Academic Censorship, Academic Freedom, and Democracy

28 May 2026

Campus Fryslan lecture series

University of Groningen

Academic freedom is under threat. All over the world, research shows that governments restrict individual and institutional freedom of research, teaching and learning. If we want to defend academic freedom, we need a clear theory about why it is valuable, why it is more than a privilege of a specific group, and why everyone has an interest. I argue that the widespread idea that we should protect academic freedom in order to enable scientific progress cannot serve as a plausible justification of a right to academic freedom. Instead, I propose a "republican" democratic theory: All citizens have an interest in there being academic freedom at higher education institutions, since such institutions provide a basis of last resort for producing knowledge, theories and vocabularies that are needed in a democracy for all citizens to contest illegitimate power.