Hungary ejects U.s.-accredited university

CEU founded by Soros and run by Ignatieff

BERLIN• European Union leaders had warned that it was a red line, and dared Hungary not to cross it. The United States ambassador had pegged the issue as his top priority. in the streets of Budapest, tens of thousands marched.

But in the end, there was nothing to stop Prime Minister Viktor Orban — who calls all the shots at home and increasingly does the same with his supposedly more powerful allies in the West — from driving Central European University into exile.

The school, headed up by former federal Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, was established a quartercentury ago to educate a new generation of leaders and scholars after the collapse of the Iron Curtain.

On Monday it became the first university to be forced out of an E.U. nation.

The ejection marked one of the surest signals to date of autocracy’s return to Hungary, and the region, after decades of relative freedom.

It also reflected a humbling for the West, which could not muster the strength to stand up to Orban. The Hungarian leader has made no secret that he wants to overturn the liberal international order from within and replace it with a system more akin to the illiberal despotism of Russia or China.

“Arbitrary eviction of a reputable university is a flagrant violation of academic freedom,” the university said in announcing the move. “It is a dark day for Europe and a dark day for Hungary.”

An exasperated Ignatieff, the president and rector, said at a news conference that despite “many declarations and expressions of support” from U.S. and E.U. leaders, the West ultimately was toothless in defence of its principles.

“No leverage has been exerted on the government of Hungary from outside,” he said.

Ignatieff rejected any suggestion that the university could have done more, saying the government never had been interested in a solution.

“This game has to stop,” he said.

In an interview last week, U.S. Ambassador to Hungary David B. Cornstein confirmed that he never had tried to use either incentives or threats to sway Orban, despite proclaiming upon arrival in Budapest in June that his top mission was to keep CEU in the country.

With that effort having failed, he blamed the university’s founder — Hungarian American financier George Soros — for the school’s departure and refused to criticize Orban.

Cornstein minimized the university’s importance — comparing its 1,500 students unfavourably with much larger campuses at Ohio State and Michigan — and appeared baffled by why the school’s fate had generated wider interest.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with academic freedom,” Cornstein said.

CEU has long been considered among the world’s finest graduate schools, attracting students from across the globe, and it is widely seen as the best in Hungary.

Orban has been particularly ruthless in attacking anything associated with Soros, whose open and liberal philosophy is the antithesis of the prime minister’s nationalist and nativist outlook.

In the spring, after Orban made denunciation of the billionaire the centrepiece of his reelection campaign and won a resounding victory, Soros’s Open Society Foundations announced it was fleeing Hungary because it could no longer guarantee the safety of its staff.

The university said Monday that it had no choice but to move its primary campus to Vienna next year after Orban’s government refused to acknowledge an agreement that would enable CEU to continue to admit new students in Budapest.

The university, which has dual accreditation in Hungary and the United States, has enjoyed robust, bipartisan backing in Congress, where members expressed concern about the threat to academic freedom and the precedent of a U.S. institution being kicked out by an American ally.

But last week, after it became clear that there would be no deal, Cornstein broke with previous U.S. policy on the matter. He refused to criticize Orban — whom he described as his “friend” — and accused Soros of being insufficiently acquiescent to the government.

Cornstein — an 80-yearold New Yorker who made his fortune in the jewelry, gambling and telemarketing businesses and is a close friend of U.S. President Donald Trump’s — compared the university’s plight to his own experience selling jewelry at department stores.

“I was a guest in another guy’s store,” Cornstein said. “The university is in another country. It would pay to work with the government.”

IT IS A DARK DAY FOR EUROPE AND A DARK DAY FOR HUNGARY.

Michael Ignatieff