The parallels between academic and press freedom – centering society in academic freedom
Chris Hartgerink
“Academic freedom has yet to be accepted […] as being as crucial as a free press”[1] – I take the Special Rapporteur’s comment as a call to further develop and center society’s relevance to academic freedom. How do journalists understand academic and press freedom in relation to their contribution to society? Vice versa, how do researchers understand academic and press freedom in relation to society?
Despite increasing attacks on both academic freedom[2] and press freedom[3] as part of the attacks on democracy more generally, both freedoms remain conceptually and practically distant. This is especially relevant when building solidarity between academic and press freedom could strengthen democratic practice across professions. Explicit, implicit, and tacit knowledge at both the structural and individual levels can reinforce or complement efforts to protect and strengthen these freedoms.
In this fellowship, I conduct qualitative interviews with journalists and researchers on how academic and press freedom are protected and why. Each interview informs the next, introducing a path-dependency to iterate understanding of both freedoms throughout the project. During the fellowship, I also embed myself in a journalist co-working space that focuses on strengthening democracy, to further explore how day-to-day threats to their work are handled practically and how that is different from academic settings. At the end of the fellowship, I run a co-creation workshop with both journalists and researchers in Berlin, to design infrastructural improvements to the experimental publishing platform I develop, ResearchEquals.
Conceptually, academic and press freedom have been related before, but no direct comparative analysis exists of their respective practicalities. With this fellowship, I contribute a society-centered framework for academic freedom which identifies protective practices from journalism that translate to academic contexts—and vice versa. It produces actionable design principles for publishing platforms like ResearchEquals, informing practical efforts to build infrastructure that sustains free inquiry.
[1] UN Human Rights Council, Academic Freedom – Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education, Farida Shaheed (2024), https://doi.org/10.1163/2210-7975_HRD-9970-2016149.
[2] “Free to Think 2025,” Scholars at Risk, September 18, 2025, https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/resources/free-to-think-2025/.
[3] Reporters Without Borders, “2026 RSF Index: Press Freedom at a 25-Year Low | RSF,” April 30, 2026, https://rsf.org/en/2026-rsf-index-press-freedom-25-year-low.