The Authoritarian War on Academia

The current events in Serbia, involving the participation of students and academics in the ongoing protest movement, as well as the repression and censorship they have suffered at the hands of government authorities, compel me to revisit some ideas I expressed some time ago regarding the topic introduced in the title of this text. Let this serve as my modest reflection and expression of solidarity in light of the acts of violence affecting my colleagues in the local academic community.

Academic freedom—now under threat across the globe—is understood as the unrestricted right of scholars to freedom of teaching, opinion, and discussion in conducting their research and in disseminating and publishing the results of such work. It encompasses various interrelated requirements and phenomena, such as freedom of research and teaching, exchange and dissemination, institutional autonomy, campus integrity, and academic and cultural freedom of expression. To defend these freedoms, it is not necessary to choose—based on ideology or degree of control—between different forms of censoring academic freedom, but rather to uphold a shared denunciation of their effects on human rights and democracy.

Academic freedom finds in the university a privileged—though neither unique nor perfect—space for its development and defense. Universities are, moreover, fundamental vehicles for democratic culture. They become schools of citizenship, where people learn to coexist with ideas different from their own and practice critical thinking. In their classrooms, within a democratic order, we can expose the lies of power—political, economic, or pastoral—and forge alternative criteria. This is why universities and research institutes are prime targets for populists who, regardless of their ideology or legitimacy, aspire to concentrate a nation’s power in the hands of a few. In doing so, they become not mere demagogues but full-fledged autocrats.

I see three main paths emerging in the strategies used to neutralize intellectuals, institutions, and academic communities noncompliant with the official discourse. These ideal types take on various forms and nuances across different contexts, shaped by the agenda, resources, and political culture of domestic authoritarianism. Yet they are replicated, time and again, across the globe. Sometimes, they operate in pure form; other times, they appear intertwined.

Suppression erupts when anti-liberal political processes and groups—whether of a revolutionary or reactionary nature—eliminate any possibility of disseminating ideas different from those of the dominant power bloc. The state takeover of universities and the abolition of the very right to an education independent of power are hallmarks of modern despotism over the past century. Autocratic regimes—communist, fascist, and peripheral military dictatorships, among others—have always sought to eliminate any form of education that challenges the official single-minded doctrine. A factual annihilation, most often backed by punitive legislation and a totalizing ideology.

Erosion reveals itself—subtle yet harmful—in populist governments of various ideological stripes, united in their tendencies toward incomplete authoritarianism. This is what Viktor Orban has done with his obsessive siege of the Central European University in Budapest, what Recep Tayyip Erdoğan enacted by dismissing the rector of Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, and what Lopez Obrador has pursued in his assault on Mexico’s Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE). These agendas have expanded to impose further restrictions and dismissals across other research and teaching institutions in Hungary, Turkey, and Mexico. Without daring to de jure eliminate all forms of non-state education, the strategy here consists of de facto cornering critics—pushing them toward financial ruin, public scorn, and the loss of their spaces for expression. With the consent of businesspeople and institutional directors aligned with the ruling power—whether by ideology or profit—the erosive wave gradually devastates academic freedom, cloaked in a hegemonic mindset that does not seek to impose a single way of thinking but to instill mass conformity.

Demolition is the least recognizable form, yet perhaps the most perverse by its very nature. The state does not need to occupy the faculty building. Nor does it need to invade the university campus with military boots. Demolitionists, much like their counterparts in civil engineering, destroy from within—the very foundations of free education. In open societies, demolitionists are those cannibal intellectuals who, through the imposition of messianic narratives and hysterical activism, murder the very conditions for critical thinking and erode the possibility of informed debate free from secular dogmas.

This has happened in Latin America, where militant intellectuals applauded the rise of authoritarian governments that imposed domination over their countries’ higher education systems. Or in the United States, where until recently it was extremely difficult—within the dominant progressivism of many elite universities—to offer a critical analysis of the (misnamed) Social Justice framework without being accused and ostracized as a vile reactionary. This, incidentally, has now been countered in an illiberal fashion through an offensive of ideological and administrative actions—blending erosion and suppression—led by the Trump administration and backed by reactionary officials, media outlets, and think tanks.

Against these freedoms converge the paths of suppression, erosion, and demolition—stretching from Serbia to Argentina, from Venezuela to the United States—each posing a threat to teaching, expression, and research freedoms within contemporary universities. These freedoms, alongside the rights to civic organization, protest, and participation, form the epistemic, normative, and factual foundations of our democratic coexistence.

Currently, the protests taking place in Belgrade, Istanbul, Budapest, and other cities along Europe’s eastern flank suggest the possibility of a people’s spring with an uncertain outcome. However, this potential is threatened by the visible repression and cooperation among authoritarian regimes against their own populations, which could lead to a long winter of despotism. Faced with a global scenario in which we suffer the perverse convergence of reactionary and progressive agendas with erosive, demolishing, and suppressive tendencies, it is vital to understand and resist such assaults on critical thought and on the very existence, reflection, and public role of academic institutions, in defense of open, just, and free societies.