Attack on Central European U. ‘Sets a Dangerous Precedent for Academic Life’

“Do I look like my hair is on fire?” Michael Ignatieff slipped off his suit jacket Wednesday and took a seat. His head was not smoking, but given the week he’s had, it seemed plausible. Mr. Ignatieff, president and rector of Central European University, is locked in a fight for his institution’s survival.

The day before, Hungary’s Parliament approved legislation targeting CEU, which was founded in 1991 by the financier George Soros to rebuild academic life in the region after the fall of communism. The university is accredited in New York, but has no operations there. The new law, among other things, would require foreign universities in Hungary to operate campuses in their home countries. CEU says the law would force it to shut down or leave the country.

The law was advanced by Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who advocates turning the country into an “illiberal state” and has cracked down on civil society. The crisis is seen as part of a larger battle between the cosmopolitan values of liberal democracy and an ascendant wave of nationalist authoritarianism in Europe and elsewhere.

The academic world has rallied to the defense of CEU. “This is nothing less than an attack rooted in a xenophobic nationalism and an anti-intellectual mistrust of the conduct of free inquiry, research and teaching,” wrote three CEU board members, including Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, and the former Columbia University provost Jonathan R. Cole, in The Washington Post. Harvard University’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, issued a statement warning that the situation in Hungary “sets a dangerous precedent for academic life in other countries.” Several scholarly associations have condemned the legislation, and an online petition in support of CEU has attracted nearly 50,000 signatures. Another petition includes the signatures of 20 Nobel laureates. Thousands of supporters have rallied at CEU’s campus in Budapest.

On Wednesday Mr. Ignatieff was ensconced in a hotel conference room in Washington, D.C. He seemed surprised, and pleased, that CEU, which has around 1,800 students from more than 100 countries, has become an international icon of academic freedom. On Thursday the chancellor of Austria offered his country as a home for the university if Hungary succeeds in shutting it down, the Associated Press reported.

Mr. Ignatieff is new to the ranks of academic administration but not public life. A prominent essayist and authority on ethics and international affairs, he was famous in Britain in the 1980s as a “teledon” — an academically trained host of highbrow programming on the BBC. In 2000 he became a professor of human rights at Harvard. Five years later, he ran for the Canadian Parliament and eventually became head of the Liberal Party. He quit politics after a devastating defeat in 2011. He became head of CEU last year.

In between phone calls from foreign ministers and meetings at the State Department and the White House, Mr. Ignatieff spoke to The Chronicle about the purpose of a university, the demands of global higher education, and working with Robert Silvers, a founding editor of The New York Review of Books, who died last month.

Where do things stand for Central European University?

We have raised a constitutional challenge with the president on two grounds: that this law targets CEU in a discriminatory fashion, and that it violates Hungary’s constitutional provisions relating to freedom of academic research. This is a test case of the durability of the post-‘89 order: Will Hungary continue on the road to a democratic transition? Will it respect the autonomy of free institutions?

The university was ringed with people yesterday. I sent out a message this morning saying that, being a university, we don’t organize demonstrations and can’t authorize them. But we’re grateful.

The support that has meant the most, that has actually cost someone something, has come from Hungarian institutions, places that no one in the United States will have heard of. These are universities under the thumb of the government, yet they’re standing up. That’s the most important political aspect of this fight: We’re a private university with a private foundation. We have the resources and the independence to stand up for everybody else. And that’s why people are in the streets, because they see that we have the capacity to defend them and we will continue to do so.

How optimistic are you?

The crucial determinant has been U.S. support. A small graduate university has been caught in a geostrategic battle between Mr. Orbán, on the one hand, and the European community on the other. And between Mr. Orbán and the United States. We’re a hostage in the middle. I had a message this morning that the U.S. State Department is sending people to Budapest next week.

Specifically to address the CEU crisis?

Yes. The support of the United States government has been unwavering, which has sent a ripple back into Europe, and the Europeans have become a little less cautious.

Are you getting as much support from the Trump administration as you would have received from the Obama administration?

I won’t comment on whether it’s less or more because that’s a retrospective hypothetical. I will say that Mr. Orbán’s assumption that a Trump administration wouldn’t care if an American institution gets kicked around is wrong.

When you think about the globalization of higher education in the last 40 years, America has been the leader. We calculate that there are as many as 30 American institutions like us that maintain campuses exclusively overseas and do not have a domestic U.S. program. I can’t begin to count the number of U.S. institutions, from NYU to Yale, who have operations here and campuses abroad. When you add the two numbers together you get a very big number.

American institutions of higher learning are the single biggest thing that helps create leaders around the world who at the very least will not be overtly hostile to the United States. If one leader in a country — a member of NATO — gets away with pushing an American university around, there are 100 other places where some local leader will think he can take a run at an American institution and get away with it. Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals all think there’s something wrong with that.

So what began with a small graduate institution in one city, when you scale out, you see that what’s at stake is a geostrategic interest of this country. That’s why we can’t back down.

You were trained as a historian. You’re an authority on democracy and human rights. What does it portend when a government goes after a university?

You don’t have a free society if you don’t have free, self-governing institutions. The university was one of the earliest free institutions in the European West. To a degree that modern theorists of democracy have not always emphasized, when we define democracy we think of majority rule, free media, an independent judiciary, checks and balances. But it’s also, crucially, self-governing institutions free from state interference.

When you go to the University of Virginia and see that for Jefferson American freedom was directly connected to the idea of a free university, you see why academic freedom is not a privilege of spoiled liberal professors. It’s not a privilege for a little cast of elitists. It’s a cornerstone of everybody’s freedom.

Is CEU a canary in the coal mine for liberal democracy?

If you look at the number of institutions and professional and scholarly associations that have signed up to support us, it’s an indication that they see us as the most relevant and resonant symbol of the battle for academic freedom that has emerged in some time.

I hope this crisis has concentrated everybody’s mind on the fact that academic freedom is the heart and soul of democratic freedom in every society. That’s what’s bringing people out into the streets of Budapest.

It’s rare to see a college president in such a direct fight for the survival of his institution. What has the last week been like?

It’s been one of the most demanding experiences emotionally. [Long silence] My wife would quickly add that it’s not about me.

But the question is about you.

It’s been exhilarating and — I sound like a ballplayer in a locker room, but it really is true — I couldn’t have done it without the team. I’m sitting here in Washington, getting up at 4 in the morning. All day the team in Budapest is feeding me decisions, issues, discussions. We’re rolling out two or three press statements a day. We’re running a legal campaign. We’re running a campaign to reach European leaders. We’re lobbying in Washington.

When you globalize higher education, the levers you have to press to get things to happen become global as well. I’m about to take a call from a foreign minister of a country. In another couple of minutes, I’ll be going to the White House. That’s what global higher education now requires of academic leaders.

You’re defending ideas you’ve been advocating for decades. Is this fight clarifying?

No question. This is the cause that walked up and shook my hand. I’m much more at ease defending academic freedom than I was with party politics. Party politics is all about whether you own an issue on the inside. Do you really feel it? I really feel this one.

You wrote recently that “We are in the full gale of a conservative counterrevolution that could last for some time and reshape modernity in a reactionary direction.” What’s the role of higher education at this moment?

A university’s function is teach young people from every race, creed, color, and origin what knowledge is. It’s that simple: Nothing more, nothing less. In a world beset by post-truth, post-fact, ferocious partisanship of the left and of the right, that’s the one thing a university can do. And knowledge is hard. It is extremely difficult to acquire. It’s contested terrain. But there is a thing called a fact, and it is the only basis upon which a democratic society can make reliable public choices.

When we last spoke, you described yourself as a “New York Review kind of academic.” Last month Robert Silvers, a founding editor, died. What have Silvers and his publication meant to academic life?

I saw Bob about three days before he died. He was struggling for his life. [Long silence] I did my first piece for him in the ‘80s. You really felt that you were up on the top of the mountain if Bob Silvers liked something you wrote. All the stories are true. It’d be 10:30 at night, I’m at a party half drunk, and I’d get a call: “Please hold for Mr. Silvers.” He would say “Michael, on galley B2, paragraph four you use this word and —" he would always put it this way, it was fantastic — “just a suggestion, could you substitute this word for that?” And I’d say, “Mr. Silvers” — I never called him “Bob” — “Mr. Silvers, that sounds like an excellent idea.” I’d put the phone down and think, God almighty, this is the greatest editor in the world.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Evan R. Goldstein is editor of The Chronicle Review.