A University Goes into Exile

What do you do if the government threatens to close your university in the city in which it is currently located? And what does it mean for your work and that of your colleagues?

Last year, the Hungarian government launched an attack against Central European University (CEU), where I teach philosophy. CEU is a private graduate institution, offering degrees in the social sciences and humanities, chartered in New York State but located in Budapest, Hungary. Founded in 1991 through generous funding by George Soros, CEU sees its mission as furthering the values of a democratic open society via higher education.

On April 4, 2017, the Hungarian parliament passed a law practically overnight that, among other new rules, required a foreign university operating in Hungary to have a campus and educational activities at its foreign base. CEU has American and Hungarian accreditation for its degrees, with some degrees having American accreditation only. But its courses have always been offered in the heart of Budapest, and exclusively so. One wonders what’s in it for the Hungarian people to ask a very successful university in Hungary to add educational activities elsewhere.

Since CEU was the only university who faced a real threat of closing down its operations in Budapest because of the new law, many observers interpreted the law’s intention to be to destroy CEU, which is why it is often called “Lex CEU.” This took place in a larger context of political crisis: There have been crackdowns against NGOs and civil society, vicious personal accusations against Soros with anti-Semitic overtones, attacks against a free press, the European Union, the rule of law, a new labor law introducing new hardships, and so on.

Since the attack, working at CEU is like a breathtaking motorcycle ride on the highway of knowledge production. Imagine you ride at a high but appropriate and efficient speed (i.e. you are busy with research and teaching), and suddenly a truck appears, entering from the right. Your only reasonable reaction, as every biker knows, is: Step on it! Do not use the brakes! If you use the brakes, you are dead.

For faculty, not using the brakes meant: No matter what, continue teaching and researching! For management, it meant: Steer us through! For students, it meant: Stay calm and study! For staff, it meant: Keep the fuel running!

Using the brakes would have meant to succumb—to the utter disbelief that this can happen inside the European Union; to the anxiety of what this actually means, not only for CEU but also for Europe; to the anger against the government; and, last but not least, to the insecurity imposed on us. It is in particular the last—the insecurity— that has the potential to kill the intellectual life of a university. Critical thinking, be it philosophical or otherwise, is possible in all kinds of dire conditions, but it can thrive—in the form of research and teaching—only in conditions of real freedom, in both the negative and positive sense.

Believe me, it has been hard to stay focused on research and teaching. We are in the middle of passing the truck, and that critical “moment” has lasted 21 months so far, which feels like an eternity, as it does for a biker passing a truck. It is clear that we will not pass unscathed; there will be cuts and lesions. But CEU will find a way around the danger—just not in Hungary.

Beneath this perseverance, some signs of stress have nonetheless accumulated. CEU basically tried a double-safe strategy: On the one hand, it contested the new law legally and employed a worldwide and very successful advocacy campaign under the label “I stand with CEU”; on the other hand, it tried to find a way to comply with the new law, in case its legal and advocacy strategy proves unsuccessful, by starting educational activities in New York.

This is a reasonable approach, but not if you deal with a government that employs a strategy meant to impose the highest level of insecurity possible and over a prolonged time, so that the university is debilitated from the corrosive force of uncertainty. If put into words, the government’s strategy was: “Whatever you do, you will be punished, and you will not know when, how, or for what!” Despite our commitment to continue working no matter what, this corrosion has been active, subcutaneously, for a while at least, probably at all levels of the university’s operations.

But in the end, CEU has found its way out of these troubles and moved forward. Ironically, the experience has even made us stronger. The imposed insecurity has overall created an astonishing sense of community, of standing together (be it with respect to CEU or any other Hungarian institution, often but not only on the streets, protesting), against whatever attack is launched against academic freedom. This has led to new activities addressing academic freedom, in its history and contemporary forms, by students and faculty alike. Faculty organized or participated in workshops, panels, conferences, or courses that deal with academic freedom and related issues. Students from CEU and other local universities organized a week long “Open University” in tents in front of the parliament, with seminars and public lectures, despite the freezing cold November 2018 weather.

CEU will relocate its American accredited degrees to Vienna, where a new permanent campus will be built up from scratch, and where new students will be welcomed from September 2019 onwards. It plans to salvage as much as possible from its Budapest operations and continue its educational activities in New York. The university will survive and, in fact, flourish. We haven’t stopped the truck, but the truck did not stop us either.

But what happens to those who cannot move? To some of the Hungarian members of CEU who might not be able to join the move; to the Hungarian institutions that have been facing similar treatment by the government, that are more and more held on a short leash by it, step by step losing their academic freedom? The deeper issue is not, or even mainly, about CEU. Hungary is witnessing the derangement of its higher education landscape. And it is Hungarians who will pay the highest price.

If Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government can do what it did to CEU, what can it do to those institutions that financially depend on it? CEU’s residency in Budapest has prevented many bright minds from leaving the region. In the future, they will want to leave. Those who remain will go into denial about the decay of academic freedom as long as possible, while others will quickly obey. Only a few will fight and not many will be watching, once CEU has left.

In the summer of 2017, after Lex CEU had passed, I was having dinner with a colleague from a Budapest-based state university. I mentioned that one viable option was for CEU to leave Hungary. My colleague cried out: “And what happens to us, when you leave?” I did not have a comforting answer.

Maria Kronfeldner

Kronfeldner is Professor at Central European University’s Department of Philosophy and works at the crossroads of philosophical anthropology, history and philosophy of the life and social sciences, and social philosophy. She is editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization and considers philosophy to be the most abstract art possible. Photo: Lukas Einsele