Protecting Scholars at Risk and Defending Academic Freedom?

Ine Lietaert

Professorial Fellow, UNU-CRIS

Assistant Professor, Ghent University

Today, the European Commission closes its call for the SAFE programme. This is a new programme by which the EU offers 60 fully-funded scholarships to work for two years at a research institution in the EU. This is an offer for doctoral or postdoctoral researchers at-risk, of any non-EU nationality. At first glance, this seems to be a laudable and welcome initiative. In the current global context of more than 110 ongoing armed conflicts and a context where academic freedom is in decline in many countries – under autocratic and democratic governments and in ‘North’, ‘South’, ‘East’ or ‘West’ alike – there are many scholars at risk. However, delving into the features and set-up of this funding scheme made my enthusiasm melt quickly. I wish to raise and share a couple of ethical issues here.

First of all, the one captivating immediate attention is the number of scholarships. The generosity of sixty scholarships – equivalent to €12 million – can said to be ‘very modest’, not to say meagre. Let’s put this amount in perspective. To access these sixty scholarships, each institution of higher education and/or research organisations established in the EU can apply with only one candidate, pre-selected by the institute. Roughly estimated, the EU is home to nearly 5,000 higher education institutions and, let’s estimate, the same amount of research organisations. This means that if you are chosen to be the one and only ‘internal candidate’ (at my university alone, there are dozens of scholars who fit the call) and – let’s set a low rate - presuming that only half of the eligible institutions submit a candidate, you can expect to ‘compete’ against thousands of other candidates for these scholarships. The success rate of this call is very low, even when you are eligible and thus at risk. What kind of offer is this then? It for sure creates a lot of false hope for all those academics who recognise their situation in the description of the call.

Of course, “budget is tight” and what is invested in academics at risk can not be invested in something else. Why should ‘academics at risk’ receive any particular attention compared to anyone who faces threats to their life or personal freedom? The SAFE call makes clear that the EU is making this investment as a defender of ‘academic freedom’. Academic freedom is presented as a core EU value. It is seen as the fundamental element for ensuring the progress of science and a prerequisite for well-functioning democratic societies, yet it is currently under threat from governments, industry, and civil society. As stated in the SAFE-call: “Science and research are needed for a country to develop and can only thrive if critical questioning is possible. Yet exactly this basic requirement of scientific work makes scholars targets of political persecution and violence”. Then, for me, the question arises: how is the EU protecting with this particular call, and what kind of ‘academia’ is defended? For this, we need to look at the call’s selection criteria.

These eligibility criteria dictate that academics should, first and foremost, take a survey that shows they are ‘at risk’. The baseline question is whether the person experiences threats to their life, liberty, academic freedom or research career or has been forced to flee because of such threats. If the answer here is ‘yes’, you are eligible to submit your proposal, and you will compete with other scholars at risk. To get the scholarship, points need to be won within the criteria ‘Impact’ (35 points to score how high your risk is), ‘Excellence’ (also 35 points for the strength of your academic CV) and ‘Implementation’ (with 15 points for the quality of your research proposal and 15 points for the quality of the support provided by the host institution).

The evaluation of the candidates’ situation of risk is based on a scoring grid to be filled in by a regional expert. This expert will evaluate “the particularity of the risk” (is it a general risk experienced by several others in your country, or is the risk more specific to the researcher’s academic activities, civic or political actions or personal characteristics) “the extent of the risk” (what kind of repercussions the researcher has/or risks to experience), “the severity of the risk” (is the researcher currently in a safe or unsafe condition, and if the latter, for how long) and “evidence of the risk” (are there clear, objective proofs of the risk). This will give the candidate a score on the criteria “impact”, with a maximum of 35 points. Given the philosophy of the call, I understand that the EU wants to check whether the person is actually at risk. Yet this scoring grid creates the awkward situation of competition of misery, whereby ‘only’ being at risk of being killed in a context of war or being affected by a war that receives less attention and coverage might make your score not high enough to win. Suffering becomes a competitive metric instead of a human experience, and people are put in a painful situation where they need to prove that they are ‘more deserving’ of support than others to become part of the lucky few;

Even more problematic, when your score is high enough, you might ‘win’ a scholarship allowing you to work in the EU on a research project for two years. Given the current return policies of the EU and its individual Member States, it is likely that many of these academics  – even when the situation that creates the risk hasn’t changed a thing within these two years – will be expected or enforced to return when the scholarship ends. So the offer is a temporary work contract, not a guarantee that people will be ‘safe’ or their ‘academic freedom’ will be protected beyond these two years. The call places all responsibility to think and act beyond the two-year scholarship with the host institutions, while providing safety within the EU through residence permits beyond their power. The ‘post-fellowship plan’ of the host institution should mention the arrangements considered for securing successful academic or non-academic opportunities after the fellowship. Although I strongly believe that universities, too, have the responsibility to think about their duty to protect their staff, and even more so the temporal ones, this is a different point of discussion. Here, I wish to point out that this call easily shifts to responsibility to protect downwards. This while universities themselves did not set the criteria of the call. Even if they strongly disagree with how candidates are selected, they are forced to do a pre-selection based on the rules of this particular game.

Clearly, the criterion of “excellence” is also highly problematic. Where high risk can earn you 35 points, the same maximum score can be reached with a strong academic CV (average grades, number and quality of peer-reviewed publications and achievements such as patents, lectures and conference participation). Again, of course, it is understandable that the EU wants to check whether the candidates are ‘academics’, or even ‘good’ ones. However, I imagine they also know that many conflict situations are protracted, and intimidation or censorship of academic output doesn’t happen overnight. Hence, being a scholar ‘at risk’ will already have impacted your academic track record before this application. Take the post-doctoral category. People who have been writing their PhD while there is war in their country might have been preoccupied by this conflict. I am thinking of seeking shelter, caring for family members and acquaintances, and taking responsibility as university staff to answer the humanitarian needs of the wider community. Sitting down and writing academic peer-reviewed articles might not have been a priority. This affects their professional trajectory, as new academic grants – including this one – are mainly available for those ‘excelling’ in their field. In this, excellence is measured through number of publications. The same argument can be made for people who have actively opposed authoritarian regimes. It is thus questionable whether quantitative criteria of academic output make any sense in this plea to protect academic freedom.

This is even more so given that many scholars at risk come from the Global South. It is clear that scholars from the Global South – yet also the Global East or anyone who is constructed as not belonging to the Global North – up till now, do not participate in the global academic field with equal chances. Their academic freedom has already been restricted, and the EU and European universities have contributed to that. The solution of ’60 scholarships’ doesn’t alter this situation in any way. To be more specific, first of all, there is their restricted mobility. ‘Being mobile’, as in having worked at institutions in different countries and regions, preferably prestigious institutions in the Global North, is still seen as criteria of excellence on an academic CV. The coloniality of the EU’s migration politics makes this mobility imperative much more complex and costly for the many scholars affected by restrictive visa regimes. However, scholars have questioned the rationale that mobility is a beneficial feature of academic life. Researchers have argued that international mobility actually masks and rationalises the pervasive issue of academic precarity for academics who, one, have limited capital to start with and, two, for those for whom the working and living circumstances upon mobility are challenging. Both things are often the case for PhD students from the Global South (and international staff more broadly) studying at European universities. Take, for example, early-career scholars from the Global South who did manage to get a (part-time) PhD scholarship at a European university. They are often paid less and are frequently subjected to fixed mobility schemes that strictly determine how much time they can spend in the European host institution and when they need to return ‘home’ (for personal experiences with this system, see, for example, the autoethnography of Khaoula Stiti). I have personally mentored several PhD students from the Global South to obtain a PhD at my university and have seen how compulsory split-time between host and home institution can be an additional burden. It removes the researcher’s agency to be at the place that would be the most beneficial for their research (and also often for their family life) at a given time. It makes them less visible at the host institution and makes it difficult to network or belong.

Moreover, at times when I was not allowed by my university to travel to certain countries due to war or diseases, for example, temporal staff from the Global South were still expected to return when the schedule dictated it. Thus, how far does protection reach? As Khaoula’s experiences mentioned above also illustrate, a precarious context at home (which is the case for ‘scholars at risk’, yet was not even the case for this particular scholar) can just be replaced by an equally precarious context in Europe, where the threat of losing your residence permit and the depletion of economic resources constantly looms over the stay. Her account shows how this precarity had an impact on her PhD trajectory and her mental health. Yet it certainly goes on. The highly problematic situation of precarity and the risk of exploitation is shared by many post-docs in the current political economy of academia. Yet the above-mentioned immigration restrictions make it almost impossible for non-EU post-docs to navigate the world of short-term academic contracts and have the time and space to develop that ‘competitive’ academic CV. See, for example, Mehul Malik and colleagues' argument on this, or again, imagine how to write academic articles or develop your own distinctive research expertise when simultaneously accepting any low-paid (non-academic) temporal job in the search for an income and in search for more permanent contracts to be able to stay (protected). Malik and Khaoula raise the rightful question - who is responsible for supporting these scholars? Or can all these hurdles be overcome if the individual is just strong enough, willing enough to make the needed sacrifices, smart or competitive enough? In other words, does this lead to the cynical conclusion that internationalisation and the fact it adds up to researchers’ precarity is a dedicated management strategy of neoliberal higher education? That only a particular form of neoliberal academic freedom is protected?

Contemplating the system that rules academia brings me to the second way that the academic freedom of scholars of the Global South has already been restricted. This is through the continuous subtle and less subtle devaluation of any way of writing or reasoning that doesn’t fit the standardised Northern academic approach of ‘rationality’ (see, amongst others, the work of Gani and Khan) or would challenge the way that ‘disciplines’ have meticulously been crafted over the past decennia. It is indeed odd to drop such a gigantic point without really developing it further, but reflecting on the enduring coloniality of knowledge production in academia really deserves a full exposé on its own. I hope to return to this at a later point.

I wish to end by recognising that this might be only a few of the hundreds of more ethical challenges this type of call raises. Or any other question on how to protect people, how to protect or realise academic freedom or what we are protecting by following current ‘rules of the game’ (of migration policy, or academia alike). I am also aware that similar arguments and frustrations have been shared by colleagues, which I couldn’t include all of or I still need to delve into (first on my reading list now is Asli Vatensever’s book entitled ‘at The Margins of Academia: exile, precariousness and subjectivity). Yet, I see sharing my reflections on this matter as an invitation to keep questioning our current way of working and to keep discussing the ethical consequences of political choices, as well as searching for alternatives that would actually address inequalities rather than offer a small symbolic bandage. I hope this will be done by all who are ‘responsible’ and have the power to protect, namely the EU, universities and individual academics – myself included.