After more than 25 years of operation in Budapest, the Central European University has been forced out of Hungary
“CEU has been forced out.” That is how Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian president of Central European University (CEU), announced the end of his university’s more than 25 years of operation in Budapest, Hungary. And 20 years after I started my first academic job at this unique university, CEU will no longer be part of Hungarian higher education, moving its operation to Vienna instead. For the first time ever, a university is forced out of an EU member state. Hungary hereby joins a growing group of authoritarian countries that (for all purposes) shut down independent universities, including Belarus (European Humanities University), Russia (European University at St. Petersburg) and Turkey (multiple universities).
CEU was founded in 1991 by US-Hungarian philanthropist George Soros, largely to educate the new elites of post-communist Europe in the spirit of “open societies” of Karl Popper, who influenced Soros profoundly when he was a student at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). It soon established itself as a uniquely international, world-class university, which attracted talented faculty and graduate students from across Europe and the world. My classes at CEU never had more than 20% students from the same country – mainly Hungary – which was an invaluable resource for courses on international politics in general, and nationalism in particular.
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