Defending Scholarship Across Borders

One of the defining features of our time is that authoritarianism has gone global. Across Latin America, Europe, Asia, and even the United States, strategies of repression once unique to single regimes are increasingly shared, adapted, and redeployed.

Universities and scholars often find themselves at the heart of these confrontations—not only because they generate knowledge that challenges power, but because campuses serve as spaces of assembly, resistance, and civic imagination.

On September 18, 2025, AltLiberalArts will host a lecture with Prof. Aysuda Kölemen and Prof. Kerry Bystrom that will examine these patterns through case studies from Hungary, Turkey, Russia, and the U.S. They will highlight how governments, when threatened by democratic practices, restrict disciplines, cut funding, and seek to silence critical scholars. Kölemen, who leads an international fellowship for displaced academics, emphasizes that the dual pressures of autocratization and precarious employment cut across borders.

This lecture also previews their forthcoming book, Threatened Scholarship, which argues that academic freedom should be understood as a transnational human right. The volume features the voices of scholars at risk across continents and underscores the importance of collective solidarity to sustain open society values.

For AltLiberalArts, this frame echoes the logic of our own programming. Our Five Disruptive Principles in the Liberal Arts series demonstrates how student agency, interdisciplinary breadth and depth, mastery, engagement, and authentic assessment disrupt efforts to narrow the educational mission. Authoritarian regimes attack these very practices for that reason.

Where repression extends across borders, so too must our defense. Through global initiatives, partnerships, and open programming, we model solidarity and resilience.

As part of our commitment to protecting the freedom to learn, we encourage you to attend this event on September 15. Together we can confront the realities of repression—and strengthen the networks of resistance that ensure higher education remains free, open, and disruptive in the best sense of the word.