Safe to Speak, Teach, and Research? Experiences of Reprisals in Danish Academia

In connection with a research project involving two external partners, I was threatened into signing a falsified document, pressured and physically intimidated by management to accept third-party data in direct violation of our written contract, and subjected to a very aggressive HR consultant who tried to place the blame for the problem on me. I asked to be dismissed, but management refused, which meant that a full year passed before I was finally fired. I have received a great deal of hate and hate mail from people I do not know for communicating my research. I have been denounced and disparaged in the media, called a “traitor to the country,” and the like, and I have had to report individuals to the police after receiving threatening emails. I was dismissed, officially for financial reasons. But in reality, it was because of my research profile. Among other things, I had criticised the head of department’s opinion pieces and research. These are among the testimonies collected from researchers at Danish universities. The testimonies form part of the campaign #SafeToSpeak, launched on 28 August 2025 in Denmark by the Movement for a Free Academia (Forskerbevægelsen). The campaign gathers testimonies of fear, threats, and reprisals experienced by academics in their everyday work – whether in research, teaching, dissemination, or when speaking critically about management decisions. By collecting these stories, the initiative seeks to break the silence surrounding academic freedom and draw attention to the structural pressures that threaten it across universities. The conditions for academic freedom are under intense pressure globally, but the ways in which this unfolds differ across contexts. In Denmark, a country often praised for its strong democratic institutions and trust-based governance, threats to academic freedom are less visible than the outright political censorship seen elsewhere. Yet, recent evidence suggests the problem is serious. Findings from the Danish Council for Research and Innovation Policy (DFIR) show that almost half (49,4%) of researchers at Danish universities fear, have been threatened with, or have been subjected to reprisals for speaking out about management decisions (DFIR - Danmarks Forsknings- og Innovationspolitiske Råd 2023). Topic and publication freedom are also affected. A 2025 survey by the Danish Union DM found that one in five university-employed researchers abstain from certain research areas due to fear of threats or harassment (Christiansen 2025). Furthermore, 5% of researchers report having been pressured to delay publication, 7% to alter results, and 4% to withhold findings altogether (DFIR - Danmarks Forsknings- og Innovationspolitiske Råd 2023). Fear of reprisals and resulting (self-)censorship pose profound threats to the integrity of scholarship. This commentary examines these dynamics through the lens of the Danish campaign #SafeToSpeak. Erosion of academic freedom in Denmark cannot be understood without reference to the University Act of 2003, which fundamentally restructured university governance. Prior to 2003, Danish higher education consisted of a relatively small number of research-oriented universities and specialized institutions operating under a collegial governance model. The governance model was shaped by the 1969 University Statutes, which introduced elected leadership and broad representation of staff and students in university councils. This framework gave academic communities substantial influence over appointments, curricula, and research directions. The 2003 act replaced collegial, elected decision-making with strict top-down management, in which rectors appoint deans and department heads, who in turn control hiring, promotion, and research priorities. While study boards remain elected boards, their influence is limited to advising within ministerially defined frameworks. Decisions on degree programmes, staffing, and resource allocation are taken by executive bodies that answer upward in a corporate-style chain of command. This system has three direct consequences for academic freedom. First, it weakens collegial oversight and the internal ‘public sphere’ of universities, where dissenting voices might once have been heard. Second, it personalises risk: when a researcher challenges management decisions, they confront not a peer body but a superior whose control extends to contracts, teaching loads, and career prospects. Third, it aligns universities with a market logic, where leaders are expected to run institutions as businesses. In this climate, speaking out critically is easily framed as disloyalty or lack of “strategic fit”. At the same time, universities became subject to increasingly tight state steering through accreditation, dimensioning of degree programmes, and taxameter-based funding tied to student throughput. With repeated “productivity cuts,” institutional budgets have eroded, and research has become heavily dependent on external third-party funding (Degn and Sørensen 2015). This shift has contributed to an increase in precarious academic positions, making researchers more vulnerable to managerial pressure and external expectations (Iddeng and et al. 2024). For individual researchers, academic freedom formally remains in terms of choice of research topics and methods. In practice, however, this freedom is increasingly constrained not only by obligations to support the institution's financial sustainability but also by rising instances of harassment, intimidation, and threats (Iddeng and et al. 2024) - both from within universities (colleagues, supervisors, and managers) and from external actors (media, politicians, or the public). These pressures, which include verbal abuse, exclusion, undermining of research outputs, and threats to career progression, create a climate in which the formal right to academic freedom coexists with powerful informal pressures toward conformity, silence, and strategic self-censorship. The testimonies collected in #SafeToSpeak reveal patterns that statistics alone cannot capture. They shed light on the mechanisms behind fear: how managerial decisions intersect with informal cultures, hierarchies, and precarious employment conditions. They also point to the risks of being publicly singled out – through media coverage or political criticism – which adds another layer of pressure and potentially fuels self-censorship among researchers. The campaign was designed to document experiences and fears of reprisals among researchers at Danish universities in order to break the silence and draw attention to the conditions that undermine academic freedom in Denmark. The core of the campaign is a survey that asks respondents whether they have personally feared, experienced, or witnessed retaliation in connection with academic work. Retaliation is broadly defined to include actions such as dismissal, denial of promotion, increased administrative or teaching duties, reduced access to resources, bullying by colleagues, or harassment from external actors such as politicians, businesses or the media. Following this initial question, participants are invited to provide anonymous descriptions of their experiences. They can also indicate when the incidents took place, their academic position at the time, and the specific university and faculty. To protect anonymity, the campaign explicitly states that any potentially identifying details will be deleted or redacted before publication. Participants are given the option to provide contact details – solely to strengthen the credibility of the testimonies and, if they so wish, to be approached for media outreach or advocacy related to the campaign. The campaign was shared with trade union representatives and faculty members of academic councils and boards at Denmark's eight universities, with a request that they distribute it to academic staff. It was also circulated via social media and personal academic networks, in order to reach a broad spectrum of researchers across disciplines and career stages. All data collected through the campaign have been treated with the utmost confidentiality. Responses were stored on a secure drive, and access was restricted to a small group of members of the Movement for a Free Academia. Before any testimonies were published or used for advocacy, identifying details were removed or rephrased to ensure anonymity and protect participants. Yet, despite these precautions, we received indications that some researchers were still reluctant to contribute, out of fear that their testimonies might be traced back to them. This hesitation in itself illustrates the climate of insecurity surrounding academic freedom in Denmark. The campaign ran from August 28 to October 16, 2025. A total of 149 people submitted full or partial responses to the survey. 88 people provided one or more testimonies, resulting in 135 testimonies overall. Five of these fell outside the scope of the campaign. These five testimonies are published together with the remaining 130 on the website of the Movement for a Free Academia,1 but they are excluded from the overview presented here. This may be considered a low number of responses given the 20,325 scientific staff (pH.D. students included) currently2 employed at Danish universities (Danske Universiteter 2025). However, because the invitation to participate was not sent directly to academic staff, and the distribution of the survey link was not monitored, it is not possible to estimate a response rate or meaningfully interpret the absolute number. For context, the number of testimonies collected here is higher than in the 2022 campaign #PleaseDontStealMyWork (Schneider 2023), which gathered 120 testimonies, but considerably lower than the 2020 #MeToo in Danish academia campaign, which collected 689 testimonies from researchers at Danish universities (Videnskab.dk 2020). Across these responses, all categories of retaliation and fear were represented: speaking out about management decisions, teaching, conducting research, and disseminating research or participating in public debate. Within each of these domains, respondents reported different forms of exposure – ranging from personal fear of reprisals, to direct threats or retaliation, to witnessing colleagues being targeted. The testimonies span the full range of academic positions, from PhD students over postdocs to assistant, associate and full professors. They were submitted from across all eight Danish universities and represent all major disciplinary fields (natural sciences, health sciences, humanities, social sciences, and technical sciences). This breadth demonstrates that the problem is not confined to a particular career stage, rank, institution or field but permeates the academic system as a whole. The testimonies collected in #SafeToSpeak reveal a variety of experiences which can be structured along four interconnected dimensions: the mode of exposure, the triggering context, the nature of reprisal, and the source of reprisal. Mode of exposure refers to how individuals experience reprisals. Researchers report experiencing reprisals in different ways: anticipating negative consequences (fear), being directly targeted through threats or coercive actions, witnessing colleagues face retaliation or receiving socially mediated threats, where colleagues or circulating rumors signal that continued action may lead to retaliation. For example, an assistant professor shares this experience: “I am very engaged in the work at my current department and have volunteered for several committees. I do this in the fora the university itself has set up, and I was even asked whether I wanted to take part. Recently, however, a colleague told me that I should be very careful about what I say and ask at these committee meetings if I hope to obtain a permanent appointment one day”. This illustrates how even well-meaning colleagues can inadvertently reinforce organisational silence. Triggering context identifies the reason or situation that prompts the reprisals. Common triggers include criticizing management decisions, choosing controversial or politically sensitive research topics, disseminating research publicly, supporting colleagues who have themselves faced retaliation, or engaging in teaching practices or classroom topics that management or students perceive as sensitive, critical, or otherwise unwelcome. For example, one researcher feared social exclusion and loss of funding after publicly criticizing a senior colleague, while another was threatened for attempting to disseminate findings in the media. Nature of reprisal describes the form that retaliation takes. This ranges from employment and career sanctions (such as (threats of) dismissal, delayed or blocked promotions, exclusion from internal committees, or denial of funding); to research interference (pressure to change research topics, alter data, suppress outputs, or restrict supervision of students); social and professional exclusion (harassment, ostracism, or lack of institutional support); external harassment (threats from politicians, media, or the public, including online attacks or lawsuits); and administrative pressures (increased teaching duties, unfounded HR complaints, or denial of resources). Importantly, these reprisals can be executed through both formal mechanisms, such as official administrative or managerial actions, and informal practices, including intimidation, disparagement, or suppression of visibility. Recognizing this distinction highlights how even subtle, informal actions can profoundly undermine academic freedom. In this light, a “drip effect” becomes visible: small but systematic slights, delays, exclusions, and procedural burdens that cumulatively produce a chilling effect - researchers pre-emptively self-censor to avoid anticipated costs. Over time, these micro-sanctions also entrench organisational silence, as individuals judge that speaking up is futile or risky, thereby normalizing quiet compliance without the need for overt directives. Source of reprisal distinguishes between internal and external actors. Internal actors include university leadership (deans, heads of department), supervisors or principal investigators, and colleagues, while external actors encompass foundations and other organisations that provide external research funding, national or international colleagues, media representatives, and members of the public. Taken together, these four dimensions show that reprisals are not limited to isolated incidents but operate through complex interactions of formal authority, informal influence, and external pressures. They create a pervasive climate of fear that affects research, teaching, and public engagement, influencing both personal choices and collective academic culture. Importantly, the testimonies indicate that reprisals need not be directly observed to shape behavior; rumors, informal cautioning, and a shared sense of risk also reinforce a culture of quiet compliance, affecting individuals who were never personally targeted. The testimonies and survey responses collected through #SafeToSpeak highlight not only the prevalence of fear and reprisals but also the structural and cultural mechanisms that sustain them. Addressing this cannot be left to isolated individuals asked to “be brave.” Durable change depends on collective action: researcher communities, unions, learned societies, and student–staff alliances that defend voice together. Collective efficacy - the shared belief that “we can” act - predicts whether people speak up even under risk (Bandura 2000). When researchers mobilize as a salient “we,” social identity processes convert private concern into public action (van Zomeren et al. 2008). Practically, this means building standing solidarity protocols (e.g., coordinated responses when someone is targeted), peer support networks, independent ombud structures, and joint positions from departments and professional bodies - so the costs of dissent are distributed across the collective, not concentrated on the most vulnerable. Collective action should work toward structural fixes of the conditions that render individual researchers vulnerable: (1) uncertainty regarding contract renewal for fixed-term researchers; (2) a high actual and perceived risk of dismissal for otherwise tenured academic staff; (3) uncertainty about future funding – even at the most basic level – for both groups; and (4) the faculty's lack of formalised power to appoint university leadership and to negotiate managerial decisions. Effective and efficient solutions will, at a minimum, need to be decided at the level of university boards and, preferably, at the national political level and secured through legislation. I feel strongly compelled to align my teaching with what management announces – even when it runs counter to my professional and pedagogical judgement, as well as my methodological freedom. Based on my own and international research on a politicised topic, I have on several occasions been asked to comment on the advantages and disadvantages of a given policy in a Danish context. My primary concern about speaking on these topics is that senior politicians might label me and my institution as activist (which we are not) and, ultimately, might push to have funding for my research institution withdrawn – which would have negative consequences not only for me and my colleagues, but for the research community in Denmark as a whole. My head of department seems very keen on micromanaging the department’s researchers. If met with questions or criticism, the head of department tends to react in a somewhat aggressive manner. They give the impression that they will remember your ‘negative’ attitude or carry a grudge. Stories circulate in the department about how they have reacted to other colleagues' objections, telling them off or being ‘mad’ at them. I ticked the boxes for fear in the survey – I haven’t actually experienced reprisals, but I am afraid of reprisals because of the climate of distrust that dominates my workplace. The authors have nothing to report. This study did not require institutional ethics approval, as it was based on testimonies voluntarily submitted to the #SafeToSpeak campaign. Participants were informed about the aims of the campaign and provided consent for their anonymised testimonies to be used in research and public communication. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. Research data are not shared. The testimonies used in this commentary were collected by the Movement for a Free Academia as part of the #SafeToSpeak campaign. Given the highly sensitive nature of the material and the need to protect participants, the data are not publicly available. Testimonies that do not contain personal data are available at: https://www.forskerbevaegelsen.dk/safetospeak.