Can the Central European University make a comeback?

On 22 September, in an auditorium on Vienna’s Quellenstrasse, Princeton Professor Kim Lane Scheppele asked whether Hungary could start a democratic cascade.

For more than a decade the country has been the cautionary tale of how a democracy falls to an aspiring autocrat; since April’s election, it has become the test of whether the process can run in reverse.

The setting added a footnote of its own. The host, Central European University (CEU), founded in Budapest in 1991, was forced to leave the country in 2019 after one of the first attacks on academia by the new wave of elected illiberals.

Hungary’s democratic restoration is argued mostly in the language of law: which statutes to repeal, which appointments to reverse. That is necessary but not sufficient: what actually protects a university takes decades to build. CEU’s case raises a question that exile has deferred: what would a genuinely Central European future for CEU look like?

CEU was a product of the early 1990s, when Eastern Europe was considered a global frontier for democracy: small by design, postgraduate and English language, it was measured against the best in its fields rather than against its neighbours.

In April 2017 the Orbán government launched a thinly veiled attack on it: a law, soon known as Lex CEU, requiring foreign universities to hold an intergovernmental agreement and a campus in their home country.

CEU tried to comply, in vain, and moved to Vienna, at a cumulative cost that its then rector, Michael Ignatieff, estimated at around €200 million (approximately US$226.7 million). When the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in 2020 that the law breached EU law, its students were already in Vienna: vindication by the courts arriving after the damage.

What we said in 2017

At Milestone Institute, we were among the first in Hungary to publish a statement of solidarity in 2017. We compared the Lex CEU bill to taking a blunt axe to an old maple tree bearing its best fruit and called CEU “a horizon, testament to the fact that a higher education institution can be both world-class and be rooted in the region”.

What we meant as a warning now reads as an agenda: not to restore what the government tried to destroy but to rethink it for a new reality.

Protecting academic freedom has to go beyond the legal route. For half a decade I have worked with universities in the region on strategy, and from that experience I know that it increasingly comes down to institutional resilience, which rests on constituencies: who pays for a university, who would miss it and where it can operate.

Who would miss it and who pays

Let’s start with who would miss it. CEU’s social capital in Hungary was, and arguably still is, real: an international standard available to Hungarian students without leaving the country, and research partnerships across Hungarian academia before 2017.

But that capital sat in a narrow band of society: academics, liberal professionals, the internationally mobile. It was never converted into broad recognition, which is what made the “Soros university” caricature cheap to deploy.

A broader base would not have saved it: in 2019 the same government stripped the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, an institution with two centuries of standing, of its research network. No constituency outweighs a supermajority. But constituencies set the price of an attack, and they decide how quickly an institution recovers once the political weather changes.

Then there is who pays. CEU was endowed by one benefactor, and that benefactor was the explicit target of the campaign against it. Dependence on a single patron is normally a financial risk; for CEU it was a political one. The Orbán government’s transfer of most public universities to foundations was touted as financial independence through endowment.

In reality, it produced government-appointed boards and years of exclusion from Erasmus+ and Horizon Europe. Autonomy through one endowing sponsor is not autonomy. Autonomy through many payers can be.

Dismantling comes first

Dismantling that Orbán model is now consuming the Hungarian sector, and the incentives were immediate: of the €16.4 billion package agreed with the European Commission in May, some €2.2 billion was tied to restoring academic freedom, against an August deadline.

Undoing capture became the unquestionable priority. But in conversations with university leaders and people close to the reforms, nobody thinks that undoing capture is the same as having a system worth having. Alongside the dismantling, there is a real appetite for models that improve the country’s competitiveness and its European connectedness. That is the opening into which CEU’s next move would land.

That leaves the third question: where CEU can operate. It never gave up Budapest: the buildings, the library, the archive, and, since April, it has a research site recognised by the Hungarian authorities. Its rector has described the university’s future as bi-local.

Framing the choice as Budapest or Vienna, however, may hide a larger one. The question is less where CEU should sit than how it should strengthen its regional foothold.

A vantage point, not a catchment area

CEU’s global standing was built not despite its location but because of it. In 1991 the world’s question was how societies leave communism, and Budapest was the place to study it from inside. Thirty-five years later the region is again a laboratory of global relevance, and this time a comparative one.

Poland has spent nearly three years trying to undo eight years of illiberal rule, Slovakia has moved the other way and Hungary is now testing whether a captured state can be reversed.

No single research programme follows from this, and none should. For economists, historians, philosophers and cognitive scientists alike, the region offers what a good location offers any serious institution: proximity to consequential change, and a place from which global questions look different.

The region is not CEU’s catchment area, nor its research topic; it is the vantage point that lets it be Central European without being provincial.

None of this makes the choice easy. A return to Budapest is as unfeasible as a return to the pre-illiberal status quo is futile: a university is an ecosystem of people, many of whom have already endured being driven out of a beloved city and starting again.

Vienna offers a place on the world stage that nowhere in the region can match. But it would be a waste to leave a campus, an archive and three decades of social capital idle now that the politics have changed.

CEU’s version of a multi-campus model would be unusual: not a Western brand exporting itself to an emerging market, nor a regional power planting outposts in its sphere of influence, but world-class quality rooted in the region CEU is named after, at a level of aspiration that is rare there.

The model is harder to design than to name. CEU’s standing rests on being small: selective programmes, a compact faculty, seminars where the region’s hardest questions are argued at the highest level. Growing large would dilute that; staying as it is would leave its influence, its income and its constituencies as narrow as they were in 2017.

Ways out of the bind

There are two familiar ways out of this bind. The European University Institute in Florence stayed small and extended its reach through policy influence and its doctoral graduates; Sciences Po grew, through teaching and new campuses, without losing its standing.

CEU is better placed than any institution in the region to follow either route. Its situation also suggests a third: reach through partners rather than size.

Conventional research partnerships would not be enough; the model would need alliances in teaching, policy engagement and public impact as well. Budapest could then become one node among several, extending CEU’s reach across borders and giving it constituencies in more than one country.

An institution anchored in several countries is also harder to expel from all of them at once.

Which path to take is the university’s decision. The rest of the sector should watch closely. CEU’s next chapter will show whether an exiled institution can come back to a region, not just a city, on terms that would survive the next reversal, and whether a name chosen in 1991 as an aspiration can become a description.

János Hódsági is a Budapest-based higher education strategy consultant at Solutions Lab, working with regional universities on competitiveness, future-of-learning and strategic positioning. Solutions Lab is part of Milestone Institute.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.