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Monday, April 8th, 2024

Academic freedom declining globally, index finds

Author:    
Source:     Agence France-Presse (France)
Publication Date:     April 4, 2024 | 10:05AM ET
 Link: Academic freedom declining globally, index finds
Stephan:  

Academic freedom and fact-based education have seriously declined in the United States. If you read SR regularly you know that. What you may not realize is that degradation of education is going on all over the world as authoritarianism rises. I think all of this is happening because of the fear engendered by the precognitive unconscious awareness of what climate change is going to do to the cultures of the world. But the effect is going to be a humanity far less capable of factual understanding than in the past, and that has all kinds of negative implications.

A university protest in Hungary, which had the lowest level of academic freedom in Europe, according to an annual index
Credit: AFP

Just one in three people live a nation that guarantees the independence of universities and research, according to an annual index warning that academic freedom is declining worldwide, particularly in Russia, China and India.

Attacks on freedom of expression, interference at universities and the imprisonment of researchers are just some ways that “academic freedom globally is under threat,” the index said.

The Academic Freedom Index — based on input from more than 2,300 experts in 179 countries — was published last month as part of a report on democracy by the V-Dem Institute at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg.

It measures changes in higher education and research over the last half century by looking at five different indicators: freedom of research and teaching; of academic exchange; of academic and cultural expression; of institutional autonomy and campus integrity.

Katrin Kinzelbach, professor at Germany’s […]

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1 Comment

  1. RevDean on Monday, April 8, 2024 at 10:03 am

    I know there is a lot of ignorance because of the number of people who would throw their lives away by voting Republican; and that in itself is a big sign of ignorance, since Trump is still not in jail where he belongs, not in the Presidential seat, yet many people would vote for these malafactors called Republicans.