Academic Freedom
Defining Academic Freedom and the Hindutva Threat
Academic freedom is a bedrock of the modern academy. It ensures that faculty and students are free to pursue research and teach—articulating ideas, arguments, and facts—free of intimidation or retaliation. A guiding document on academic freedom is the 1940 statement by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which has been re-endorsed in recent years by major scholarly organizations (example). The AAUP Statement identifies academic freedom in three key areas:
Research and Publication
Teaching and the Classroom
Public Engagement
Academic freedom is often attacked and infringed upon in the context of Hindutva harassment using an array of tactics. Hindutva tactics in this regard include pressuring universities to retaliate against faculty, violent threats, online harassment, generating controversy over matters of academic consensus, petitions, attempts to imperil employment, making bad-faith accusations of bias, and more.
Research and Publication
Scholars have the right to pursue and share their research in accordance with scholarly norms. Academic freedom extends to all mediums, including social media. It covers investigating sensitive topics, even when they upset the sensibilities of individuals or entire groups. Arguably, the very core of the humanities is found in research that cuts to the heart of things people care about the most, such as religious beliefs. The American Academy of Religion, the largest scholarly society dedicated to the academic study of religion, reissued their Statement on Academic Freedom in 2021, in response to growing attacks on this essential framework.
Teaching and the Classroom
Faculty who teach subjects sensitive to Hindutva ideologues—including Hinduism, caste, persecution of religious minorities in India, Hindu nationalism, the movement for self-determination in Kashmir, and more—have the freedom to do so, without fear of intimidation. As the American Academy of Religion notes, such teaching may be “unsettling to students, especially those who may be unaccustomed to reflection on their own religious practices and beliefs or unfamiliar with critical analysis of their own traditions and communities.” Such intellectual challenges are fully compatible with supporting students in their own identities and creating space for all members of university communities to flourish.
Public Engagement
Many professors choose to do public outreach and education, write for popular publications, and make other efforts designed at reaching an audience beyond the ivory tower. This is a virtuous part of humanities scholarship, and it is covered by academic freedom. Many statements of academic freedom focus on the right to engage in such public discourse free of censorship from the scholar’s home institution. Such censorship is sometimes an explicit goal of Hindutva harassment. In addition, scholarly organizations such as the American Historical Association have explicitly stated in recent years that scholars have the right to discuss their work free of online harassment, a common weapon in the Hindutva arsenal.
Worldwide
Scholars across the world deserve academic freedom. As the Association of Asian Studies notes in a 2020 statement:
In today’s globalized academic ecosystem, academic freedom is not something that applies solely to people within the physical boundaries of a given education institution. Rather, it is a protection that a university has the obligation to extend over its academic activities wherever they occur, whether on its domestic home campus, on a foreign branch campus, in the pages of a journal, or online.
In practice, outside of North America, academic freedom is variable. In India, attacks against both faculty and students are common (here and here; see Association of Asian Studies statement on the subject). Scholars at Risk is one group that offers both resources and information about academic freedom worldwide.