Monash students join international peers advocating for academic freedom as a ‘democratic imperative’
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Academic freedom protects the rights of university community members to teach, research and publish without fear of retribution. It is often discussed as if it were a given – enshrined in policy and assumed to exist so long as an institution does. Yet in practice worldwide, it feels increasingly fragile.
The recent release of the Academic Freedom Index (AFI) 2026 Update offers a striking measure of this fragility. Over the past decade, academic freedom has declined in 50 countries, with the most consistent erosion not at the level of institutions, but among individuals and on campuses themselves – subtly reshaping what can be debated.
This reveals an uncomfortable truth: academic freedom does not sustain itself. It depends on those within universities to insist upon it as a social good. Academic freedom underpins democracy by fostering the ability to question, criticise and make informed choices – all prerequisites for an educated and active public.
Student approaches to advocacy
Each question that students ask tests the limits of what can be taught and learned – a freedom now under growing constraint and in need of urgent defence.
According to Monash lecturer Tony Williams, “the decline in academic freedom globally is a signal of distress for the democratic world and system upon which so much relies.”
It was within this context that representatives from Monash University’s ATS3950 Activism for Academic Freedom (a third-year undergraduate unit in Monash Arts) travelled to Innsbruck, Austria in February to attend the Scholars at Risk (SAR) 2026 European Student Advocacy Days, themed ‘Academic Freedom as a Democratic Imperative’.
Designed to place students at the forefront of academic freedom advocacy, the event brought together participants from across Europe, Canada and Australia. Monash was represented by Unit Coordinator Tony Williams and Chief Examiner Kate Murphy, alongside students Daniela Alfaro and Eliza Kral from the 2025 ATS3950 cohort.
The unit – shortlisted for last year’s Shaping Australia Awards – partners with the Scholars at Risk Network to develop advocacy campaigns for imprisoned academics. In the unit, students work in small teams to design and deliver real-world advocacy campaigns – each team works on a campaign for one imprisoned scholar.
In Innsbruck, Eliza and Daniela shared insights from their campaigns in a joint presentation.
As Daniela explains, “my team recognised that one of the biggest barriers to advocacy wasn’t a lack of information, but apathy.” Working on the case of Azerbaijani scholar Igbal Abilov, the campaign centred on emotional engagement and narrative-driven awareness raising.
“This experience reshaped how I understand advocacy, not as a linear path to outcomes, but as a long-term commitment to creative and collective engagement.”
Eliza’s team took a different approach in its advocacy campaign for Iranian-Swedish academic Dr Ahmadreza Djalali.
“Our campaign targeted three different contexts: the Monash community, Australia and Sweden,” Daniela says.
“Dr Djalali has Swedish citizenship, and we aimed to leverage Sweden as a ‘human rights world leader’, holding them accountable for their inaction and reflecting this back at Australian officials, reminding them of their own obligations.”
While Daniela’s group was interested in ‘zooming in’ on emotions and storytelling for personal impact, Eliza’s team ‘zoomed out’ to situate the case within its broader political and legal setting.
These approaches revealed that advocacy can move in different directions at once, either mobilising power from the ground up or activating it from within.
The conference offered a chance to hear about other student campaigns happening across the SAR network. What emerged was a sense of coordinated, transnational effort.
“The opportunity to engage with peers globally was deeply inspiring. Threats to academic freedom are rarely isolated, and responses to them cannot be either,” Eliza says.
Contested truths and the myth of neutrality
Such discussions challenged the assumption that universities are naturally sites of free thought – themes introduced by keynote speaker Othmar Karas, President of the European Forum Alpbach and former Vice-President of the European Parliament. In his opening address, Karas emphasised academic freedom as a ‘pillar of democracy’, stressing its importance in an era of ‘contested truth’.
Yet for participants, Karas’ avoidance of questions about ongoing global crises affecting universities raised questions about what remains unspoken, and what that silence ultimately reflects. The conversations that followed sharpened a recurring theme of the conference: inaction is itself an active choice.
The question of institutional neutrality took on a palpable form during a tour of the University of Innsbruck. The university was once a stronghold of Austrian fascist ideology, and willingly collaborated with German Nazism. Instead of erasing this history, the university has confronted it. A monument dedicated to “honour, freedom and fatherland” has been amended with a single, destabilising question: “whose honour, whose freedom, whose fatherland?”
Negotiating power and agency in academic spaces
If academic freedom is shaped by institutions, it is also shaped by the people within them. A panel conversation with Ugandan poet Stella Nyanzi brought questions of power and agency in universities into sharp focus. Imprisoned for her poetry and activism, Nyanzi spoke about the realities of advocating under conditions where expression itself is criminalised.
Her reflections pointed to a more subtle form of repression. “Often, censorship of thought and imagination precedes the censorship of academic output. Before research is restricted or punished, there is a narrowing of what can be expressed,” Eliza says.
The challenges and joys of student advocacy
For students, engaging with these realities carries its own weight. Working on cases of imprisonment requires more than intellectual attention; it demands a form of ethical engagement that is not always easy to sustain. There is a risk of becoming overwhelmed, but also a risk of responding too easily – of reducing complex lives to symbolic case studies.
A further challenge lies in making these issues feel immediate.
Daniela says academic freedom is often perceived as an abstract concern rather than something with direct human consequences.
“Overcoming this requires forms of engagement that are deliberate and capable of extending beyond usual disciplinary boundaries,” Daniela says.
But the recent release of Belarusian activist Marfa Rabkova, a former Scholars at Risk case, demonstrates that student campaigns can contribute to meaningful change. Over the course of the Innsbruck event, and within the unit itself, it became clear that academic freedom must be continually insisted upon, by students and scholars alike.
“Universities are places of knowledge production, but they can also be shaped by pressure and biases,” Eliza says. “We need contestation to maintain their integrity, and we need to use the privilege that academic freedom has granted us here in Australia to speak out against its erosion, wherever it occurs.”