight.com/2025/04/11/serbian-police-enter-university-faculty-detain-journalist-in-protest-clampdown/.
[202] FoNet, “Rector Vladan Đokić called in by the police,” NIN, April 17, 2025, https://www.nin.rs/english/news/74546/rector-vladan-dokic-called-in-by-the-police.
[203] SAR AFMP. University of Gezira. July 23, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-07-23-university-of-gezira/.
[204] See for example, Radio Tamazuj, “East Darfur: Al Daein University resumes medicine studies,” Radio Tamazuj, July 14, 2024, https://www.radiotamazuj.org/en/news/article/east-darfur-al-daein-university-resumes-medicine-studies.
[205] Karin Fischer, “In yet another global hot spot, education is a casualty,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 6, 2024, https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/latitudes/2024-11-06.
[206] Linda Nordling, “War-torn Sudan’s lost scientists ‘may never return’,” Research Professional News, September 19, 2024, https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-africa-pan-african-2024-9-war-torn-sudan-s-lost-scientists-may-never-return/.
[207] SAR AFMP, Middle East Technical University, March 27, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-27-middle-east-technical-university/; SAR AFMP, Middle East Technical University, Hacettepe University, Bilkent University, March 21, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-21-middle-east-technical-university-hacettepe-university-bilkent-university; and SAR AFMP, Middle East Technical University, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-20-middle-east-technical-university/.
[208] Nathan M Greenfield, “Study raises fears of a ‘lost generation’ of scientists,” University World News, July 8, 2024, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20240708170441802.
[209] Ivanka Popović, “There is a road ahead for Ukraine’s universities,” European Universities Association, February 24, 2025, https://www.eua.eu/our-work/expert-voices/there-is-a-road-ahead-for-ukraines-universities.html.
[210] David Livingstone, “Western scholars must not let the war black out Ukrainian higher education,” Times Higher Education, September 19, 2024, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/western-scholars-must-not-let-war-black-out-ukrainian-higher-education.
[211] SAR AFMP, Sumy State University, September 3, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-09-03-sumy-state-university/; SAR AFMP, Donbas State Pedagogical University, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-11-14-donbas-state-pedagogical-university/; SAR AFMP, Unidentified Institution, November 25, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-11-25-unknown-institution/; SAR AFMP, Zaporizhzhia Polytechnic National University, January 23, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-01-23-zaporizhzhia-polytechnic-national-university/; SAR AFMP, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, February 4, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-02-04-taras-shevchenko-national-university-of-kyiv/; SAR AFMP, Kharkiv National University of Urban Economy, February 26, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-02-26-kharkiv-national-university-of-urban-economy/; SAR AFMP, Sumy State University, April 13, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-04-13-sumy-state-university/; SAR AFMP, Dnipro State Medical University, April 17, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-04-17-dnipro-state-medical-university/; SAR AFMP, Zaporizhzhia Polytechnic National University, May 1, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-05-01-zaporizhzhia-polytechnic-national-university/; SAR AFMP, Ivan Puluj Ternopil National Technical University, June 6, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-06-06-ivan-puluj-ternopil-national-technical-university/; SAR AFMP, South Ukrainian National Pedagogical University, June 17, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-06-17-ushynskyi-south-ukrainian-national-pedagogical-university/; and SAR AFMP. Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. June 22, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-06-22-igor-sikorsky-kyiv-polytechnic-institute/.
[212] Oleh Ivanov, “Stolen Ukrainian universities: An invisible Russian weapon,” Vox Ukraine, March 14, 2025, https://voxukraine.org/en/stolen-ukrainian-universities-an-invisible-russian-weapon-2.
[213] NV Nation, “At Kyiv’s request, Lithuania halts university funding for Ukrainian refugees,” The New Voice of Ukraine, July 15, 2024, https://english.nv.ua/nation/at-kyiv-s-request-lithuania-halts-university-funding-for-ukrainian-refugees-50435006.html.
[214] Kateryna Hodunova, “Basic military training to start in Ukrainian higher education institutions in September 2025,” Kyiv Independent, January 17, 2025, https://kyivindependent.com/basic-general-military-training-to-start-in-ukrainian-higher-education-institutions-in-september-2025/; Stefan Korshak, “Ukraine to Kick Off Mandatory Military Training for University Students – Men and Women,” Kyiv Post, March 18, 2025, https://www.kyivpost.com/post/49153; and Abbey Fenbert and the Kyiv Independent news desk, “Students who fail military exam or refuse oath cannot continue higher ed, official says,” Kyiv Independent, January 18, 2024. https://kyivindependent.com/students-who-fail-military-exam-or-refuse-oath-cannot-continue-studies-official-says/.
[215] Katrin Kinzelbach, Staffan I. Lindberg, Lars Lott, and Angelo Vito Panaro. 2025. Academic Freedom Index 2025 Update. FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and V-Dem Institute. doi:10.25593/open-fau-1637, p.9.
[216] Liam Knox, “Education Department Investigates Dozens of Colleges for Discrimination,” Inside Higher Ed, March 15, 2025, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/diversity/race-ethnicity/2025/03/15/education-department-accuses-51-colleges-discrimination.
[217] Jessica Blake, “Congress Eyes More Control Over Colleges,” Inside Higher Education, March 21, 2025, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2025/03/21/congress-eyeing-more-control-over-colleges.
[218] The White House, Reforming Accreditation To Strengthen Higher Education, April 23, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/reforming-accreditation-to-strengthen-higher-education/; Jessica Blake and Katherine Knott, “Trump’s Latest Executive Orders Target Accreditation, Foreign Gifts,” Inside Higher Education, April 23, 2025, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2025/04/23/trumps-latest-executive-orders-target-accreditation; The White House, Ending Illegal Discrimination And Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity, January 21, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-illegal-discrimination-and-restoring-merit-based-opportunity/; Jasper Smith, “Trump Has Issued a Blitz of Executive Orders. Some Could Affect Higher Ed,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 21, 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/article/trump-has-issued-a-blitz-of-executive-orders-some-could-affect-higher-ed; and The White House, Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports, February 5, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/keeping-men-out-of-womens-sports/.
[219] See, for example, Katherine Mangan and Jasper Smith, “It’s Punishment for the Sake of Punishment, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 28, 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/article/its-punishment-for-the-sake-of-punishment.
[220] US Department of Education. U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights Sends Letters to 60 Universities Under Investigation for Antisemitic Discrimination and Harassment, March 10, 2025, https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-educations-office-civil-rights-sends-letters-60-universities-under-investigation-antisemitic-discrimination-and-harassment.
[221] SAR AFMP, Columbia University, March 7, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-07-columbia-university/; SAR AFMP, Harvard University, April 14, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-04-14-harvard-university/; SAR AFMP, Cornell University, April 8, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-04-08-cornell-university/; SAR AFMP, Northwestern University, April 8, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-04-08-northwestern-university/; SAR AFMP, Brown University, April 3, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-04-03-brown-university/; SAR AFMP, Princeton University, April 1, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-04-01-princeton-university/; and SAR AFMP, University of Pennsylvania, March 19, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-19-university-of-pennsylvania/.
[222] For example, the freezing of Princeton University’s funds came two weeks after the university’s president Christopher Eisgruber published an opinion piece in The Atlantic that criticized the US administration’s actions towards Columbia University. See: Liam Knox, “Trump Freezes Princeton’s Federal Funding,” Inside Higher Education, April 2, 2025, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2025/04/02/trump-admin-freezes-half-princetons-federal-funding.
[223] Jessica Blake, “How Trump Uses the DOJ as Tool of ‘Fear-Mongering’,” Inside Higher Education, July 7, 2025, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2025/07/07/trump-deploys-justice-dept-ramp-attacks-higher-ed.
[224] SAR AFMP, Multiple Institutions, January 14, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-01-14-multiple-institutions/; SAR AFMP, Multiple Institutions, March 27, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-27-multiple-institutions/; SAR AFMP, Multiple Institutions, March 28, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-28-multiple-institutions/; and SAR AFMP, Multiple Institutions, April 4, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-04-04-multiple-institutions/.
[225] Chronicle Staff. DEI Legislation Tracker. Chronicle of Higher Education, May 30, 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/article/here-are-the-states-where-lawmakers-are-seeking-to-ban-colleges-dei-efforts
[226] Rose Horowitch, “Colleges Have No Idea How to Comply With Trump’s Orders,” The Atlantic, March 10, 2025, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/dei-letter-universities-trump/681986/; and J. Brian Charles, “Pre-empting Conservative Lawmakers, Mizzou Disbands DEI Work,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 30, 2024, https://www.chronicle.com/article/preempting-conservative-lawmakers-mizzou-disbands-dei-work. See also examples including: SAR AFMP, Rutgers University, January 23, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-01-23-rutgers-university/; SAR AFMP, University of North Carolina System, February 5, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-02-05-university-of-north-carolina-system/; SAR AFMP, West Point Military Academy, February 4, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-02-04-west-point-military-academy/; SAR AFMP, United States Naval Academy, October 4, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-10-04-united-states-naval-academy/; SAR AFMP, United States Naval Academy, March 19, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-19-united-states-naval-academy/; SAR AFMP, United States Naval Academy, March 31, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-31-united-states-naval-academy/; and SAR AFMP, United States Naval Academy, April 15, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-04-15-united-states-naval-academy/.
[227] Christa Dutton and Jasper Smith, “Clinging to Control,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 12, 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/article/clinging-to-control.
[228] Jessica Blake. “What to Know About Trump’s Strategy Targeting Colleges’ Grants and Contracts” Inside Higher Education, April 18, 2025, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2025/04/18/what-know-about-trumps-funding-threats-colleges.
[229] “Grant Terminated,” Inside Higher Education, April 7, 2025, https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2025/04/07/federal-grant-cuts-researchers-own-words-opinion; Katrina Miller and Carl Zimmer, “National Science Foundation Terminates Hundreds of Active Research Awards,” New York Times, April 22, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/science/trump-national-science-foundation-grants.html; and Dan Bauman, “Trump Plans to Shutter USAID. Here’s What That Could Mean for Higher Ed,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 11, 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/article/trump-plans-to-shutter-usaid-heres-what-that-could-mean-for-higher-ed.
[230] Jasper Smith and David Jesse. “‘Institutional Destruction’: A Federal-Funding Pause Sent Shockwaves Through Higher Ed,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 28, 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-federal-funding-pause-sent-shockwaves-through-higher-ed-heres-what-we-know.
[231] Stephanie M. Lee, “The Scientists Who Got Ghosted by the NIH,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 9, 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-scientists-who-got-ghosted-by-the-nih; Megan Zahneis, “Despite a Judge’s Ruling, Large Swaths of NIH Funding Remain Effectively Frozen” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 20, 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/article/despite-a-judges-ruling-large-swaths-of-nih-funding-remain-effectively-frozen?sra=true; and Jeff Tollefson, Max Kozlov, Alexandra Witze, and Dan Garisto, “Trump’s siege of science: how the first 30 days unfolded and what’s next,” Nature, February 20, 2025, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00525-1?utm_source=Live+Audience&utm_campaign=65192fafeb-nature-briefing-daily-20250220.
[232] Megan Zahneis, “Research Universities Are Poised to Lose Billions Under Trump’s Sudden Cut, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 8, 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/article/research-universities-are-poised-to-lose-billions-under-trumps-sudden-cut; Department of Energy, Department of Energy Overhauls Policy for College and University Research, Saving $405 Million Annually for American Taxpayers, April 11, 2025, https://www.energy.gov/articles/department-energy-overhauls-policy-college-and-university-research-saving-405-million; and National Science Foundation, Policy Notice: Implementation of Standard 15% Indirect Cost Rate, May 2, 2025, https://www.nsf.gov/policies/document/indirect-cost-rate.
[233] SAR AFMP. Multiple Institutions, March 15, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-15-multiple-institutions/.
[234] Stephanie Saul, “As Trump Goes After Universities, Students Are Now on the Chopping Block,” New York Times, March 6, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/06/us/politics/trump-university-funding-grad-student-cuts.html; Josh Moody, “Federal Funding Uncertainty Prompts Hiring Freezes,” Inside Higher Education, February 19, 2025, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2025/02/19/federal-funding-uncertainty-prompts-hiring-freezes; Shaoni Bhattacharya, “‘Weaponisation’ of US research funding risks ‘lasting damage’,” Research Professional News, March 27, 2025, https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-usa-universities-2025-3-weaponisation-of-us-research-funding-risks-lasting-damage/; Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff, “Johns Hopkins University to slash 2,000 jobs after $800M in federal cuts,” Washington Post, March 13, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2025/03/13/johns-hopkins-layoffs-federal-funding-cuts/; and Kathryn Palmer, “The Ripple Effects of Draining the Ph.D. Pool,” Inside Higher Education, April 11, 2025, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/graduate-students-and-postdocs/2025/04/11/how-drop-phd-students-could-affect-colleges.
[235] Afeez Bolaji, (2025, February 9). “Trump’s ‘deadly, anti-people policy’ is taking its toll,” University World News, February 9, 2025, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20250210001048466; and Desmond Thompson, “Trump leaves South African universities reeling,” February 6, 2025, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20250205183156837.
[236] Yogita Limaye. “Afghan women who fled Taliban to study abroad face imminent return after USAID cuts.” BBC, March 8, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg4k25wlw21o.
[237] Wagdy Sawahel. “Universities ‘save’ students’ amid Trump’s aid pause.” University World News, February 6, 2025, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20250205163734812.
[238] Caitlin Cassidy, “Trump administration accused of ‘blatant foreign interference’ in Australian universities over questionnaire on DEI and gender,” The Guardian, March 14, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/mar/14/australian-university-sector-accuses-trump-administration-of-blatant-interference-in-research; John Ross, “Australian scientists demand meeting over Trump grant cuts,” Times Higher Education, March 21, 2025, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/australian-scientists-demand-meeting-over-trump-grant-cuts; Jack Grove, “Trump’s DEI crackdown ‘could block US-UK research collaborations’,” Times Higher Education, February 14, 2025, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/trumps-dei-crackdown-could-block-us-uk-research-collaborations; and Joana Mourão Carvalho, “Trump administration sent ideological questionnaire to Portuguese universities and cut support, Euronews, April 11, 2025, https://www.msn.com/pt-pt/noticias/ultimas/administra%C3%A7%C3%A3o-trump-enviou-question%C3%A1rio-ideol%C3%B3gico-a-universidades-portuguesas-e-cortou-apoios/ar-AA1CJFFz.
[239] Stephanie Nolen, “Defunded Aid Programs Are Asked by Trump Administration to Prove Their Value, on a Scale of 1 to 5,” New York Times, March 6, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/06/health/usaid-freeze-review.html; Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Apoorva Mandavilli, “Trump Administration Sends Politically Charged Survey to Researchers,” New York Times, March 7, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/health/foreign-aid-questionnaire.html; Emily Dieckman, “Survey from Trump Administration Asks Researchers Abroad About Involvement in DEI, Environmental Justice, and Climate Projects,” Eos, March 27, 2025, https://eos.org/research-and-developments/survey-from-trump-administration-asks-researchers-abroad-about-involvement-in-dei-environmental-justice-and-climate-projects; and Smriti Mallapaty, “Trump team ‘survey’ sent to overseas researchers prompts foreign-interference fears,” Nature, March 20, 2025, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00850-5.
[240] Katherine Mangan. “Pro-Palestinian Protesters Stuck in Disciplinary and Legal Limbo.” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 5, 2024, https://www.chronicle.com/article/pro-palestinian-protesters-stuck-in-disciplinary-and-legal-limbo.
[241] Johanna Alonso, “Anticipating Fall Protests, Colleges Adopt a Range of Approaches,” Inside Higher Ed, August 16, 2024, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/free-speech/2024/08/16/how-universities-are-preparing-fall-protests; and Katherine Mangan, “New Rules and Familiar Challenges as Antiwar Protesters Return to Campuses: ‘The Stakes Are Extraordinarily High’,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 5, 2024, https://www.chronicle.com/article/new-rules-and-familiar-challenges-as-antiwar-protesters-return-to-campuses-the-stakes-are-extraordinarily-high.
[242] Stephanie Saul. “A Mysterious Group Says Its Mission Is to Expose Antisemitic Students,” New York Times, April 1, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/us/israel-gaza-student-protests-canary-mission.html. See also Natasha Lennard and Akela Lacy, “The Columbia Network Pushing Behind the Scenes to Deport and Arrest Student Protesters,” The Intercept, February 15, https://theintercept.com/2025/02/15/columbia-alumni-israel-whatsapp-deport-gaza-protesters/; and Karen Fischer, “An Anonymous Group’s List of Purported Critics of Israel Helped Steer a U.S. Crackdown on Student Activists,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 10, 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/article/an-anonymous-groups-list-of-purported-critics-of-israel-helped-steer-a-u-s-crackdown-on-student-activists.
[243] SAR AFMP. Tufts University. March 26, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-26-tufts-university/.
[244] SAR AFMP. Muhlenberg College. September 26, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-09-26-muhlenberg-college/.
[245] SAR AFMP, Harvard University, October 2, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-10-02-harvard-university/; SAR AFMP, Harvard University, October 24, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-10-24-harvard-university/; SAR AFMP, Harvard University, October 24, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-10-24-harvard-university-2/; and SAR AFMP, Harvard University, November 11, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-11-11-harvard-university/.
[246] SAR AFMP. University of California Berkeley. September 24, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-09-24-university-of-california-berkeley/.
[247] SAR AFMP. DePaul University. November 6, 2024, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-11-06-de-paul-university/.
[248] SAR AFMP, Columbia University, March 8, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-08-columbia-university/; SAR AFMP, Columbia University, March 8, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-08-columbia-university-2/; SAR AFMP, Georgetown University, March 17, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-17-georgetown-university/; SAR AFMP, Tufts University,. March 26, 2025 https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-26-tufts-university/; and SAR AFMP, Columbia University, April 14, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-04-14-columbia-university/.
[249] Charlie Savage. “Congress Wrote a Deportation Law to Be Used ‘Sparingly.’ Trump Has Other Ideas.” New York Times, April 1, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/us/trump-deportations-students-campus-protests.html?.
[250] Prem Thakker, “SCOOP: ICE Revoking Students’ Immigration Statuses Without Their or the University’s Knowledge,” Zeteo, March 30, 2025, https://zeteo.com/p/ice-manually-revoking-university-students-residency-status-middle-east; “International Student Visas Revoked,” Inside Higher Education, April 25, 2025, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/global/international-students-us/2025/04/07/where-students-have-had-their-visas-revoked; Liam Knox, “Smashing the Student Visa System,” Inside Higher Education, April 3, 2025, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/global/international-students-us/2025/04/03/how-trump-wreaking-havoc-student-visa-system; and Zach Montague and Hamed Aleaziz, “U.S. Restores Legal Status for Many International Students, but Warns of Removals to Come,” New York Times, April 25, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/us/politics/trump-student-visa-cancellations.html.
[251] Makiya Seminera, Annie Ma, and Janie Har. “The US is reinstating records for international students. For some, it’s too late.” AP News, May 19, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/international-students-visas-terminated-trump-sevis-9f85c3c58a4b74c354df0d7d993cf34c.
[252] Liam Knox. “ICE Expands Student Deportation Powers.” Inside Higher Education, May 2, 2025, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/global/international-students-us/2025/05/02/new-ice-policy-puts-international-students-greater.
[253] Nahal Toosi, “Trump team pauses new student visa interviews as it weighs expanding social media vetting, Politico, May 27, 2025, https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/27/trump-team-orders-stop-to-new-student-visa-interviews-as-it-weighs-expanding-social-media-vetting-00370501; Karin Fischer, “As student-visa season heats up, the State Dept. freezes new interviews,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 28, 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/latitudes/2025-05-28; and Liam Knox, “Where International Students Stand Now,” Inside Higher Education, June 3, 2025, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/global/international-students-us/2025/06/03/chronicling-trumps-evolving-international-student.
[254] Edward Wong. “U.S. to Review Social Media Posts of Student and Scholar Visa Applicants.” New York Times, June 18, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/18/us/politics/student-visa-applications.html.
[255] Emily Badger, Aatish Bhatia, Asmaa Elkeurti, Steven Rich, and Ethan Singer, “These Are the U.S. Universities Most Dependent on International Students,” New York Times, May 23, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/upshot/harvard-trump-international-students.html; and Madeline Zavodny, “The Importance Of Immigrants And International Students To Higher Education In America,” National Foundation For American Policy, May 2025, https://nfap.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Importance-of-Immigrants-and-International-Students-to-Higher-Education.NFAP-Policy-Brief.2025.pdf.
[256] Kathryn Palmer, “The Ripple Effects of Draining the Ph.D. Pool,” Inside Higher Ed, April 11, 2025, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/graduate-students-and-postdocs/2025/04/11/how-drop-phd-students-could-affect-colleges; and Katherine Knott, (2025, February 25). “Colleges Restrict Graduate Student Admissions After NIH Proposes Rate Cut,” Inside Higher Ed, February 25, 2025, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/science-research-policy/2025/02/25/facing-nih-cuts-colleges-restrict-grad-student.
[257] American Association of Colleges and Universities. “Call for Constructive Engagement.” April 22, 2025, https://www.aacu.org/newsroom/a-call-for-constructive-engagement.
[258] Christopher L. Eisgruber, “The Cost of the Government’s Attack on Columbia,” The Atlantic, March 19, 2025, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/columbia-academic-freedom/682088/; Alan Garber, “The Promise of American Higher Education,” Harvard University, April 14, 2025, https://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2025/the-promise-of-american-higher-education/; Ruth Abramovitz, “GU Law Community Responds to US Attorney’s Anti-DEI Letter,” The Hoya, March 14, 2025, https://thehoya.com/news/gu-law-community-responds-to-us-attorneys-anti-dei-letter/; Eugene Volokh, et al., “A Statement from Constitutional Law Scholars on Columbia,” New York Review of Books, April 14, 2025, https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/03/20/a-statement-from-constitutional-law-scholars-on-columbia/; Letter from Members of the National Academies of Sciences Engineering, and Medicine, The New York Times, March 31, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/31/health/scientists-letter.html; and Former and current college and university professors, “Harvard’s defiance of Trump’s ‘authoritarian incursion’ supported by over 80 past and present college and university presidents,” Fortune, April 15, 2025, https://fortune.com/2025/04/15/harvard-defiance-trump-supported-college-university-presidents/?abc123.
[259] Ben Brasch and Molly Hennessy-Fiske. “Big Ten university faculties push for defense compact against Trump.” Washington Post, April 24, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2025/04/24/big-10-universities-alliance-trump-attacks/.
[260] MADCs Tracker. University of Massachusetts Amherst. https://www.umass.edu/senate/madcs-tracker.
[261] Megan Zahneis, “This Time, Higher Ed’s Resistance to Trump Is Being Led by Its Associations,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 26, 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/article/this-time-higher-eds-resistance-to-trump-is-being-led-by-its-associations; and President’s Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, “Eighty-Six Institutions and Associations Lead the Presidents’ Alliance’s Filing of Amicus Brief Challenging Visa Revocations and Detentions,” April 10, 2025, https://www.presidentsalliance.org/press/eighty-six-institutions-and-associations-lead-the-presidents-alliances-filing-of-amicus-brief-challenging-visa-revocations-and-detentions/.
[262] Amnesty International. “Zimbabwe: Authorities must end massive crackdown on dissent before SADC summit.” Amnesty International, August 9, 2024, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/08/zimbabwean-authorities-must-end-their-crackdown-against-opposition-and-civil-society-members-ahead-of-the-southern-african-development-community-sadc-summit-scheduled-for-17-august-2024-in-harare/.
[263] SAR AFMP. Multiple Institutions. July 24, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2024-07-24-multiple-institutions/.
[264] Clemence Manyukwe. More allegations of government torture of student leaders. University World News, August 8, 2024, https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20240807182845506.
[265] Ibid.
[266] SAR AFMP. Midlands State University. March 12, 2024. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-03-12-midlands-state-university/.
[267] SAR AFMP. Great Zimbabwe University. April 9, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-04-09-great-zimbabwe-university/.
[268] Gamuchirai Masiyiwa. As University of Zimbabwe Strike Drags on, Pressure Mounts on the Country’s Higher Education System. Global Press Journal, July 18, 2025, https://globalpressjournal.com/africa/zimbabwe/university-zimbabwe-strike-drags-pressure-mounts-countrys-higher-education-system/.
[269] SAR AFMP. University of Zimbabwe. May 12, 2025. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/report/2025-05-12-university-of-zimbabwe/.
[270] SAR AFMP. University of Zimbabwe. June 26, 2025.
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