Three brushes with populist power tell me no one in academia is safe

As a graduate of the Central European University in Budapest who has tenure at Maastricht University and was recently a visiting academic at Columbia University, I have had the rare luck of experiencing attacks on higher education in three different regions.

That triple blow has taught me that academics are never far away from the wrong end of authoritarian power, however liberal a society might seem. But there are other more hopeful lessons to share.

My first brush with populist attacks on academia occurred when the CEU was forced to relocate its degree programmes from Hungary to Austria in 2019. I was a recent PhD graduate, soon to be invited back to participate in the CEU’s newly founded, still Budapest-based Democracy Institute.

As a historian focused on 20th-century Europe, the unsubtle authoritarian playbook was clear for me to see. The clampdown was centred on the unsubstantiated claim – closely linked to conspiracy theories surrounding the university’s founder, George Soros – that the CEU was a political rather than an academic institution; propaganda was now dictating political decisions. It was followed by shameless but unsurprising denials by government representatives that they had purposefully sought to dismantle the university. What surprised me more was the ineffectiveness of the European response, which was never based on a robust commitment to academic freedom.

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I had believed, all too naively, that while the CEU, a nascent island of world-class academic excellence, made a convenient whipping boy for Hungary’s illiberal rulers, it was too reputable and too tiny to be treated as a genuine enemy and would ultimately be protected. So when conservative members of the Budapest middle class descended in masses from the hills to chant “szabad ország, szabad egyetem” (“free country, free university”), I found it at the same time uplifting and dispiriting. If educated former supporters of Fidesz were now openly protesting alongside us, then the university must be under serious threat, I reflected. Unilateral decisions had already been taken behind closed doors. And I belatedly realised just how consequential they would be.

But surely rich, long-established American institutions would not be susceptible to such bullying? Upon my arrival in New York in early 2024, Columbia struck me as the mighty child of an unconventional marriage between the liberal establishment and some of its most ardent critics. It took me no more than five minutes to get from the top floor of the International Affairs Building, where Barack Obama’s former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and historian Timothy Snyder declared in unison their enthusiastic support for Ukraine, to a rather discreet room in the adjacent Center for the Humanities, where Palestinian-American academic Rashid Khalidi was commenting on Palestinian writer Tareq Baconi’s most recent article setting out how Western policy on Gaza had become morally discredited.

With its chants, skirmishes, student encampments, police interventions and temporary closures, Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus offered a close-up view of fierce polarisation. I was half-jokingly told on a street in downtown Manhattan that this campus for the erudite kids of the privileged must have been invented to play out the psychodrama version of global politics. Back on campus, I was quietly informed that our centre of learning would soon adopt airport-style security measures and that this was not the moment to raise sensitive questions.

As a visiting professor with comparatively little at stake, I chose to complete the semester even after we were discouraged from teaching on campus. Towards the end, our seminars were repeatedly interrupted by chants from the lawn, which my students greeted with mild amusement.

My subsequent discussions with courageous student journalists revealed a much more troubling story though. They spoke to me with conviction about a university leadership they saw as having adopted an externally imposed narrative and that appeared unwilling to defend the university against unfounded accusations of antisemitism.

I arrived with great admiration for a place of exceptional intellectual creativity and departed – despite having experienced many profound exchanges – with the gnawing perception that Columbia might just have become another giant Manhattan-based corporation in an increasingly oligarchic age.

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Hence, it was with a certain sense of relief that I moved back to the Netherlands – a wealthy, consensus-oriented West European democracy. I was aware that a sense of nationalist resentment against neoliberalism and internationalisation had been growing, but I didn’t expect it to seize political power so abruptly.

Universities in the Netherlands were internationalised earlier and more thoroughly than in any other European Union member state, attracting significant talent by making English the default language in many settings. But chronic underinvestment in public programmes paved the way for the rise of the far right, who pledged to defund and de-internationalise Dutch academia as they took power in the 2023 general election.

The result was less dramatic than my experiences in Budapest and New York but no less chilling. The tyranny of ethnonationalist opinion in what remained a deeply conformist society was impossible to ignore. It turns out that even in what is nominally one of the most liberal EU member states, the voices of other Europeans, let alone academicians from further away and with fewer rights, can be easily drowned out – despite our constituting about half of the faculty in the Netherlands by now.

Protests against the planned withdrawal of €1.3 billion (£1.1 billion) from education and research were ultimately successfully organised, but we have seen remarkably little open and principled support for international academic culture or non-Dutch academicians. The more centrist government that was formed after last October’s snap general election might now redress the cultural issue, but the failure to support individuals will remain painfully etched in memory.

Maastricht proudly brands itself as “the European university of the Netherlands”. As it turns out, “the Dutch university of Europe” would have been the more accurate slogan since our faculty and students may be thoroughly Europeanised, but our circumstances continue to be determined by the vagaries of national politics.

You only ever truly experience power if you are at the wrong end of it. My repeated exposure to it has made concepts like autocratic legalism, oligarchic capture and anti-intellectual nationalism feel like existential threats.

Academics may prefer to dissect these burning issues from a safe distance, but recurrent attacks on their institutions show they might not enjoy this privilege any longer. That should make us all the more motivated to reflect on how we have arrived here – and how we could build back better.

Ferenc Laczó is assistant professor in history at Maastricht University. He dedicates this article to Pablo del Hierro.