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CEU, a U.S.-accredited graduate school in the humanities and social sciences, was founded by George Soros and a group of dissident Hungarian academics back in 1991. For 25 years, CEU stayed out of politics, trained graduate students, and earned a reputation as a serious scholarly institution.
Then in late 2016, right after Donald Trump’s first election victory, Orbán attacked. There is a certain kind of populist politician who needs enemies to give someone his base can hate. Orbán chose Soros.
In the election campaign from late 2016 to the spring of 2018, Orbán campaigned to drive Soros and his influence out of Hungary. CEU was not Orbán’s target, though he wanted to silence us if he could. He introduced a law requiring us to seek his permission to operate and requiring us to set up a campus in the United States. Many American universities overseas do not operate campuses at home. We were one of them. But this too was a pretext. For the next three years, the Orbán government tried to drive us out of Hungary.
The question the embattled university president asked, in effect, was how a university fights an authoritarian regime.
I told him to frame his fight to gain as many allies as he can. Mobilize your alumni networks. Enlist families whose children’s lives have been saved in your hospitals; reach out to companies that have commercialized your research, make contact with universities in red and blue states, public and private, who face the same threat. Do it fast. Make sure your campaign is not just about you, because that opens you to attack as a defender of privilege. Make the case to the public that these attacks are senseless assaults on institutions that promote what America is famous for: life-saving science and world-class innovation.
At CEU we framed Orbán’s attack as an affront to academic freedom in Europe, indeed the most serious one since the 1930s. We didn’t draw parallels with Hitler’s expulsion of the fine flower of German academic life and their forced emigration. We didn’t have to. Within days, university presidents from around the world were bombarding Orbán with incredulous and indignant emails, copied to us, asking why a member of the European Union and NATO, a supposed democracy, was attacking a free institution.
Universities don’t and shouldn’t organize demonstrations on their behalf, but again we didn’t have to. One Sunday afternoon in May, we looked out our window and saw 80,000 Budapest citizens stream by the university, on their way to Parliament, chanting “Free universities in a free society.” It was the largest demonstration in Budapest since the end of the Cold War. Those people understood that when a university is attacked, everyone’s freedom is attacked. That’s a message American college presidents should adopt as their own.
The real challenge, whenever an authoritarian government attacks a university, is that they have already prepared the ground, portraying universities as privileged enclaves of the entitled and the condescending, trapped in their own self-regarding bubble of wokeness. These politicians play expertly on the resentments of those who don’t have college degrees. They grab hold of the flag of academic freedom and wave it in the face of university administrators struggling to balance the imperatives of campus order and civility against their First Amendment obligations.
The Germans have a word for this strategy. It is called Kulturkampf, and it proceeds from an intuition associated with Trump’s former strategist, Steve Bannon: “Culture is upstream from politics.” Translation: If you can win the culture war, you win the political war.
Faced with Kulturkampf waged by a ferociously ideological administration intent on neutralizing academe as a critical voice, university presidents will be inclined to hunker down and wait for the storm to pass. But it may not pass. Even if it does, the universities that survive may be weakened, frightened shadows of their former selves.
So, I said to the embattled president who called me, You’re going to need an alliance that pulls together American families, employers, unions, companies, the whole network of people and institutions beyond your campus who understand that the universities of America are critical to everything that is good about the country: its commitment to freedom, its devotion to excellence, its leadership in science and medicine. This alliance is going to have to get political — to reach across red state and blue state, identify the members of Congress from both sides of the House who understand why universities matter to their communities, to the American economy, and to America’s deserved reputation for excellence. Don’t mince words. It’s too late to play nice. Call a spade a spade. Convince enough Americans that the administration’s strategy deserves only one name: vandalism.
