The power and vulnerability of colleges amid rising authoritarianism
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Shalini Randeria started a podcast, Democracy in Question, on which she and leading scholars or public figures grapple with meaty themes, like climate justice, women’s rights, and the intersection of democracy with populism.
A sociologist and social anthropologist, she has long explored such ideas in her research. But the issues are not just academic for Randeria, who in 2021 became president and rector of Central European University, a liberal-arts institution started by George Soros, a financier and civil-society activist.
Even before Randeria’s arrival — she is the institution’s first female leader and its first from the global South — Central European University had relocated its main campus from Budapest to Vienna, under political pressure from Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, that threatened its survival. (The university, which is accredited in Austria and the United States, ultimately won its case before the European Court of Justice.)
Under Randeria’s leadership, the university continues to champion academic freedom and extend higher education’s reach to parts of the world where learning can be threatened by politics and even war. Most recently, faculty members put together the Invisible University for Ukraine, designing and co-teaching online courses with Ukrainian colleagues, on topics ranging from literature to post-conflict reconstruction. Randeria led a class on imperialism and nationalism.
Randeria spoke with Latitudes about culture wars around the globe, educating students to be comfortable with difference, and why universities may particularly threaten autocratic-leaning leaders. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Are there lessons you’ve learned from dealing with political pressures firsthand?
We learned the lesson that the university is a fragile institution, that it is very dependent on the conditions under which it operates in order to retain its autonomy as an institution and its values of academic freedom. But it also reminded us that the university is a powerful institution — because were it not for that fact, an authoritarian regime would not spend so much time and energy.
Right, why else bother?
It shows you the fear and anxiety that authoritarian rulers have against autonomous institutions, civil-society institutions of all kinds, but also universities as spaces in which there is critical thought. That is something that every authoritarian regime fears.
It’s a mistake to divide the world into authoritarian and democratic systems. I think we need to look very much more carefully at the practices of what I call soft authoritarianism. The U.S. would be a very good example. Look at some of your states which are banning textbooks because they don’t like what they say on gender or LGBT rights. You have governors who are threatening universities with dire consequences if they don’t fall in line. You have backlash from the right wing on wokeness and cancel culture. Universities, and especially liberal intellectuals, have become targets of right-wing populists, even in democracies. In France, under Macron, you had a large number of French intellectuals making a case that gender studies and critical-race studies and postcolonial studies are not disciplines, that these are American fads that should not be taught and have no place in the French university.
Is there something about universities, about academics, that makes them especially troubling for some leaders?
The backbone of a democracy is dissent, is argument, is critical thought. It’s diversity, pluralism. If you want to stifle both pluralism and dissent, then you attack universities. As is the case with most of these authoritarian governments, if your idea is that higher education is about indoctrination and not education, then an autonomous university is a real thorn in your flesh. This is a presumption on my part, but probably the fear of universities is that we are educating critical, independent thinkers for the next generations.
What ought university leaders be doing in this time of threats to academic freedom and autonomy?
I wish I had a good set of prescriptions, but I’ll tell you two or three things which strike me. One, I think it would be a good idea to include indices for academic freedom in university rankings. If you do that, the Chinese university rankings will fall immediately. The other interesting thing for me is this debate, in the U.S. especially, is on the freedom of expression of faculty. But how about our students? I’m very mindful of how vulnerable our students are because these days you have all of these authoritarian regimes which are monitoring the social-media accounts of students abroad. We had a student who was in jail in Egypt for 18 months because of some criticism he had voiced on a Facebook account here of the Egyptian regime.
It’s part of our mission to protect and safeguard and practice democracy. The classroom becomes a space, when you have students of diverse backgrounds, where students learn to respect difference, to learn to tolerate views that are not their own, and even that they disagree with. The university can make a huge difference if it sees itself as a training ground for democracy, in the way in which it teaches, in the way it allows differences to be articulated, tolerance to be practiced.
Central European University has a large population of Ukrainian students, and you’ve put together programming to reach students still in Ukraine. How do you see your role in supporting students affected by the war?
We brought together 26 of these students to our summer school. I spent an evening with them, and it was one of the most moving experiences I’ve had in the last year. The very first question that this 18-year-old girl asked me was, How does one forgive someone who has done such awful things to your fellow citizens and country? I said, well, there are very many views on this, but let me tell you something about Gandhi. Because he had very interesting views on the whole question of morality in politics and what forgiveness could mean and why the perpetrators of injustice are as deformed by that injustice as victims are.
You ask yourself, who am I to give advice sitting in the luxury of Vienna while your families are being bombed, your fathers and brothers are on the front? But they were asking the questions. That is where the university is a unique institution. It can reach out in these very troubled times and can be a space for refuge from these harsh conditions of life. It’s about the life of the mind and to keep that open space for people.
