Report from UCU/EI Academic Freedom Conference

By Tilly Fitzmaurice

On 15th October 2025, UCU co-hosted its first-ever conference on academic freedom at the National Education Union’s Hamilton House in London. UCU’s co-host was Education International, a global membership organisation for education unions that represents more than 33 million education professionals around the world.

The conference was opened by UCU General Secretary Dr Jo Grady and Education and Education International’s Deputy General Secretary Haldis Holst, and the keynote address was given by Robert Quinn of the Scholars At Risk Network. The rest of the conference consisted of two panel discussions and a breakout group session. Panellists in the first session, on state repression and political interference, were Dr Todd Wolfson from the American Association of University Professors/American Federation of Teachers, Carl Marc Ramota from the Alliance of Concerned Teachers in the Philippines and Evrim Gülez from the Education and Science Workers’ Union (Eğitim-Sen) in Türkiye. The second session, on marketisation and managerialism, included Jorunn Dahl Norgård from the Norwegian Association of Researchers, Grace Nyongesa from Kenya’s Universities’ Academic Staff Union, and Professor Terence Karran and Dr Chavan Kissoon from the UK’s University of Lincoln.

This was a very popular event, and all the in-person registration spots were taken far ahead of time. The hybrid format, however, meant that many more people could participate.

Key messages

It is striking to see how the same patterns repeat themselves around the world from the UK, to Norway, to the US, from Kenya to Türkiye, though we should always avoid exaggerated, homogenising comparisons. These common themes include:

• Academic freedom is under attack via falsely conflating it with freedom of speech. Contrary to much popular opinion, academic freedom is less about ideas and opinions than processes of truth-seeking and knowledge dissemination for the public good. Protest, too, though a crucial presence on university campuses, is distinct from both academic freedom and freedom of speech. Robert Quinn of the Scholars At Risk Network outlined this distinction in his keynote speech. In particular, he emphasised the importance of disciplinary rigour and standards in distinguishing academic freedom from freedom of speech. As Quinn put it, “…every academic has a responsibility to make sure they are being intellectually honest in distinguishing when they are presenting a view that is based on evidence and reason, or whether just expressing a personal opinion.”
• Growing academic precarity is a serious threat to academic freedom. This was explicitly acknowledged by many of the speakers, including those from the UK, Norway and Kenya. Academic precarity stops educators and researchers from speaking up for fear of losing their employment and therefore their livelihoods.This is also closely imbricated with the forces of marketisation.
• We are living through a crisis point, as Dr Todd Wolfson of the American Association of University Professors showed with the example of how the Trump administration’s overnight removal of government grants has decimated crucial Alzheimer’s research. This means there’s never been a more important time to defend academic freedom, while also providing a critical rallying point for our professional communities and for the public.
• We cannot win this on our own. We urgently need to form a cross-society, and cross-sectoral, alliance. Education, for our members and professional colleagues, but also the public, is crucial: if we cannot articulate what academic freedom is, how can we hope to engage the public? Quinn, cited above, described the strategy for fighting back as a ‘virtuous whack a mole’ strategy: it is vital that people standing up are not isolated, as they will be easy targets.
• It is vital to defend the university on its own merits, for its own sake. For a long time, we have tended to fall back on instrumental defences of the university based on outputs, numbers and graduate salaries. However, we have neglected to defend the university on its inherent value for democracy, which is the foundation we must rally round now. 
• State repression and interference. The erosion – or indeed, wholesale destruction – of democratic institutions and the threats to academic freedom are two sides of the same coin. Academic freedom and autonomy in many countries has been decisively shaped by the exercise of state power and ideological control. The playbook repressive governments are working from is an old one, though this looks different everywhere, and we heard about this in shocking detail from the invited speakers. In the Philippines, where political power is a plaything of the same few powerful families, drone surveillance of university campuses is normal, and extra-judicial violence has deep roots in decades-old government-led persecution of the Left. In Kenya and Türkiye, there are long histories of crackdowns in the context of military coups in the 1970s and 1980s. In the US, 40 academics have been dismissed from their posts for speech relating to the Charlie Kirk assassination.
• Marketisation and managerialism. This is where to make the points about how higher education is often at the mercy of state funding, which regards it as an unacceptable financial burden, as well as threats of commercialisation and privatisation. Academics are also increasingly dependent on private sources of funding for research, which naturally has a strong chilling effect on which kinds of research is financially supported. Precarious employment, the effects of which trickle through and hurt the most underserved groups of students, is frequently a cost-cutting measure, as we heard from Grace Nyongesa from the Universities’ Academic Staff Union in Kenya. Precarity, however, also has an explicit disciplinary function: if their jobs and livelihoods are at risk, educators and researchers self-censor. 
• Academics, educators, unions and their allies are fighting back. Robert Quinn spoke of how strong the networks of support and solidarity are between Scholars At Risk and trade unions, and we also heard about successful cases in Kenya where the union filed successful cases against universities involving the sector’s regulator. Over in Australia, the NTEU has pulled off some encouraging victories over casualisation and wage theft, governance, health and safety and local mismanagement at some institutions. During the breakout room discussion, I was struck by how clear-sighted our members are about where threats to our academic freedom come from. It seems clear that years of attempts by bad-faith actors to muddy the waters and paint minority groups as ‘threats’ to academic freedom have failed to cloud our members’ judgement.

Education International has produced a report on the conference which can be found here.

Readers may also enjoy this piece by Tilly Fitzmaurice and Dion Georgiou from 2024.