First they come for the universities

And then they come for democracy

The Trump Administration’s attack on Harvard and on higher education is the most serious assault on academic freedom in American history. Nothing compares to it, not the clampdown on academic speech during World War I, not Senator McCarthy’s harassment of professors in the 1950’s. The President has annulled the university’s right to accept foreign students, cancelled billions in federal research funding and demanded control over hiring, curriculum and every aspect of campus life. This is a direct assault on long-established constitutional doctrine which has always placed academic freedom under the special protection of America’s First Amendment.

The battle with Harvard is not some academic sideshow of interest only to students and professors. It’s a fundamental test of the US constitutional system and of American democracy itself. At stake is whether a federal court will defend a free institution against unconstitutional government interference, and whether, if courts do rule in Harvard’s favor, the President obeys their orders.

How did we get to this place? Culture, it is said, is upstream of politics, and a political attack of this magnitude has been decades in the making. Antisemitism on campus is pretext. The attack on the supposed elitism, entitlement and political correctness of the US campus has been underway for at least forty years. Conservatives went after universities because they understood their immense power to shape minds and allocate opportunity. The percentage of Americans gaining a college education rose steadily from the 1960’s onward, making college education the key dividing line in American life, defining political allegiance and world view. Universities became the doorkeepers to opportunity and college degrees became the ticket of entry to the elites. While close to forty percent of Americans have college degrees, sixty percent do not, and President Trump was the first American challenger for the Presidency to turn the resentment of those without college credentials against the academics guarding the doors to the privileged destinations in American life.

This is not just an American story. Populists elsewhere have ridden to power on resentment of educational privilege. The global authoritarian turn against universities began in 2017 when Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary, decided to evict Central European University from Budapest. CEU is a US accredited graduate school in the social sciences and humanities, founded by the American billionaire George Soros in 1991, to give his native Hungary a free university as it transitioned out of Communism.

Why would Orban target an American graduate school that had stayed out of politics and posed no threat to this power? There were four reasons, and they all lead back to the United States. First, Orban was the only head of government to endorse Trump in 2016 when he was still a candidate. Second, Trump’s election gave him the signal he needed to go after CEU, since he could be sure the new President would not raise a finger to protect an institution founded by Soros, a long-time donor to liberal causes. Orban’s third reason—and it aligns with Trump’s attack on Harvard—was that he was the first to grasp that stoking the resentment of the uncredentialed was a sure way to rally his electoral base.

The fourth reason for Orban’s attack is the one that should worry Americans most. It was part of a systemic attempt to replace liberal democracy’s checks and balances—‘power checking power to keep the people free’—with an illiberal democracy monopolizing power in the hands of a single party state.

When Orban attacked CEU, he had already muzzled the Hungarian Supreme Court, taken control of state media and sold off private media to his cronies, and brought the rest of the Hungarian higher education system under the control of party bureaucrats.

When in 2017, Orban rammed a law through his rubber-stamp parliament declaring CEU illegal, the university found it had no right of appeal to the Hungarian Supreme Court, and European laws could not save it either. Not even a mass demonstration of eighty thousand Hungarian citizens in Parliament Square chanting ‘Free Universities in a Free Society” could stop Orban. After fighting for three years, CEU was forced from its home in Budapest and re-established itself, next door in Vienna where it continues to operate.

Without Trump, Orban would never have dared to attack an American institution and without Orban, Trump and his revolutionary reactionaries might never have discovered that attacking a university ‘feeds the base.’ Since 2017, there has been a steady stream of right-wing American politicians and commentators journeying to Budapest to learn from the master.

What lessons does CEU’s experience hold? Attacks on academic freedom never succeed when countervailing institutions—courts, media, regulatory bodies, NGO’s—are strong enough to push back. But if those institutions fail, the next target, after universities have been brought to heel, will be those institutions themselves. Attacking a university’s freedom to govern itself, who it hires and what it teaches, are not marginal battles of interest only to academics. The reactionary revolutionaries first come for Harvard, then they come after the media, law firms,NGO’s, regulatory bodies and finally the courts. The objective is clear: to establish single party domination and an uncontrolled and uncontrollable Presidency. If you dismiss Harvard’s battle as the rearguard retreat of an entitled elite, don’t be surprised when you and your institution become the next target.

Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian historian, was Rector of CEU between 2016 and 2021.