The immediate trigger for the editorial is a cluster of recent US regulatory developments, most prominently Executive Order 14279, titled ‘Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education,’ published in the Federal Register in April 2025. The editors read this order, alongside related regulations that could restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, as imposing constraints that may undermine three pillars they identify as foundational to academic life: the freedom to learn and teach, the freedom to conduct and valorize research, and the freedom to communicate scientific results both within and beyond academia. Their concern is not abstract. They cite reporting of anger and despair from within the US federal research system, including accounts of scientists who feel compelled to publish their work anonymously out of fear of potential repercussions, a practice that strikes at the heart of scientific accountability and attribution.

The first pillar the editors examine is the freedom to learn and teach. Academic freedom, they argue, is the cornerstone of a vibrant educational environment and is profoundly connected to societal development and human well-being. It guarantees that educators and students can engage in open dialogue, explore diverse perspectives, and challenge prevailing norms without fear of retribution. In their assessment, the recent US regulations prioritize certain ideological standards over educational quality and significance, threatening to stifle intellectual diversity and critical thinking. The technical consequence, they suggest, is a narrowing of the epistemic range within classrooms and curricula: when accreditation frameworks reward conformity to prescribed positions rather than intellectual rigor, the educational experience itself degrades, knowledge development slows, and universities lose their function as spaces for free and open inquiry. For a discipline like occupational therapy, whose practitioners must reason across biological, psychological, social, and cultural domains, that narrowing is not a peripheral concern but a direct threat to professional competence.

The second pillar concerns the freedom to conduct research and to translate its results into value for society. The editors emphasize that the ability to pursue inquiries wherever the evidence leads, without undue interference, is essential for scientific progress. Research on health, disability, aging, and social participation, the core territory of occupational science, depends on the willingness of investigators to follow data into politically sensitive terrain, whether that involves inequities in access to care, the lived experience of marginalized groups, or the evaluation of policies that affect daily functioning. Regulations that could restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives may, in the editors’ view, pose a direct threat to this freedom by limiting both the scope of permissible research questions and the dissemination of findings. The downstream effect is a slower and less reliable pipeline from discovery to application, hindering the advancement of knowledge and its use in addressing societal challenges and improving people’s health.

The third pillar, communication, receives perhaps the most pointed treatment. The editors describe the freedom to communicate scientific results as vital for the dissemination of knowledge, for democracy, and for the overall advancement of society. Researchers must be able to share findings with both the academic community and the public. Recent US policies, they warn, could create an environment of fear and self-censorship in which researchers become reluctant to publish controversial or politically sensitive results. The mechanics of this loss are worth spelling out: science advances through the open circulation of results, methods, and replications, and public policy depends on access to the best available evidence. When scholars withhold findings, bury inconvenient data, or anonymize their authorship to avoid retaliation, the scholarly record becomes incomplete and unattributable, peer review loses leverage, and the public is deprived of information that can inform policy and improve lives. The editors characterize this as a significant loss of valuable scientific contributions that would affect everyone, not only the academic community.

Underpinning the entire editorial is a normative claim about the legal and moral status of academic freedom. The editors assert that academic freedom is a key right, an inherent part of the human right to education, as recognized by the United Nations and by the European University Association. They point to the UN’s 2025 report on academic freedom and the freedom of opinion and expression, issued by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and to a further UN document, the report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to education on the right to academic freedom, which together articulate a framework in which academic freedom encompasses the freedom to access, disseminate, and produce information, to think freely, and to engage with a diversity of knowledge. The European University Association has similarly published guidance on how universities can protect and promote these freedoms. Within this framework, the editors argue, the recent actions of the US administration could threaten fundamental freedoms and pose a significant risk to the integrity and progress of higher education and research.

The editorial is also notable for its institutional provenance. Its lead author, Anita Björklund Carlstedt, is Editor-in-Chief of the Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, based at Jönköping University in Sweden, and the co-authors include national editors affiliated with VIA University College in Denmark, Gothenburg University, Umeå University, and Oslo Metropolitan University, alongside the presidents of the Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, and Norwegian associations of occupational therapists, several of whom serve on the board of the journal’s foundation. This breadth matters because it signals that concern about academic freedom is not confined to political scientists or legal scholars but extends to applied health disciplines whose practitioners work daily with people whose well-being depends on evidence-informed services. The journal’s leadership explicitly positions itself as part of the global research community, using its editorial platform to amplify what it describes as unprecedented challenges facing peers in the United States.

The editors are candid about the immediate consequences for their own fields. As professionals in occupational therapy and occupational science, they write, they are acutely aware of the effects these actions have on their disciplines, from disrupted collaborations to constrained research agendas. But they insist the implications extend far beyond occupational therapy, affecting the entire research community and undermining the trustworthiness of science and evidence itself. Their argument here is essentially one about epistemic infrastructure: modern evidence-based practice, whether in healthcare, education, or public policy, is built on the assumption that research is conducted and reported without ideological filtering. Once that assumption weakens, the credibility of every downstream product, from clinical guidelines to systematic reviews to public health recommendations, is called into question. The editors argue that scientists carry a responsibility to uphold these principles and to ensure that their work remains credible and impactful for societal growth, a responsibility they frame as inseparable from the scientific role itself.

The editorial closes with a call to action rather than a resignation. The authors urge the global academic community to defend and advocate for worldwide academic freedom and to stand in solidarity with colleagues in the United States. What solidarity looks like in practice is left to readers to determine, but the editorial itself models several possibilities: journals can use their editorial pages to document threats to scholarship, professional societies can lend their institutional weight to cross-border statements, and researchers in less affected countries can publish, cite, and collaborate in ways that keep threatened lines of inquiry alive. The piece, published on 23 June 2025 and available open access under a Creative Commons license, is short, spanning just two pages, but its reach is deliberately global. By framing academic freedom as a human right and its erosion as a shared professional emergency, the Scandinavian editors have turned a regional journal’s editorial into a signal flare for researchers everywhere who believe that science cannot function under conditions of fear, censorship, or ideological control.

Subject of Research: Threats to academic freedom in US higher education and research and international solidarity with affected researchers

Article Title: Defending academic freedom and showing solidarity with US researchers

Article References: Björklund Carlstedt, A., Helle, T., Häggblom-Kronlöf, G., Nilsson, I., Sveen, U., Thordardottir, B., Kåhlin, I., Nør Langager, T., Wikman, K., Leosdottir, T., & Holst Skyer, T. (2025). Defending academic freedom and showing solidarity with US researchers. Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 32(1), Article 2520102. https://doi.org/10.1080/11038128.2025.2520102

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1080/11038128.2025.2520102

Keywords: academic freedom, US higher education, Executive Order 14279, occupational therapy, occupational science, research ethics, science policy, self-censorship, human rights, Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, DEI restrictions, scientific communication