Twenty-one Skytte Prize winners speak out

The full letter was published in Financial Times on May 23 2025, read it here.

It is from a position of scholarly responsibility that we, as winners of the Johan Skytte Prize in political science — an award recognising the most significant contributions to the field — speak out.

We are deeply concerned about recent actions taken by the Trump administration that undermine the independence and academic freedom of research universities, colleges and scholarly institutions.

In the words of Harvard president Alan Garber: “No government, regardless of which party is in power, should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and what areas of study and research they can pursue.”

We strongly support these values. As award-winning political scientists who do not know each others’ political affiliations, we collectively fear that the current actions of the US government are a threat to the rule of law and civil peace, and we condemn the tools being used to achieve the administration’s goals. Specifically, we condemn the US government’s use of extortion to coerce independent institutions to act in accordance with the administration’s preferences; its illegal detention and deportation of hundreds of our international students and our international faculty colleagues; its deliberate fostering of bitterness among students and faculty on hundreds of university campuses in America; its punishing of researchers unrelated to the charges against their universities; its fear-mongering against those with whom the president disagrees; its short-sighted and senseless cuts to basic research that benefits the US and the world; and its encroachments on academic freedom and the core mission of American universities and colleges.

These actions threaten the world’s leading free and open society. Decades of political science research show that societies that are open and pluralistic, with high levels of both individual and political rights, are more prosperous, more peaceful and more effective than autocracies that are closed and stagnant. President Donald Trump and his administration are on a spectacularly dangerous path.

We, the authors of this letter, have been awarded the annual Johan Skytte Prize at Uppsala University for outstanding contributions to political science. As political scientists we have learnt how easily voters can be swayed to support anti-democratic candidates; but it is democratic and civic institutions, ones that Trump seeks to dismantle, that often save us from ourselves.

Our concern is that American universities will not be able to continue to be the best and most innovative in the world, attracting brilliant minds from around the world to flourish in a community of students and peers. The price of such a disastrous future is incalculable.

Robert Axelrod

University of Michigan (emeritus)

David Collier

University of California, Berkley (emeritus)

Jon Elster

Columbia University, (emeritus)

Martha Finnemore

George Washington University, Washington, DC

Francis Fukuyama

Stanford University

Robert E. Goodin

Australian National University (emeritus)

Jürgen Habermas

Johan Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main (emeritus)

Peter J. Katzenstein

Cornell University

Robert O. Keohane

Princeton University (emeritus)

Herbert P. Kitschelt

Duke University

David D. Laitin

Stanford University

Arend Lijphart

University of California, San Diego (emeritus)

Margaret Levi

Stanford University

Jane Mansbridge

Harvard University 

Pippa Norris

Harvard University

Carole Pateman

University of California, Los Angeles (emerita)

Robert D. Putnam

Harvard University (emeritus)

Adam Przeworski

New York University (emeritus)

Philippe C. Schmitter

European University Institute (emeritus)

Rein Taagepera

University of California, Irvine (emeritus)

Alexander Wendt

Ohio State University