Columbia University faculty protesting against the settlement between their university and the government, as a violation of institutional autonomy, on March 24, 2025. Photo credit: The New York Times . The 2026 update of the Academic Freedom Index (AFI) was published on March 17, 2026. Based on a dataset that measures academic freedom levels across 179 countries, the most recent iteration of the yearly report demonstrated once again the growing scale and intensity of attac