Involve academics in confronting academic freedom issues

The targeting of European academics and think tanks by the Chinese state in March has given rise to much discussion about the impact of the internationalisation of higher education on academic freedom.

Aside from expressions of support for the targeted individuals and organisations, however, there appear to be few substantial ideas on how academics can work together in a practical way to preserve the integrity and credibility of their profession.

The threats to academic freedom are, of course, most conspicuous for academics working under autocratic regimes.

Yet their colleagues in more open societies find themselves with little leverage for improving the situation when their own institutions fail to take a lead. This situation is becoming more precarious as plans by governments to impose solutions raise the prospect of a further erosion of institutional autonomy and going down the path of global decoupling that would be detrimental to all sides.

It is to address these dilemmas that members of the Academic Freedom and Internationalisation Working Group (AFIWG) came together in 2019.

Working with the support of the United Kingdom parliament’s All-Party Parliamentary Human Rights Group, it includes academics from several UK universities and representatives from Scholars at Risk (SAR) and the Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA).

It aims to provide a voice for academic staff whose leverage over decision-making has declined with the movement towards the model of the ‘enterprise university’ since the 1980s.

Whatever one thinks about the wisdom of that general trend, the measures that were put in place to protect academic freedom were done at a time when the primary student markets and sources of research funding and philanthropic donations lay in relatively open and transparent societies.

The rise of China

China’s recent imposition of sanctions on academics is the most recent and dramatic illustration of how procedures for protecting academic freedom from an earlier age are no longer fit for purpose.

The degree of change was recently revealed in a joint study by the Policy Institute at King’s College London and the Harvard Kennedy School which shows that, on its current trajectory, China is set to overtake the United States as both the world’s biggest spender on R&D and the UK’s most significant research partner.

The dilemma that higher education institutions now face is shown by the fact that Newcastle University is now in the position of proclaiming its resolve to protect a member of staff targeted with sanctions by the same government that has located a Confucius Institute on its campus.

Even Universities UK, the body representing UK universities, took several days to announce its commitment to protecting academics from sanctions and held back from naming the offending state when it did so.

This makes it even more important for academics to voice their united opposition to threats to academic freedom. Members of the AFIWG thus took a leading role in organising letters and petitions to protest against the Chinese sanctions, which gained the signatures of over a thousand colleagues from around the world, at last count.

Other activities that the group is developing include international workshops, the first of which brought together academics from Central Europe, Central Asia, Russia, Turkey, China, Australia, the Middle East and Africa in December last year. Members have also been engaging with organisations such as Universities UK, the UK Department for Education and the Council of Europe.

Code of conduct

Central to these activities is the development of a Draft Code of Conduct, which is available on the AFIWG website. This suggests clear and deliverable policies that can help higher education institutions to manage the risks of internationalisation while continuing to enjoy its benefits.

We hope that academics will use these to encourage their institutions to make their procedures fit for purpose by giving the protection of academic freedom and academic staff and students a higher profile, rather than burying it in ethics codes that cover a much broader range of ethical issues.

Such steps include strengthening due diligence and transparency, making it obligatory for higher education institutions to frequently and publicly emphasise the importance of academic freedom in all external collaborations and make it an important theme in induction and training for staff and students.

The code also recommends measures for mitigating risk and protecting academics who are active outside the institution. This includes assessment and training, due diligence and risk assessment and adequate insurance for staff and students who are involved in collaboration and fieldwork.

It also recognises and encourages the obligation to protect academics and students who are at-risk or being punished for exercising their academic freedom in other countries. This includes supporting visa and asylum applications, developing an internal emergency response procedure to address situations where life and-or liberty are in imminent danger and advocating publicly and privately for individuals who are imprisoned, disappeared or facing administrative and judicial sanctions.

Higher education institutions are also called on to make full use of programmes that offer assistance to academics at risk, such as those run by CARA and SAR.

Such measures can only be made meaningful, however, if higher education institutions do more to include their own academics in decision-making processes that tend to be dominated by well-resourced internal bureaucracies and international regional agents tasked with hitting financial targets.

The draft code thus makes a special point of calling for ongoing and meaningful consultation with academics whose work is most directly impacted by transnational collaboration and-or have knowledge of the international actors or the regional/national context in question.

Only with this kind of internal engagement can measures designed to manage the dilemmas arising from internationalisation and the development of the enterprise university be implemented in a way that genuinely protects and promotes academic freedom at home and abroad.

Christopher R Hughes is professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he also served as director of the Asia Research Centre from 2002 to 2005. He is a member of the Academic Freedom and Internationalisation Working Group.