Pocket Guide for Academics Under Attack

Facing pressure or attacks in academia can be disorienting and you may not know how to react to such attacks. The Pocket Guide for Academics Under Attack, available on AcademicResilience.eu. It offers practical support to:

• identify different forms of threats and attacks to academic freedom
• highlights every type of attack, even the ones linked to self-censorship.
• explore survival strategies to respond and adapt

🗣️ The guide is available in our Website in English and will soon be published in multiple languages to reach a wider community across Europe.
and

"Erosion of academic freedom rarely appears overnight."
Katja Brøgger (Chair of COST OPEN) & Reina Zenelaj (Vice-Chair)

To many, this sentence may seem trivial, but it highlights a reality experienced by thousands of academics around the world: It doesn't start with a crisis. It starts with a shift. Hard to explain. Easy to dismiss.

Then the perspective widens:

"Safeguarding science means safeguarding democracy."
Eva-Maria Holzleitner, Austrian Federal Minister for Women, Science and Research

This isn't just about academia anymore. It's about how societies hold on to truth, debate, and evidence.

And then comes the part we often feel, but rarely name:

"Authoritarianism divides, atomizes and isolates."
Andreas Kranebitter, Director of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW)

Far-right authoritarianism constructs myths - and critical scholars, almost by definition, expose them. Researchers in gender studies, migration studies or climate science become targets. And the same social process repeats: silence, distancing, isolation.

Finally, a reminder of where all this comes from:

"This Pocket Guide draws on lived experience and supports scholars."
Carsten Q. Schneider, Interim President and Rector, Central European University (Vienna)

The ideas exposed in the Pocket Guide are not abstract ideas. They come from real institutions, real pressures, real trajectories. And that's what makes them really useful.

📘 Read the guide
🔁 Share it as well as our website: Academicresilience.eu