Shalini Randeria, president and rector of the Central European University (CEU), has warned that the Trump administration is working from the “playbook” of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, describing the legal uncertainty faced by US universities as the government’s “intended outcome”.

Now based in Vienna, CEU was forced out of Budapest after the Fidesz government implemented a series of legal measures in 2017, which the European Court of Justice later ruled were “incompatible with EU law”.

The 2020 ruling came too late for CEU, however, which had relocated to Austria the previous year. “That’s one of the problems of using law courts to stop the machinations of soft authoritarian regimes,” Randeria told ����Vlog. “Courts are slow and unpredictable, even though we had a very strong case.”

“There was a lot of legal uncertainty created by Orbán, and this is exactly the same playbook which is being used by the Trump administration,” she said, pointing to the court battle between Harvard and the government as an example.  

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“They introduce a flurry of laws and administrative measures, that universities can then go to court against. It’s unclear what will happen at the end, and this chaos and unpredictability is really the intended outcome.”

Randeria described legal uncertainty as particularly problematic for organisations that work to “long-term cycles”, such as universities. “It makes any rational decision-making, any financial planning or academic planning impossible,” she said.

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“When we admit students now, we admit them to complete a four-year degree, or a two-year master’s, or a doctoral degree in five or six years. We are thinking and planning way ahead. If you don’t know what the legal status of your institution will be in two years, you cannot in good faith advertise to and recruit students.”

Attracting faculty, too, requires long term certainty, Randeria continued: “When you have this sword of Damocles hanging over your head, not knowing whether you’ll be able to run the university efficiently and fairly on a consistent basis, it’s very, very difficult to recruit faculty.”  

After the “traumatic period” of forced relocation, CEU has “performed really well academically”, Randeria said, securing “competitive research funding both within Austria and, as usual, within Europe”.

Obtaining consortium grants, such as those , has “allowed us to anchor ourselves in Austria, not in competition with the very vibrant academic scene here and its research institutions and universities, but in partnership with them”. The university did not lose any faculty in the move, she noted, while “recruitment and admission numbers didn’t fall”.

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Nevertheless, Orbán’s pursuit of the CEU – part of a larger campaign against its philanthropist founder George Soros – has yet to run its course, Randeria said. Fidesz’s proposed “national sovereignty” law, which would allow the government to penalise or shut down organisations receiving “foreign funding”, “could be used against CEU’s continuing activities” in Budapest, she warned, namely research conducted at the CEU Democracy Institute.

US vice-president J.D. Vance has expressed explicit admiration for Orbán’s higher education policy, calling his approach, which has also seen control of state universities transferred to government-aligned foundations, “the closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities”.

“What right-wing populists all over have done is stamp universities as ivory towers of elite privilege, and this is not true,” Randeria said. In response, “we need to mobilise public support on a very large scale.”

“As institutions, we need to put a lot more focus on outreach and communication,” she told THE, with the goal of ensuring the public “really understand what universities do, and why they are the backbone of a functioning liberal democracy”.

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US universities must “not let themselves be divided one against the other,” Randeria advised. “I don’t think you can protect yourself as an institution on your own. It has to be a collective resistance against this kind of intervention into university autonomy and academic freedom.”

“One should be prepared for some very, very strong institutional solidarity of universities across the board.”

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emily.dixon@timeshighereducation.com