Academic freedom is a trending topic. Countless opinion pieces and articles have been written about it, and institutions have been increasingly eager to demonstrate their commitment to it, with Uppsala University recently dedicating an entire “Week on Academic Freedom”. Receiving far less attention is its neglected but equally important ethical corollary – academic responsibility. A central tenet of moral philosophy is that freedom and autonomy entail responsibility. The ability to freely make autonomous choices carries an obligation to consider their consequences.
Fouad El Gohary
Postdoctoral Researcher, Uppsala University
The same holds true within academia – the ability to think, speak, and conduct research independently — carries with it a duty to consider how our work affects others. Despite valid concerns about restrictions on academic freedom, scholars in Western institutions remain among the world’s most privileged professionals, enjoying exceptional latitude in their intellectual pursuits. Yet public debate devotes far more attention to academic freedom than on the responsibilities that accompany it.
Academic responsibility is often understood in narrow, procedural terms – protecting study participants’ rights and safety, ensuring informed consent, and maintaining transparency. Yet responsibility also extends to the wider consequences of research — how our work affects society and the uses to which it may be put. Both the 1984 Uppsala Code of Ethics and the Swedish Research Council underscore that researchers are responsible not only for the integrity of their work but also for ensuring that its application does not violate fundamental rights or risk causing harm.
Such principles extend beyond research outputs themselves to the institutional relationships through which research is conducted. Institutions we collaborate with gain not only access to knowledge and resources but also credibility and legitimacy, making the choice of collaborators an ethical question rather than merely a reputational one.
“Institutions we collaborate with gain not only access to knowledge and resources but also credibility and legitimacy, making the choice of collaborators an ethical question rather than merely a reputational one.”
For two years, a broad national movement of students and faculty have urged Swedish universities to end collaborations with Israeli institutions implicated in violations of international law, appeals that have been dismissed. University leaders disingenuously misrepresent these demands as emotional attempts to make universities “take a stand,” and express a foreign policy preference. Rather, these calls are about assessing whether institutional ties lend legitimacy to serious abuses and responding accordingly. There is substantial evidence that some Israeli universities are complicit in such violations, whether through developing surveillance or weapons, legitimizing the occupation or supporting policies of segregation and dispossession. Swedish universities are not insulated from these ties. The organization WASSAP has documented multiple collaborations with implicated Israeli institutions.
These partnerships raise not only ethical concerns but also potential legal breaches for Swedish universities. The UN Special Rapporteur’s recent report shows how Israeli universities support the state’s military and security apparatus — developing technologies for surveillance, crowd control, urban warfare, and targeted killing. Even disciplines seemingly distant from military activity, such as law and archaeology have contributed to legitimizing occupation practices and erasing Palestinian history.
She (Editor’s note: Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur) also reminded an audience at the University of Copenhagen that the International Court of Justice has ruled Israel’s occupation illegal, obliging states, international bodies, and universities not to assist in sustaining it. Maintaining institutional ties with Israeli universities, she warned, risks complicity and should end.
Severing institutional ties is not without precedent. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Swedish universities quickly suspended collaborations with all Russian institutions — even those not directly implicated in violations of international law. When questioned about this inconsistency, university leaders argued they were simply following government policy even though they had no legal obligation to do so and retained full autonomy over their collaborations. Their decision to mirror the government’s double standard was therefore a choice, one that surrendered existing academic freedom — the freedom to determine partnerships — in order to avoid the academic responsibility that comes with it. In both the Russian and Israeli cases, university leaders deferred to government positions and acted unilaterally, without consultation or ethical review. These choices expose a deeper structural gap — the absence of any framework within Swedish universities for assessing the ethical implications of international collaborations.
“In both the Russian and Israeli cases, university leaders deferred to government positions and acted unilaterally, without consultation or ethical review. These choices expose a deeper structural gap — the absence of any framework within Swedish universities for assessing the ethical implications of international collaborations.”
Ideally, decisions of this kind should not rest with government ministries or university management but emerge from transparent and principled processes within academia itself. In such a system, groups like Academics for Palestine wouldn’t need to pressure universities to recognize their ethical responsibilities, because these would already be embedded in institutional practice.
What is needed is a formal policy for ethical academic ties, established either within universities or nationally under the Swedish Ethical Review Authority. This framework should include clear ethical criteria for international partnerships, grounded in human rights and international law, and an independent review body of ethics and legal experts who can assess whether proposed collaborations meet those standards. Partnerships that fail to do so should be terminated. Such a policy would ensure that academic freedom is exercised in line with moral responsibility and legal obligations.
“This framework should include clear ethical criteria for international partnerships, grounded in human rights and international law, and an independent review body of ethics and legal experts who can assess whether proposed collaborations meet those standards.”
Academic freedom has never meant the absence of any and all constraints. Researchers accept ethical oversight in countless areas of academic life: experiments involving human subjects require approval; studies that risk harm to participants are prohibited; and data collection is bound by principles of consent and integrity. No one seriously argues that such safeguards infringe on academic freedom, because we recognize that freedom carries corresponding responsibilities. The same logic should apply to the institutional level.
Reflecting and acting on the ethical implications of international collaborations is not a restriction on academic freedom but the exercise of academic responsibility. Each university should therefore establish a formal policy of ethical academic ties, supported by an independent committee mandated to review and advise on institutional partnerships. Such mechanisms can help ensure that the freedom universities rightly defend is matched by the responsibility they too often neglect.
Fouad El Gohary,
Postdoctoral Researcher
Uppsala University
