‘His way has to be the model': Team Trump turns to Hungarian strongman for inspiration on higher ed

Boston Globe

07-03-2025

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Demonstrators were blocked by riot police near the headquarters of Viktor Orbán's political party, Fidesz, as students and teachers of the Central European University and their sympathizers protested in downtown Budapest in 2017. Hungarian lawmakers approved legislation that could force the closure of the prestigious Budapest University founded by US billionaire financier George Soros.
ATTILA KISBENEDEK/AFP via Getty Images
Orbán,
His legions of critics view him as an aspiring authoritarian and say his takeover of universities is a bid to quash dissent and consolidate his party's hold on power.
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But influential American conservatives see something else: a leader who is willing to do what it takes to
'Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but
the
model,' Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, the group behind
Now, after years of looking to Hungary for inspiration, conservatives serving in the Trump administration have
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New College of Florida students protested on Feb. 28, 2023, the day after a political ally of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis took over the presidency of the school. Some observers saw DeSantis's takeover of New College as a "microcosm of what Orbán did."
Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press
Like Trump, Orbán lost an election after a first term leading his country, and then spent his years out of office working with allies planning his return. When he regained power in 2010, he issued a blitz of directives aimed not only at the education system, but also the country's courts and the constitution, that staggered his opponents.
'It was this list of laws and orders and decrees and all kinds of stuff, so fast that most people couldn't see the forest for the trees,' said Kim Lane Scheppele, a former professor at Central European University in Budapest. 'Everybody was concerned about their particular program getting defunded or some law that targeted them in particular.'
Orbán targeted universities almost immediately. Unlike in the United States, the national government of Hungary has direct oversight of most universities. In 2011, Parliament, controlled by Orbán's party, Fidesz, began
cutting their funding. Then in 2014, Orbán installed hand-picked 'chancellors' at most universities to take over the budgets and administration, pushing aside existing leaders.
There are important differences between the higher education systems in the United States and Hungary that would make it difficult to import Orbán's agenda wholesale.
With fewer than 10 million people, Hungary only has a few dozen universities, and nearly all rely almost entirely on government funding, which gave Orbán extraordinary power to reshape them. When Orbán returned to power, Hungarian universities were still attempting to remold themselves into modern, Western institutions two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but had struggled financially under the socialist government Orbán succeeded.
The United States, by contrast, has a sprawling higher education system with thousands of public colleges and universities administered by state officials, and private institutions not directly under the thumb of the government. They are supported by a combination of tuition payments, government funding, and proceeds from endowments. Although the government has a great deal of influence — many American colleges could not survive without federal funding — the power is less direct. Unlike in Hungary, it is not possible in the United States for a president to appoint university leaders.
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But even if Orbán's specific policies cannot be replicated, some of his strategies can be adapted. And Orbán's and Trump's stated reasons for targeting universities are largely the same.
Both men have said universities came to be controlled by leftists who indoctrinated leaders with radical, anti-Western ideas. Both have questioned the value of a college degree and suggested that universities are ripping off the public. They have attacked what they regard as frivolous fields, such as gender studies. Orbán, like Trump, vowed to root out 'woke ideological education.'
The two men also share an instinct for aggressive and adversarial governance. They publicly identify enemies and move against them.
Hungary's renowned Central European University announced in 2019 that it had been "forced" to move its most prestigious studies to Vienna after a long and bitter legal battle with Prime Minister Viktor Orban's government.
ATTILA KISBENEDEK
In 2017, Orbán targeted an elite graduate school in Budapest, the privately run Central European University. For many Hungarian liberals and academics, CEU was a cosmopolitan oasis in a country that felt increasingly isolated and stifled. Founded in 1991 by George Soros, the liberal philanthropist and native Hungarian, it was meant to revive higher education in post-communist Europe.
It had a vibrant academic culture. 'There was a public event every day,' said András László Pap, who taught at CEU for 25 years. The lectures and conferences were catered, offering sandwiches and drinks. 'It sounds mundane, but that's unique,' Pap said.
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When the Fidesz-controlled Parliament passed a law in 2017 that effectively made it illegal for CEU to continue operating in Hungary, tens of thousands of young people protested, chanting 'Free country, free university' in Budapest's streets.
But two years later, after failed negotiations with the government, CEU's leaders gave up and moved the university to Vienna, where it is now based.
The expulsion of CEU was a potent symbolic triumph: Orbán had eliminated an institution he regarded as an insidious, liberal influence, and vanquished Soros, a longtime bogeyman of both the American and Hungarian right. Next he moved to consolidate his control of Hungary's public universities.
Orbán and the chancellors he had installed choked off funding. Campus buildings deteriorated. Salaries were cut. Students and academics left to study and work abroad.
'Most public universities were suffocated financially,' Pap, a legal scholar, said.
Then Orbán offered universities a lifeline. He created richly funded private foundations that are overseen by loyalists. Then he gave the universities a choice: They could remain public and impoverished, or they could submit to being governed by the new, wealthy foundations. The faculty senates of nearly all universities in the country voted to take the deal.
István Kiss, the head of the Danube Institute, a think tank aligned with Orbán, said the government rescued universities from financial mismanagement under the previous socialist government.
'Our universities went bankrupt,' he said, and students were not reaping the benefits from earning a degree.
Now, under the management of the new foundations, Kiss said, dropout rates have declined and enrollment has increased by nearly 6,000 students. Salaries for some professors have also risen.
Many students and academics saw the transfer of universities to Orbán's foundations as a takeover, not a rescue. But three years after the mass protests over CEU, the reaction was more subdued. Students at the University of Theater and Film Arts, one of the few institutions that did not accept Orbán's bailout, staged a two-month protest, but it had little effect.
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Today, said András Bozóki, a Hungarian political scientist at CEU, 'There are some islands of resistance [within universities], but in general I would say people accept the situation as a given.'
Students of the University of Theatre and Film Arts (SZFE) and their sympathizers formed a human chain in 2020 to protest changes to the way the university was governed.
Marton Monus/Associated Press
More than a decade into Orbán's higher education campaign, many Hungarian academics speak of an unsettling climate in which some dissent is tolerated, but it is never clear what types of instruction or political speech may lead to reprisals.
Professors are sometimes fired without explanation or, in at least one case, after flunking the child of an oligarch, recalled Zoltán Ádám, a professor in Budapest, of his own experience. The government has sent moles into classrooms to report back about what is being taught, Scheppele said.
In 2018, a
There are softer forms of coercion, as well. 'Those who are openly
critical of the governing party don't really get any national orders . . . or big national prizes,' said Péter Érdi, a Hungarian American professor at Kalamazoo College in Michigan who returns to Hungary regularly.
The result, he said, is a widespread culture of 'self-censorship.' Last month, Érdi contacted some young scientists in Hungary to ask if they would speak with the Globe. They replied that they speak 'only about science policy, but not direct politics,' Érdi said.
'It was their polite way to tell me they don't want to speak openly,' he said.
For Kiss and other Orbán supporters, the climate for free expression was dire before Orbán intervened. There 'was a heavy left-wing bias' in the universities, Kiss said.
Liberal critics say the humanities, law, and social sciences have been particularly hard hit by Orbán's campaign.
Academic departments have, in many cases, lost authority to decide what they teach, said Balázs Bárány, a history teacher in Budapest with a PhD from a Hungarian university. The chancellors installed by Orbán have been
'dictating everything,' he said.
'The loser of the new system,' said Nóra Bán-Forgács, a professor and researcher in Budapest, 'is definitely [the] social scientists, lawyers, sociologists, political scientists, even historians.'
'There are some colleagues of mine who were sanctioned or even lost their jobs, not even for their opinion, but for the academic work, which was, let's say, too liberal or antigovernment,' she said.
Orbán also claims an economic rationale. 'He's surrounded by people with this libertarian or neoliberal economic agenda [who say the] humanities don't really make money, so why should we fund this?' Bárány said.
Bozóki, the political scientist, doubts Orbán's goal was to improve education. 'There is an anti-intellectual spirit of the government, against the educated people, against professionals, against professors,' he said. 'Hungarian universities are pretty much at the end of the European lists.'
The effects of Orbán's campaign have been uneven. Technical fields, such as medicine, economics, or management, generally have not been undermined, Bozóki said. Medical education tends to be 'nonpolitical, so it can be high level and excellent,' he said.
Orbán has focused especially on educating government bureaucrats. In 2012, his government formed the Ludovika University of Public Service and charged the school with educating the next generation of government officials who would be committed to the 'protection of Hungarian national identity and cultural heritage.'
Pap, the legal scholar, who has publicly criticized the Orbán government, used to run a PhD program at the school. But he was fired in 2023 for reasons that were never explained to him.
'This is not an independent academic institution,' he said. 'It's a government training house.'
Seeds of Orbán's approach were first evident in the United States in Florida.
There, in 2023, Republican governor Ron DeSantis installed political allies at the helm of the state university system, pushed colleges rightward by abolishing DEI offices, and mounted a full-scale takeover of New College of Florida, a
small public
liberal arts school known for its vibrant LGBTQ+ community, where DeSantis replaced the president and the board of trustees. It was a 'microcosm of what Orbán did,' Scheppele said.
Trump's incipient crackdown on universities is an attempt to take those efforts national. Even if the precise methods
are different, the spirit and the goals are much the same.
During his first weeks in office, Trump
ordered the Department of Justice to investigate universities that pursue diversity policies his administration considers illegal. He laid plans to abolish the Department of Education, which has left the future of student financial aid, which universities rely on, in doubt. He warned schools of all kinds to provide a more 'patriotic' education, and this past week
threatened to cut 'all' federal funding from schools that allow 'illegal protests.'
And after moving to cut billions in research funding, Trump officials vowed to go further, calling into question the future of government support for scientific research.
Trump has
For Scheppele, the former professor in Budapest who is now at Princeton, that's a page lifted from the Orbán playbook, recognizing 'the budget is the strongest weapon the federal government has.'
Trump's former adviser Steve Bannon — who once called Orbán 'Trump before Trump' — put it more crudely. At a
'Once you cut the money off . . . they'll start paying attention,' he said.
Already, there are signs universities are falling in line.
University leaders who used to speak publicly have gone silent out of fear of retaliation. Many schools have
'It is very much a McCarthy period,' said Suzanna Danuta Walters, a professor of sociology at Northeastern University.
Last week the Department of Education posted a website encouraging 'students, parents, teachers' to report DEI practices.
Vance has said that one thing he admired about Orbán's approach to universities is that he has not merely marginalized or defunded them; he has reoriented them toward his own vision. The goal, Vance told his friend Rod Dreher last year is 'not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice: between survival or taking a much less biased approach.'
Diti Kohli of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Hilary Burns can be reached at