University backed by Soros forced to close in Hungary

Central European University, founded in Hungary after the collapse of the Soviet Union to champion the principles of democracy and free societies, announced Monday that it was being forced from its campus in Budapest by the increasingly authoritarian government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

The closing of the university, founded by American billionaire George Soros, came after a nearly two-year struggle with the Orban government, which has quashed dissent and consolidated control over all aspects of Hungarian life.

The university will move its U.S.-accredited degree programs to Vienna in September. “CEU has been forced out,” said Michael Ignatieff, president of the university. “This is unprecedented. A U.S. institution has been driven out of a country that is a NATO ally. A European institution has been ousted from a member state of the EU.”

Thousands had marched in support of the institution.

Piret Karro, a 27-year-old from Estonia who came to Budapest to get a master’s degree in gender studies, learned that Orban banned the subject this year. She said that while the university would survive in Vienna, she worried what the move meant for academic freedom in Hungary more broadly.

“Other academic institutions in Hungary will still have to deal with Viktor Orban curbing free speech and eliminating critical thinkers,” she said.

Orban has long viewed the school as a bastion of liberalism, presenting a threat to his vision of creating an “illiberal democracy,” and his desire to shut it down was only deepened by its association with Soros, a philanthropist who was born in Hungary.

In April 2017, Orban’s party pushed through legislation that appeared to be aimed at the university. Among other things, it required that colleges must have campuses in their native countries.

To be in compliance, CEU formed a partnership with Bard College in New York, but Orban’s government said that did not satisfy the requirement.