From Orbán’s harassment of the Central European University in 2017, which led to its withdrawal from Hungary, to the undermining of the autonomy of Brazilian universities under Bolsonaro from 2019 onwards, to the current politically motivated cuts to research funding in the United States by the Trump administration: increasingly, academic freedom no longer seems to be a given, even in formally democratic countries. Data from the Academic Freedom Index (AFI) show that these events are not just a series of anecdotal incidents, but that they are part of a broader global trend. The dataset was created five years ago by an international team of academics with the objective to better contextualize the first signs of this development.

The Academic Freedom Index is a comparative measurement that evaluates countries worldwide every year over an extended time series regarding their degree of academic freedom, including aspects such as freedom to research and teach or university autonomy. The index data are generated on the basis of numerous, standardized assessments by experts (2,363 experts worldwide, on average more than ten per country-year) and summarized using a statistical model developed by social scientists at the V-Dem Institute in Gothenburg. Expert surveys have long been used in democracy and human rights research because it is the only form of data collection suitable for recording and comparing the lived reality of abstract concepts (such as freedom of research) in countries with different types of regimes and varying scopes of freedom.

The latest edition of the AFI dataset from March 2025 once again paints a worrying picture. Although individual positive developments can be reported year after year, spaces for free and independent science are overall declining. This also applies to democratic countries: here, the index values have on average fallen by around five percentage points over the past ten years alone. Particularly where anti-pluralist parties have come to power – such as in Hungary, Brazil and the United States – we can observe significant restrictions on academic freedom. The AFI data help to identify, classify, and explore these trends in more detail. However, learning the lessons and acting accordingly is a task for us all.