BY HANK REICHMAN
On December 1, Central European University (CEU) announced that, after a lengthy struggle, it would abandon its Budapest campus and relocate to Vienna. “Basically this is a dark day for freedom in Hungary,” said Michael Ignatieff, the president and rector of CEU. “And it’s a dark day for academic freedom.” CEU said the Hungarian government refused to ratify an agreement that would allow it to continue to operate its campus in Budapest under the terms of an April 2017 law on foreign branch campuses. The law was widely seen as a targeted attack by Hungary’s increasingly illiberal government on CEU and its founder and honorary board chairman, the liberal financier George Soros. (See Joan Scott’s account on this blog of the final stages of the fight to preserve CEU in Hungary.) In October, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán issued a government decree effectively prohibiting gender studies courses in all universities in the country, making good on a threat made last summer.
Now the assault on scholarship has apparently spread to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. According to the Hungarian Free Press, on December 6 in an emergency assembly of the Academy, President László Lovász announced that the government was cutting the organization’s first quarter funding and that he did not know how they would continue operating given the circumstances. Earlier, Innovation Minister László Palkovics had explained why he was unhappy with the Academy. He complained that it was involving itself in “unworthy” matters (i.e., political discourse) and that members ought not be “burdened” by such things. President Lovász shared with the members Palkovics’s belief that further funding is also unwarranted because the Academy’s research network does no real work.
At the meeting, the Free Press reports, it was decided that the Academy would attempt to initiate new negotiations with the government, communicating the expectation that funding to research units continue. In a compromise, however, the meeting agreed to establish a 14-member committee to audit the work of these research units. It is likely that research deemed to have a “political” approach not consistent with that of the current government will have to be halted–mostly likely by the Academy’s members engaging in self-censorship, which the Free Press called “the beating heart of the regime.” The Academy has already tried to curry favor with the government by prohibiting two academic talks pertaining to gender studies and the role of women in computer science. Moreover, the Free Press commented, “The Hungarian Academy of Sciences has thus far had absolutely nothing to say about CEU’s announcement this week that it would be relocating to Vienna. The silence is clearly strategic.”
The Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest
