Universities should be places where discoveries are made.  Academia is an opportunity for students and teachers to challenge themselves, their preconceptions and values and perhaps, head off in a new direction.

But a statement issued by freedom of speech charity, Index on Censorship, and signed by academics, authors and activists around the world, points to the erosion of academic freedom from Turkey to China to the USA.

In Mexico academics face death threats, in Turkey they are being threatened for teaching areas of research that the government doesn’t like, in Ukraine they are being investigated for ‘separatist attitudes’, in Belarus there is a national committee vetting subjects that are taught and some US universities are being urged to issue ‘trigger warnings’ for course content that might upset some students.

The latest issue of Index, magazine of Index on Censorship magazine,  catalogues the way academic freedom if under threat and raises the spectre of McCarthyism.

Tags: Academic freedom, Freedom of speech, Index on Censorship