Monash University students were delighted when jailed Iranian wildlife conservation scientist Niloufar Bayani was temporarily set free in 2023, before her permanent release some months later. They had been working on a campaign for Bayani’s freedom for months, and one student had been quietly told about the scientist’s impending release before the news was made public. As part of their arts faculty studies, the students had been lobbying for the freedom of Bayani, who had been a cellmate of then-jailed Australian-British political scientist Kylie Moore-Gilbert.
“It was quite a touching moment when one of our teams got news of her release,” Monash lecturer Tony Williams says. “As part of their end-of-semester presentation, they were able to say she had just been released and would soon be able to go home.”
The third-year, hands-on Activism for Academic Freedom course at Monash aligns teams of students with jailed or at-risk academics selected by the US-based Scholars at Risk network. In teams of 10 or so, the university students design and deliver real-world advocacy campaigns – each team works on a campaign for one imprisoned scholar.
“We think it’s really important for students to have an understanding of the concept of academic freedom and its importance in liberal democracy and how it intersects with freedom of expression and freedom of association in debates and arguments about what academic freedom means,” says senior lecturer Kate Murphy, who co-teaches the Activism course with Williams.
“Each year, Scholars at Risk provides a list of cases that they think will benefit the most from the public attention,” Williams says.
An Activism for Academic Freedom student holding a ‘Free Marfa Rabkova’ poster.
In the year to mid-2025 the network documented just under 400 attacks on scholars in 49
countries and territories, and Williams thinks that is likely to be an underestimate.
About 150-200 Monash students take the one-semester course each year. In 2025, the teams worked on campaigns for scholars across a range of disciplines and from a range of different nations, including two Azerbaijanis – political student Bahruz Samadoz, and history and ethnography academic Igbal Abilov.
Also on the Monash list were Marfa Rabhova, a law student from Belarus, and Abduljalil al-Singace, a retired mechanical engineering academic from Bahrain. A team of students also worked on a campaign for Swedish-Iranian disaster medicine academic Ahmad Reza Djalali, who has been jailed in Iran for more than 10 years. Sentenced to death, his execution has been repeatedly postponed.
Some of the imprisoned academics have an Australian link, many do not. Jailed in Saudi Arabia, Saudi-Australian national Osama al-Hasani is not on the Scholars at Risk list, but he was considered an important Monash campaign focus because he lived and worked in Australia for many years.
The students choose where to focus their campaigns and how to conduct them, often drawing on the expertise of advocacy professionals and country specialists, Murphy says. They understand their campaigns are only a contribution to a much larger ongoing global effort to free jailed scholars.
Many of the students are close to completing their degree, and find the activism course stimulating and useful: a chance to investigate the worsening climate for scholars worldwide and determine how best to tackle it.
“They’ve spent 2½ years thinking very theoretically about things like human rights and injustice,” Murphy says. “When you present them with an opportunity to actually do something and to put these things into action, they find that really appealing.”