How Right-Wing Politics Is Redefining Academic Freedom and Targeting Critical Geography

Academic freedom has long been treated as a settled achievement of liberal democracies, enshrined in constitutions and university charters across the world. A new intervention published in the journal Geographica Helvetica argues that this assumption is no longer safe. Sybille Bauriedl, a professor of integrative geography at Europa-Universität Flensburg in Germany, documents how right-wing parties, reactionary media outlets and social media activists are systematically redefining what academic freedom means, and how that redefinition is being used to undermine critical scholarship in geography and beyond. Her analysis, based on years of teaching at German and Austrian universities and research in international networks, comes at a moment when the erosion of academic freedom is no longer confined to authoritarian states but is measurably advancing inside democracies such as Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

The conceptual core of Bauriedl’s argument is a distinction that political debates increasingly blur: the difference between academic freedom, freedom of expression and freedom of ideology. Academic freedom, as she frames it, is not a license to voice any opinion whatsoever. It is a right to produce and communicate knowledge through scientific methods, protected by law because truth claims derived from evidence must remain beyond the scope of political negotiation. In Germany, this protection is unusually strong, anchored in Article 5, paragraph 3 of the constitution, which states that art and science, research and teaching are free. The constitutional right covers anyone who seeks knowledge using scientific methods, and it has functioned as a globalized norm of liberal science since the 1960s. But a university, Bauriedl emphasizes, is not merely a legal construct. It is a social space in which the boundaries of what can be said are constantly tested, and in which perceived freedom depends heavily on whether researchers fear that their own work is under threat.

The strategy she identifies among right-wing actors is to contrast academic freedom with a supposed freedom of ideology, positioning critical research on gender, colonialism or climate change as ideological while presenting other fields, such as research on economic growth or nuclear power, as neutral science. This maneuver, she argues, inverts the actual epistemology of scholarship. Free speech makes no distinction about quality; academic freedom does. When an evolutionary biologist comments on gender studies, that is an opinion rather than science, because academic freedom requires participation in academic discourse grounded in a sufficient understanding of a subject and its methods. There is, in her account, no requirement for political neutrality at universities beyond neutrality with respect to political parties, provided those parties do not seek to abolish fundamental democratic values. Academics are in fact called upon to defend democratic values, and where necessary to be politically active in doing so. Researching uncomfortable truths about climate change, sexism and racism, she insists, is not ideological when the findings are fact-checked, and it may even require uncomfortable scientists willing to communicate them.

The empirical picture she assembles is sobering. A 2024 study by the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies surveyed 9,083 respondents drawn from all status groups at 158 German universities about their subjectively perceived academic freedom. A majority considered themselves free in choosing research topics, with 83 percent reporting freedom in topic selection, 64 percent in the implementation of research projects and 80 percent in publishing results. That still means roughly every fifth scientist feels their research practice is rather unfree. Eight percent expect moral devaluation and ten percent expect career problems, with only minor differences between status groups. Meanwhile, the Academic Freedom Index, an annual assessment covering 179 countries produced jointly by Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg and the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, draws on 2,363 country experts in its 2025 edition and tracks five indicators, including freedom of research and teaching, academic exchange, institutional autonomy and campus integrity. The 2026 update shows that although academic freedom remains better protected in democracies than in autocracies, significant losses have occurred in countries including the United States, Argentina and Mexico, with erosion of university autonomy in Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland and, most abruptly, the United States.

What has changed, according to Bauriedl, is not the existence of pressure on critical scholarship but its mechanism and scale. Scholars of critical theory have faced marginalization for decades, and feminist academics in geography endured mockery from colleagues well into the 1980s. What is new is that policing now arrives through coordinated public attacks by authoritarian groups, journalists or politicians, amplified through press and social media, naming and shaming individual researchers for allegedly ideologically motivated work. In Hungary, gender studies have been eliminated at universities, creating pressure on feminist scholars elsewhere. In the United States, aggressive action against specific research topics threatens to become a template exported to countries like Austria or Germany. At the national conference of the Alternative for Germany party in January 2025, the party leader announced that, should the party come to power, she would abolish gender studies and dismiss all professors who teach the subject. These campaigns, Bauriedl notes, are not attacks on specific people but on critical positions, and their function is to force unwanted voices into self-censorship while consuming researchers’ time, resources and health.

The German case illustrates how legal and institutional structures mediate these threats. Because German professors are employed by state ministries rather than by their university presidencies, they cannot be dismissed easily, which offers a measure of protection unavailable elsewhere. Yet gender, colonialism and climate studies remain fundamentally under pressure, requiring scientists to legitimize and defend the relevance of their topics repeatedly. Bauriedl also points to two resolutions of the German Bundestag, adopted in May 2019 and January 2025, which were intended to counter antisemitism but which, in her assessment, subject academics researching land grabbing, settler colonialism or genocide to general suspicion. By applying a definition of antisemitism that was not formulated for use at universities, the resolutions, she argues, fail to differentiate critical statements and can equalize descriptions of settlement colonialism and apartheid with the denial of Jewish self-determination, with a social media post criticizing the Israeli government potentially ending an academic career. She stresses that countering antisemitic discrimination at universities is important and appropriate, but that the instruments chosen violate academic freedom and university autonomy.

Neoliberal dynamics inside universities compound the external pressure, in Bauriedl’s analysis. Intensifying competition for research funding and excellence awards makes institutions more susceptible to the ideology of neutral science, anticipatory obedience and mechanisms of exclusion. Large research collaborations that must win competitive funding to operate avoid system-critical perspectives, pursuing seemingly neutral concepts instead of clusters of excellence on the causes of climate catastrophe, the social impacts of multiple crises or postcolonial extractivism. When university management prioritizes public image and the battle for attention over the conditions of academic freedom, even small political campaigns against individual members can succeed. In many recent cases, she observes, university administrations have capitulated rashly and failed to stand up for their scholars. Mission statements and general commitments, she argues, are not sufficient; universities have become norm takers rather than norm shapers, and different views on the meaning and scope of academic freedom have left institutions without coherent defensive strategies.

The resistance she documents is still fragmentary but growing. The German Association of Geography published a statement expressing concern about developments in the United States and Hungary, yet stumbled, in her view, into the discourse trap of ideological freedom by pairing a defense of diversity with a call for ideology-free research. More promising are the self-organized networks that scientists have built, including the Alliance for Critical Scholarship in Solidarity, the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies and the geographers collective Orangotango. In January 2026, geographers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland began forming a dedicated network on academic freedom, and major German research institutions have published guidelines for dealing with authoritarian attacks on scientific communication. Bauriedl proposes a concrete program: universities should refuse inquiries from political parties about the activities of academics, develop guidelines for handling hate speech from influencers and politicians, debate how to respond to research assignments from right-wing actors, prepare strategies for colleagues whose social media statements have been spied on and scandalized, and organize discipline-specific task forces capable of issuing rapid statements when research projects come under attack.

Her conclusion is that the institutional, political, social and economic conditions enabling critical research and teaching must be actively defended, because academic knowledge production depends on accepting the provisional nature of knowledge, its openness to criticism and revision, and methodological standards without submission to the disciplinary mainstream. There is a right to dissent in democratic societies, at universities and in geography, including analyses critical of the state. Defending that right, she argues, cannot be delegated to diversity managers or left to individual self-help. It requires collective practice within every discipline, solidarity with colleagues under pressure, and universities willing to provide legal assistance, protect communication channels when email accounts are flooded with hate messages and support scholars whose families are attacked. Safeguarding academic freedom demands significant effort from all academics, and that effort, she concludes, is essential for critical scholarship as much as for the capacity of societies to confront global crises and injustices.

Subject of Research: Threats to academic freedom in critical geography and strategies for institutional resistance

Article Title: Academic freedom for critical geography: principles, threats, resistance

Article References: Bauriedl, S. (2026). Academic freedom for critical geography: principles, threats, resistance. Geographica Helvetica, 81(3), 421-425. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-421-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-421-2026

Keywords: academic freedom, critical geography, right-wing politics, gender studies, climate change research, university autonomy, self-censorship, Academic Freedom Index, cancel culture, research funding, Germany, higher education policy