Academic Freedom in Liberal Democracies: Understanding the Intellectual History of a Contested Concept in Global Networks of Policy

Objective

In the recent context of rising nationalisms, populist anti-science rhetoric, and geopolitical tensions, universities and other higher education institutions are under pressure. Academic freedom, one of the foundational pillars of liberal democracy and central to the pluralist character of academic research and higher education, is threatened by attempts to instrumentalise science and scholarship for the realisation of political agendas. The aim of the FREEDOM project is to investigate how academic freedom became a vital value within international discourses on the politics of higher education during the emergence of the liberal world order in the second half of the 20th century. The project takes a special interest in the role of international organisations (IOs), specifically UNESCO and affiliated agencies, as ‘teachers of norms’ in the development of the concept of academic freedom during the Cold War as part of geopolitical alliance building, international diplomacy, and East-West tensions. To pursue this aim, FREEDOM constructs a novel interdisciplinary methodology that combines insights and techniques from education studies, history, and political science to study the intellectual-historical development of the idea of academic freedom and the conceptual shifts experienced through processes of transfer and translation within global networks of policy. FREEDOM is premised on the assumption that the critical scrutiny of the liberal value of academic freedom in its historical and contextual contingency during the emergence of the liberal world order in the Cold War years will de-westernize commonly held assumptions about academic freedom and provide more robust and context-sensitive understandings of academic freedom, necessary to address the threats of nationalism, populism and geopolitical tension.