Liberdade acadêmica e retrocesso democrático

Abstract

Around the world – and increasingly within established democracies – academic freedom is being narrowed by polarization, populist rhetoric, and legal engineering. This article argues that universities function as core epistemic institutions in constitutional democracies and are therefore early and frequent targets of would-be autocrats. It offers three contributions. First, it systematizes the repertoire of backsliding strategies – societal intimidation and “autocratic legalism” (e.g., purges, criminal defamation, selective funding, politicized appointments, curricular mandates) – and traces their chilling effects on scholars and students. Second, using comparative constitutional text and doctrine, it maps protections for individual academic speech, institutional autonomy, and the state’s affirmative duties, contrasting the United States’ judge-made, First Amendment-adjacent protections with the explicit guarantees common in many constitutions. Third, it synthesizes emerging international and regional jurisprudence (UN treaty bodies; the ECtHR on academic and extramural speech; the EU Charter’s Article 13 and Commission v. Hungary on CEU; Inter-American principles and cases; African Commission decisions) to show how transnational norms can constrain or at least stigmatize domestic erosions. The article concludes that safeguarding universities requires robust constitutional entrenchment of both individual and institutional freedoms plus positive state obligations to maintain an enabling environment for knowledge production. Absent such measures, democratic backsliding will continue to exploit ambiguity in law to subordinate universities to partisan projects and degrade the democratic public sphere.