How the Destroyers of Academic Freedom Masquerade Themselves as Its Victims
Gábor Halmai and Andrew Ryder | 15 January 2025 | Verfassungsblog
Under the authoritarian leadership of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the government has started a culture war to dismantle the independence of academic institutions, including universities and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, arguing that they represent a threat to their proudly proclaimed illiberal ideology. Ironically, after dismantling academic freedom in the country, Orbán’s administration started to claim that actually the liberals are the ones who, through “cancel culture”, threaten academic freedom. This accusation draws on the work of Viktor Orbán’s favorite political theorist, Patrick J. Deneen of the University of Notre Dame, who propounds a theory on liberalism’s totalizing claims on its citizens, arguing that liberals are authoritarians. Here, we tell a story from contemporary Hungary, where the destroyers of academic freedom humiliate university scholars who have already been deprived of their autonomy.
Hungary was once considered to be one of the first and most thorough political transitions after 1989, which provided all the institutional elements of liberal constitutional democracy: rule of law, checks and balances and guaranteed fundamental rights…