Chapter 6: Academic Freedom and Decoloniality: Reconciling the Seemingly Irreconcilable

As academic communities have faced increasingly destructive external political attacks impacting their day-to-day functioning and long-term well-being, the values of academic freedom have also come under direct assault. Authors of the Global Academic Freedom Index report a significant decline in academic freedom globally since 2013, which they attribute to the growing global trend of authoritarianism. Thirty-four countries showed a substantial decrease in the degree of academic freedom provided to their inhabitants, with the United States showing a particularly sharp decline across the five categories measured by the index: freedom to research and teach, freedom of academic exchange and dissemination, institutional autonomy, campus integrity, and freedom of academic and cultural expression (Kinzelbach et al., 2025). Under the second Trump administration, the attack has been part of an expansive threat to the entire US higher education sector. As of the writing of this chapter, 52 universities are being investigated for their efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, and 60 universities are being investigated for their supposedly inadequate efforts to confront campus antisemitism. Prestigious research universities including Harvard and Columbia have been threatened with the loss of federal grant funding along with the potential the loss of non-profit tax exempt status unless they accede to demands that include the transfer of basic admissions, and curricular and decision-making responsibilities to external government entities, or in other words, sacrifice their institutional autonomy in order to continue to function. And, with independent government efforts that seek to eliminate or sharply restrict funding for the National Endowment of the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health, not to mention the obliteration of the Agency for International Development, the threats to scholars and researchers who wish to continue to pursue their work have become extreme (Levitsky et al., 2025; Salajan & jules, 2025). It has become clear that the Trump administration’s claim that, through these efforts, it is confronting widespread campus antisemitism is disingenuous, given the overtly ideological bent of the concerns and the extensive degree to which so many of these efforts are unrelated to that goal. It is also clear that the centrality of academic freedom values to the proper functioning of the academy is implicitly acknowledged by the Trump administration, hence its desire to decimate the higher education sector through eliminate of academic freedom protections.