Excerpt: Liviu Matei knows firsthand what it looks like when an authoritarian leader seeks to reshape higher education. Matei was provost at Central European University when the parliament led by Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, passed a law in 2017 essentially forcing his institution out of the country. The law supposedly targeted foreign branch campuses, but many saw it as an attack on a university founded by liberal Hungarian American financier George Soros.
The situation became a worldwide “cause célèbre of academic freedom,” Matei said during a panel Wednesday. But he added that “you might be surprised to hear that there was almost no discussion about academic freedom in Europe between the fall of the Berlin Wall” and the new millennium.
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