Academic freedom continues to decline globally, with a marked fall in the US, according to the 2026 update to the Academic Freedom Index. The index revealed that over the last decade academic freedom has slipped in 50 countries, with just nine registering improvement.
‘There is a negative downward trend for liberal democracies, which is the case in the UK but also Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy and Greece,’ says Angelo Panaro, an author of the update at the Institute of Political Science at Friedrich-Alexander University, Germany.
This year’s report highlights widespread declines in ‘institutional autonomy’ amongst countries. This is a measure of the independence of higher educational institutions from external state and external non-academic actors.
The Academic Freedom Index is developed using a peer-reviewed approach, which is based on country experts’ assessments. These expert judgements are aggregated and used to produce estimates of academic freedom and other measures of institutional autonomy. In 2026, the index drew on the expertise of over 2000 experts and over one million data points, which are available on its website.
Data shows that ‘the United States has experienced a remarkably sharp drop in institutional autonomy compared to other countries in Western Europe and North America,’ the report states. The decline began in 2020 and intensified last year, driven by ‘an unprecedented array of coercive federal executive measures that amplified and fueled state-level pressures on autonomous universities’. Attacks by the Trump administration targeted faculty members, staff and students, the report notes.
One egregious example concerned Harvard University being targeted over alleged left-wing bias and antisemitism, leading the Trump administration to freeze billions in federal funding. Harvard labelled the Trump administration’s actions as ‘unlawful government overreach’, triggered by the university refusing to surrender its independence.
The pressure on universities and research institutes in the US was more dramatic than in other countries such as Hungary, India and Turkey, where institutional autonomy declined more gradually.
The 2026 report noted that resistance in the US has emerged via legal and institutional pushback. Harvard University, for instance, fought and won in court.
‘American research universities are so dependent on federal research support that there was a huge amount of leverage,’ says Jeremy Berg, a biochemist at the University of Pittsburgh and former editor-in-chief of the Science journals. ‘A few universities have been pushing back, but most universities have kept their heads down.’
Institutions that decided to fight the Trump administration in the courts ‘have a pretty good chance of winning’, says Berg, showing ‘that the actions that the administration has taken are illegal’.
‘This academic freedom erosion is part of broader democratic backslide that we’re seeing in the US,’ says Jennifer Jones, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. ‘It mirrors the rise of authoritarianism that we’ve seen in Hungary and Turkey, where higher education is often targeted.’
Academic freedom began to decline globally around 2012, mostly driven by setbacks in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. ‘Nowadays the declines impact established liberal democracies,’ says Panaro. One reason is the rise of right-wing populist parties that tend to reject pluralism in public debates and engage in hostile rhetoric against academia, she says.
‘Countries that are more democratic generally have higher academic freedom,’ says Panaro. Those at the top of the index include Czechia, Estonia, Belgium, Jamaica, Sweden and Honduras. Examples of improvers include Bangladesh, Syria, Thailand and Uzbekistan. There is also hope that Hungary’s academic freedom will improve after the electoral defeat of the Orbán government this month.
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