American Academic Freedom Plunges To Near Authoritarian Levels – Cobb Courier

By John A. Tures, Professor of Political Science, LaGrange College There’s a lot of concern about an incident in Cobb County where more than 200 teachers were pulled from their classes to explain why they walked out of an administrator’s speech. Sadly, it’s not an isolated incident. From executive orders to the cancellation of faculty decision-making bodies, to the power nongovernmental organizations have through lobbies of politicians, teachers and professors are being micromanaged in a way that’s closer to authoritarian countries than fellow democracies. Visual Capitalist maps out countries for their levels of academic freedom, or the lack of it in some places. Partnering with V-Dem via Our World in Data, they measure academic freedom by those closer to a “one” have the most academic freedom, while those closer to zero have no academic freedom. America’s score is a 0.40. What does that mean? First of all, that score places the United States in the same company as Thailand and Bhutan. Thailand fell to 33/100 in their overall Freedom House score, rating them as “Not Free,” with a political rights score of 11/40 and a civil liberties score of 22/60. It’s an undemocratic regime. Bhutan is a monarchy, but thankfully
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