A new global index from Sweden's V Dem Institute and Germany's Friedrich Alexander University, built on input from more than 2,300 country experts, finds 50 of 179 countries and territories saw significant declines from 2015 to 2025, driven by universities losing the freedom to…
Academic freedom now has a scorecard, and the numbers are mostly bad. A new global index, compiled by Sweden's V-Dem Institute and Germany's Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg with input from more than 2,300 country experts, finds that 50 of 179 countries and territories saw a significant decline in academic freedom between 2015 and 2025. Only nine improved. The rest stayed flat or moved too little to register as a change.
The index tracks five variables. The one doing the most damage, according to the report, is institutional autonomy, a university's freedom to govern itself, including the right to hire faculty, set curricula, and decide what to research, without interference from politicians, wealthy donors, or religious authorities. When that lever weakens, the freedom of individual researchers falls with it.
That mechanism helps explain why the picture looks roughly the same in very different political systems. The report, summarized in Scientific American's coverage of the 2026 update, points to political attacks, legal reforms, and administrative interventions that have gradually undermined university self-governance in Hungary, India, and Türkiye, alongside faster-moving declines elsewhere.
The United States is the most striking rich-democracy case. The U.S. institutional-autonomy sub-score fell from 3.3 in 2019 to 1.7 in 2025, a drop the report describes as "fast and steep deterioration." That is a case study of the global mechanism, not a partisan verdict: the same variable that explains Budapest and Ankara is doing the work in Washington, and the index is built on expert coding rather than a tally of headlines.
The scorecard matters because academic freedom is not just an abstraction for professors. Studies cited in the index's underlying research link it to more and better science and innovation, which is to say, to the quality of the work that eventually reaches patients, voters, and consumers. A country that hollows out its universities' right to govern themselves is also choosing, slowly, what kind of knowledge it is willing to let them produce.
The next test is whether the 2026 update marks a floor or a pause. The 50-of-179 figure covers 2015 to 2025; the index's next data point will tell readers whether the curve has bent, and which countries have started rebuilding the institutional autonomy they lost.