Hungary cannot look to its past to restore higher education

Ten years ago, the illiberal Hungarian government began its campaign against the Central European University (CEU). Back then, I was asked at a conference in Budapest: “Andrea, what will happen to you now?”

The colleague who asked the question did not have me in mind, but the CEU. He was a well-paid, enthusiastically loyal Fidesz apparatchik. Later, as (Viktor Orbán’s) Fidesz moved further to the far right, he became a so-called ‘Fidesz orphan’, and now, in 2026, he is an advisor to the Respect and Freedom Party (Tisza), a typical example of pragmatic careerism.

I replied at the time: “We’ll leave Budapest; we’ll live splendidly in Vienna, the world’s most liveable city, and when everything here collapses, we’ll come back and rebuild what can be rebuilt.”

I already knew back then that the System of National Cooperation, as the illiberal state built by Fidesz is called, would eventually collapse, since no country can be run for long without professional expertise.

And here we are now, with Orbán finally defeated last weekend and Péter Magyar elected as prime minister.

My 2017 forecast is becoming a reality.

Restoring the status quo makes no sense

In the case of the collapse, I was right: other public institutions, including those in higher education and research, have indeed collapsed. However, doubts remain regarding another question: how this system is to be rebuilt.

These doubts are well-grounded with respect to Magyar’s programme. So far, his stated goal is to restore the autonomy of both the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the universities, that is, to restore the pre-Fidesz status quo.

But is it possible – and, more importantly, is it necessary – to restore what has been destroyed in the past 16 years?

Hungarian academia and higher education stand before a historic opportunity to build a new system more appropriate for the 21st century rather than restore the old one. This rethinking is important, as restoring what – and, more importantly, those who ran these institutions – proved so vulnerable to illiberal attacks makes little sense.

As illiberal politicians and voters, and, more importantly, the business and geopolitical interests attached to them, will not disappear after the election, neither will the illiberal desire to control higher education, resources, knowledge production, authorisation and dissemination suddenly evaporate. Higher education and research should therefore be better prepared this time.

Parallel system

Over the past decade and a half, Hungarian higher education has undergone a profound illiberal transformation. These changes have affected not only the operation of universities but also students’ life trajectories, the freedom of research, academic authority and the social prestige of knowledge.

Although these changes were often bold and unprofessional solutions to real, existing structural problems and were communicated as ‘reforms to increase competitiveness’, on closer inspection what emerges instead is the conscious impoverishment of public higher education and the building up of a parallel, centralised, well-funded, politically controlled system.

The most visible institutional change has been the transfer of universities into foundationbased management. A significant share of statefunded, public universities was placed under the control of assetmanagement foundations.

These foundations are formally ‘private’ actors, and their boards of trustees are often populated by active or former political figures with longterm, entrenched mandates.

In theory, this model promised greater flexibility; in practice, however, it blurred the boundary between the public and private character of universities, while control over public funds did not diminish but was instead shifted to a less transparent level.

Consequently, Hungary was excluded from the Horizon programmes, and the illiberal government launched its own so-called HU-rizont programme, which failed miserably in terms of professional autonomy, as the ministry overruled the jury’s decisions.

Illiberal Hungary became a key factor in building up an alternative model for internationalisation.

The founding of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium opened a new era. The institution gained access to an extraordinary volume of state and private foundation resources, together with ‘dark money’, both domestically and internationally. Its educational and research activities have created a parallel system that does not fit within traditional higher education structures yet has a significant impact on them.

Erosion of trust

Trust in higher education has eroded as, over the past 16 years, key decisions on leadership, strategy and budgets have increasingly required external political or trustee approval. As a result, self-censorship has become a dominant survival strategy within institutions.

Autonomy has not vanished entirely, but it has become conditional: it is tolerated only when it does not conflict with political or ideological priorities. Competitive, professionally reviewed grant funding has largely been replaced by centralised decisions, targeted subsidies and designated ‘national priority institutions’, weakening both academic competition, trust and, more importantly, excellence.

Funding decisions are now often driven more by connections than by scholarly merit, contributing to the declining competitiveness of Hungarian science.

At the same time, Hungarian higher education faces a self-reinforcing spiral of emigration: talented students leave early to study abroad, while young researchers see no predictable academic future at home.

These dynamics are compounded by demographic decline. Fewer university-age students, combined with an oversized institutional network, have pushed universities to lower admission standards to maintain enrolment.

The value of a university degree for social mobility has declined, both because it no longer reliably leads to secure careers and because intellectual work itself has lost public value due to the conscious anti-intellectualism of illiberal politics.

New ways of thinking

This moment calls not for the recycling of the same actors and ideas within a rebranded system, but for new people bringing genuinely new ways of thinking and acting. The goal is not a mechanical restoration of the past, but the creation of an open, pluralistic and competition-based academic system in which professional courage once again replaces selfcensorship.

This is a bold claim, given that any possible development has never started from such a low point, even compared with neighbouring countries.

But the situation is not that gloomy. There are several historical precedents that can help with rebuilding, and by now, there is a considerable, well-trained pool of scholars with international experience living in exile.

If a truly historic opportunity were to open for Hungarian higher education – and indeed, never has so much funding flowed into the system as in the past 16 years, during which, for example, at least six 20th-century historical research institutes with the same profile were established – these resources could be mobilised to serve new goals aligned with the challenges of the 21st century.

Whether CEU, together with the Hungarian higher education system, is prepared to meet these challenges remains an open question, one that will ultimately test the ccuracy of the second part of my forecast.

Andrea Peto is a professor in the department of gender studies at Central European University in Vienna, Austria, and a research affiliate of the CEU Democracy Institute in Budapest, Hungary. This article was first published here.

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