A few days before we launched this petition, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) aired an interview with Michael Ignatieff, former President and Rector (2016-2021) of CEU. The interview closes with Ignatieff’s take on what happened to Hungary and to CEU:
“I went to Hungary because I was asked to be the President and Rector of a wonderful institution called Central European University, which was a graduate school in the humanities and social sciences set up after 1991 to do something, which I think was a very good idea, which is: you can’t have a free society unless you have a free university. And so, George Soros put some money into this place, and a bunch of crazy Hungarian intellectuals helped him to build this institution, and I came in in 2016, when it was firmly ensconced in Budapest and built up a good international academic reputation. And then Viktor Orbán, then, basically decided that his reelection campaign in 2018 depended on finding a big enough enemy to mobilize his base, and the biggest enemy that you can find in Hungary is George Soros, who is, you know, a Holocaust survivor, the richest Hungarian who ever lived, and a very prominent defender of liberal causes. Orbán had no conceivable grounds for questioning our academic quality, but he went after us, and used legislation to render this university illegal, in effect. And we fought it for two or three years, and, eventually—you know, what’s that country in western song… “fight the law but the law won”—so, we fought the law and the law won, and we ended up in Vienna, which is where I live now, and I had to move a university across a national frontier in the middle of Covid. And I learnt a couple of things that, I think, are relevant. One of them is that Hungary is, nominally, a democracy. Viktor Orbán is not a dictator or a tyrant, he won four straight elections, and then used, this is the point, used democracy to demolish democracy. And everybody who’s seen that—you’ve seen that once, you’ll never forget it. You win a majority, and you then hobble the Supreme Court, sell off the media to your cronies, hobble all the regulatory agencies, you use majority rule to take apart every counter-majoritarian institution that keeps people free in a society. And once you’ve seen that, you look at your own democracy with new eyes. You begin to realize that this is another thing liberalism, for all its other faults, got right. Which is, you know, democracy is not majority rule. Democracy, in liberal beliefs, is power checking power, to keep the people free. Right? And that’s the vision of democracy that Orbán hates. And he goes after universities because we are one of the counter-majoritarian institutions that keep our society free. And our job is, epistemically, crucial in a world of digital media and the chaos of information we see. Our job—and we don’t do it as well as we should—it is to curate the knowledge that has stood the test of time, create new knowledge, and critically assess the truth claims, or the evidence claims, in the public discourse. And it makes a university an extremely important institution to democracy. And Orbán understood that better than most liberals, is what I’m saying, and he went after the last free-standing institution in the country, the last institution that mustered any kind of intellectual or conceptual opposition to this vision of democracy. And it taught me a lesson about the fragility of democracy, the ease with which the counter-majoritarian institutions of a society can be weakened. And so we lost.”
In a few hours from now, the Board of Trustees of Central European University will gather to discuss the present and future of CEU. They may decide to cement this “loss”, formally request the withdrawal of KEE’s license and terminate KEE, and thus legitimize, and legalize, the decision made by the CEU leadership to remain in Vienna even after Lex CEU was struck down by the Court of Justice of the European Union in October, 2020, and, especially, after the law was amended by the Hungarian Parliament in May 2021 to comply with EU legislation. Such an admission of defeat will be unprecedented in the history of CEU, and it will surely set the stage for further ones.
While we categorically disagree with Michael Ignatieff’s claim that “we lost” (who, or what, exactly? He, personally? Or OSF, the most powerful philanthropic foundation in the world? Or, more generally, the cause of democracy and justice?), we cannot put it more clearly than he did: universities are extremely important institutions to democracy.
We understand that (non-degree granting) CEU in Budapest, reduced to a few “crazy” Hungarian and foreign scholars who still run the place there, are determined to keep on fighting for democracy, and especially, for academic freedom. They will do so for their colleagues in Austria as well, as Austria is steadily descending into brown political misery. But they will also continue their fight for the country most of the Trustees come from: the US. Ignatieff’s words must be a warning for all of us as we see “Project 2025” take off, and indeed, materialize (and we have explained in detail how much of this madness has started in Hungary, and how it spread to the US in recent years).
Lastly: Hungary has just announced the slogan for its rotating Presidency of the European Council starting in a couple of weeks: “Make Europe Great Again.” What can we say? What belongs together will grow together.
Let us all hope that the Trustees are aware of the gravity of the situation and the importance of the decisions they will be making in the upcoming days.
The petition remains open, and we hope that many more alumni will sign in the coming weeks and months. We also welcome and encourage friends of CEU to continue signing. Help us by sharing the petition link among your contacts, especially in higher education worldwide! Comments left in the Reason for signing section at the bottom of the page are especially welcome.
Notes:
"I Fought the Law" by The Crickets (1960): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKrxq5U8SBY (last accessed on June 19, 2024).
"Massey at 60: Michael Ignatieff on how human rights language has shaped Canadian politics", in: Ideas with Nahlah Ayed, a podcast of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16055552-massey-60-michael-ignatieff-human-rights-language-shaped (aired April 11, 2024; last accessed on June 19, 2024).
"Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project": https://www.project2025.org/ (last accessed on June 19, 2024).