Associate Professor Ferenc Hammer (Media and Communications Department at ELTE University in Budapest, Hungary) is concerned about silenced and repressed scholars in dozens of countries: “At-risk scholars try to live under the radar, but that’s how they become invisible. This doesn’t equate to academic freedom.” He launched an organisation to help them.
Your research work focuses on academic freedom and the protection of threatened scholars. Could you please tell us more about your research and your results so far?
The main finding of my work is that silenced scholars in dozens of countries do not appear sufficiently on the problem map of support initiatives, relative to the severity of the hardships that their lives represent.
Worse, many of these scholars are so successful in their efforts to avoid being listed in the next year’s Free To Think Report that they become invisible, even to initiatives that map these problems.
Living “under the radar”, so to speak, may save a scholar’s life, but it certainly does not equate to academic freedom.
Based on this consideration, and with the help of several organisations – one of them at this stage is the Kulturwissenschaftlisches Institute in Essen (Germany), I created Mesh – Academia Without Borders gGmbH, but it will only go live in a couple of days). This organisation aims to support silenced scholars with a mentoring system and a publishing platform that offers low visibility to troubled scholars.
What are the main tendencies one can observe in the field of academic freedom, at national level and in the EU?
Ferenc Hammer: As a measure, the Academic Freedom Index reflects the broader picture with considerable accuracy. Measures of democracy, or free speech, often correlate with numbers in the Academic Freedom Index.
However, there are emerging cracks in this “expected” picture. In some democratic countries, higher education has been targeted by neo-populist forces, leading to political debates and measures that make academia less free than before, see the Netherlands for example. Hungary, my home country, of course, stands out from the rest of the European academic freedom landscape, but that has been, sadly, an old story now.
Do you think academic freedom measurement tools present the situation in a reliable way?
Ferenc Hammer: Yes, I do. The transparency of these measurement tools and the institutions that organise the process ensure quality. Nevertheless, there are new complications, new issues and new issues of measurement. To start with, more inquiry would be valuable to better conceptualise and measure silence and silencing in academia.
I believe the time has come to create a system that incorporates more recent forms of communication paradoxes that threaten academic freedom: think of astroturfing (the practice of publishing opinions or comments that appear to come from ordinary members of the public, but actually come from a company or political group, as a way to make it seem that a product, policy, opinion, etc. is very popular, ed.), doppelgänger, and silencing scholars with information such as half-truths, harassment, damaging the reputation of a scholar. This happened to me as well. With “doppelgänger” I mean that it seems to be a recent strategy of the alt-right movement to appropriate terminology from inclusive social policy agendas, not only for practical purposes, but presumably also in order to blur the meaning of the original terminology. Quite recently for example, a right wing politician used “diversity” as an argument to possibly fire academics.
The most recent higher education debates in Germany or Norway seem to bring new aspects to the debates; in Norway, more than one third of climate scientists say they have experienced harassment via social media, SMS or threatening phone calls. In the long run, this could silence them. And in Germany, academics seem to face multiple threats from populist politicians, dubious third party funding, and misguided developments within German academia itself to name a few. This is exacerbated on the international stage by dubious party-state funding from China, and an unhealthy dependency among Western China scholars on ‘official China’.
Are “silencing” and “self-censorship” for example, important issues in academic freedom? Have you observed tendencies in this respect?
Ferenc Hammer: In recent academic freedom measures, reports, and global conferences, these concepts do appear, but not with the weight they demand.
For example, two major events on this theme, the Philipp Schwartz and Inspireurope Stakeholder Forum, and the SAR 2024 Global Congress, along with key European policy documents addressing academic freedom, from the Commission and the Inspireurope+ consortium, concentrate mainly on displaced scholars, but devote perhaps not enough interest to those who remain silenced at home.
Based on these observations, I would recommend increased inquiry and action towards addressing the silenced at EU level.