Christopher F. Rufo, the activist and author, spent six weeks in the spring of 2023 in Hungary, just as he and other conservative trustees were mounting a hostile takeover of New College of Florida, the state’s honors college. Rufo was there as a visiting fellow at a think tank closely aligned with the country’s populist prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
“My deepest interest was to understand how Hungary, which emerged from Soviet communism just thirty years ago, is attempting to rebuild its culture and institutions, from schools to universities to media,” Rufo wrote in a Substack post after he returned to the United States. He applauded Hungary’s leaders for “using muscular state policy to achieve conservative ends.”
Rufo isn’t the only one in the orbit of the incoming Trump administration to look to Hungary as a potential model for reform of American higher education. The Heritage Foundation — drafters of Project 2025, which is largely seen as a blueprint for the new administration — has close ties with the Danube Institute, the Hungarian think tank that hosted Rufo. (Neither Rufo nor the Danube Institute responded to requests for comment.)
Vice President-elect JD Vance has also praised Orbán’s approach to dealing with campus dissent: “I do think that he’s made some smart decisions there that we could learn from in the United States.”
And Trump has met with the Hungarian leader several times, including at a post-election confab at Mar-a-Lago.
Why does a small Central European country with fewer than 70 colleges loom so large in right-wing visions of remaking American higher education? On the global stage, Hungary doesn’t have the reputation of, say, Singapore, a tiny nation punching academically above its weight — just one Hungarian institution is among the top 500 universities in the world on major university rankings.
Hungary has captured the imagination of Trump and his allies for reasons both ideological and concrete. In his 14 years in power, Orbán has succeeded in casting higher education as a dangerous foe in his largely successful prosecution of the culture wars. He has also imposed real change, banning gender and women’s studies departments and overhauling university governance.
Like Trump, Orbán inveighs against educated elites and political correctness, said Eve Darian-Smith, chair of global and international studies at the University of California at Irvine. Trump’s rhetoric, she said, “could be out of the mouth of Orbán.”
While differences between the educational systems in the two countries could make Hungary’s approach difficult to replicate in the United States, the embrace of Orbán offers insight into the game plan for higher education in the second Trump administration.
Pursuit of an ‘Illiberal Democracy’
Orbán fired one of his first salvos against higher education at Central European University, a liberal-arts institution founded by the financier George Soros to help rebuild academic life after the fall of Communism. Orbán’s government pushed legislation in 2017 to require foreign universities to have campuses in their home countries; the measure would have affected only CEU, which is accredited in New York but had no operations there.
The target on CEU was due partly to its connection to Soros, a major backer of progressive causes. But it also reflected Orbán’s specific hostility toward higher education and its promotion of critical thinking, dissent, and diversity. Colleges’ cosmopolitanism was both foil and threat to his pursuit of a more populist and nationalist “illiberal democracy.”
Vance, who has called professors the “enemy,” has pointed to Hungary as worth emulating.
“The closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary,” he said in a February 2024 interview. “I think his way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching.”
While Vance and others have singled out Hungary, Orbán is not alone. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has cracked down on academe, purging dissident professors, stifling student protests, and restructuring universities to give the government greater control. Autocratic leaders in Argentina and Brazil have tried to discredit universities and cut their funding.
CEU was “just the leading edge, only one tiny piece” of the changes Orbán would impose, said Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University, who taught at CEU.
He sought to “stamp out wokeness” by forcing the closure of gender and women’s studies departments at Hungarian universities, said Scheppele, who started CEU’s gender-studies program. The government took control of the budget of the Hungarian Academy of Science, which funds research institutes in history and literature as well as the hard and social sciences.
If I was a private institution in the U.S., I’d look at what Orbán did to CEU and be worried.
Perhaps Orbán’s most far-reaching move was to effectively privatize Hungary’s public universities, taking oversight away from the central Ministry of Education and giving it to institutional governing boards. Rather than receive government funding, endowments were set up for each university, to be controlled by the boards. Although the initial board members would be government appointees, in the future, they would name their successors.
On the face of it, the reforms seem like textbook good governance, insulating universities from state control, said William Krull, a former CEU board member and founding director of the New Institute, a Germany-based research center focused on social challenges. The intent and effect, however, were different: By making the boards self-perpetuating, Orbán loyalists could appoint other loyalists, ensuring control even under a different government. As private entities, their decisions and spending were no longer subject to public disclosure. While Hungarian professors did not have tenure, they had stronger protections as public-sector workers — and that was gone.
“It was a seemingly slow and gentle transformation, but it undercut the autonomy of universities,” said Krull, who contributed a chapter on Hungary to a recent volume, Neo-Nationalism and Universities: Populists, Autocrats, and the Future of Higher Education. (This reporter wrote a section on China.)
Now at-will employees, some faculty members and administrators were dismissed or reassigned, while others took early retirement. “They’re just killing off Hungarian academia,” Scheppele said.
In response to the governance changes, the European Union blocked Hungarian universities from receiving research grants and taking part in student exchanges, citing concerns about conflict of interest and lack of transparency. According to the Academic Freedom Index, Hungary has seen “dramatic” declines in academic freedom.
Even as Orbán restructured Hungarian universities, he transferred $1.7 billion in government money to fund a parallel educational institution designed to train a conservative elite, from elementary school through college. The private foundation, Mathias Corvinus Collegium, controls assets worth more than the country’s total annual higher-education budget.
The idea of an alternate national university may ring bells for Americans — during the presidential campaign, Trump pledged to set up a free online college where “wokeness or jihadism” would not be allowed.
Limits on Power
So could Orbán’s playbook be replicated in the United States? Yes and no, experts said.
With no central education ministry, direct oversight of colleges occurs at the state and local level. More than 1,700 institutions are privately governed.
But CEU was also private, points out Alex Usher, an international-education consultant based in Toronto. Political pressure from the Hungarian government eventually led university leaders to relocate the college to Austria.
“If I was a private institution in the U.S., I’d look at what Orbán did to CEU and be worried,” Usher said. “He said, we’re just going to harass and harass and harass you.”
The CEU case revolved around foreign accreditation, but Trump and Vance have different levers, said John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley. The administration could tax endowments, “impound” scientific grants if it was displeased by the area of research, use the Department of Justice and other federal agencies to investigate colleges, and threaten student-aid funding to compel institutions to take certain actions, like ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programming and policies.
While it would be “fairly impractical” to put in place structural changes similar to Hungary’s at the national level, “having the federal government advance an Orbán agenda doesn’t mean you have to have Orbán-governance style nationwide,” said Brendan Cantwell, a professor of higher, adult, and lifelong education at Michigan State University. Instead, the Trump administration could encourage states to use their authority to more tightly control college governance.
In fact, there’s already a state that “looks a lot like what happened in Hungary,” Cantwell said. It’s Florida, where Rufo and a slate of trustees appointed by the state’s Republican governor fired New College’s president, dismantled gender studies, and sought to change the college’s curriculum and mission.