Academic freedom is declining worldwide, according to a report released in March, but the US is seeing an especially rapid deterioration across one particular metric: institutional autonomy, or the right for universities to determine who can teach, what can be taught, and who can be admitted onto their campuses.
This finding comes from the latest update of the Academic Freedom Index (AFI), an assessment that measures levels of academic freedom across 179 countries and territories. The AFI is the result of a collaboration between researchers at the Friedrich Alexander University (FAU) Erlangen–Nuremberg and the Varieties of Democracy Institute. Using assessments by 2,357 country experts worldwide, standardized questionnaires, and what the researchers say is a “a well-established statistical model,” the AFI analysis determines the state of academic freedom in each country based on five different indicators: freedom to research and teach, freedom of academic exchange and dissemination, institutional autonomy, campus integrity, and freedom of academic and cultural expression.
The AFI report showed that, between 2015 and 2025, 50 countries experienced a significant decline across all indicators of academic freedom. Forty-three countries, including countries in Europe and North America such as Poland, the Netherlands, Canada, and the US, saw substantive declines specifically in their schools’ institutional autonomy.
“The declines in institutional autonomy are very serious,” says Lars Lott, a postdoctoral researcher at FAU Erlangen–Nuremberg and project coordinator of the AFI assessment. It’s “a prerequisite to safeguarding merit-based appointments and to providing safe spaces for researchers whose work might challenge prevailing political or ideological interests.”
The US, in particular, has experienced an especially sharp and rapid decline in its institutional autonomy, which has fallen by over 50% in the past decade. In comparison, Hungary, India, and Türkiye—all democracies that have shifted toward autocracy—have seen much more gradual declines, the report says.
According to the report, this rapid deterioration in the US was likely spurred by state-level actions beginning in the 2010s, “mostly undertaken by officials aligned with the MAGA [Make America Great Again] movement.” Such actions include legislation that has weakened tenure or restricted which subjects universities can teach.
Isaac Kamola, a professor of political science at Trinity College and the director of the American Association of University Professors’ Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, says these actions were likely part of a larger political strategy advanced by this subset of the Republican party that eventually resulted in the recent targeting of universities on a variety of issues by the second Donald J. Trump administration. For example, over the past year, the administration has withheld federal funding and launched civil rights investigations to force universities to adjust their admission policies and crack down on student protests, he says. “That’s a clear violation of academic freedom and institutional autonomy.”
Despite the latest findings, Lott says, the declines in academic freedom are not set in stone. “We have seen this in different countries, such as Poland and Brazil, where antipluralist governments have been voted out of office,” he explains. “Since then, academic freedom has recovered in those countries, even if it has not returned to its previous levels.”
With regard to the US, Lott says that what gives him hope is seeing universities win court cases against federal actions that are putting pressure on academic freedom.
US policies have also met pushback at the faculty level, Kamola says. “There are a lot of examples, big and small, visible and not, of organized faculty defending academic freedom,” he says. “It’s more important than ever for faculty to organize at their own institutions.”
2026 American Chemical Society
