CHAPTER 3

The Central European University (CEU) and Its Future

“A University That Takes Its Principles and Its Social Responsibilities Seriously”

I established the Central European University (CEU) as a graduate school for the social sciences and humanities in 1991.

Under the Soviet system, scientists were kept segregated in academies of science. Considered to be critics of the regime, most of them were not allowed to teach at universities because the regime was afraid they would poison the minds of students with their quest for freedom of thought and research. Promising science students in elite schools had the chance to get admitted to scientific academies, but once there, they were typically kept away from teaching. As the regime weakened, the clamor of social scientists to gain access to students increased.

The first breach in this segregation occurred in Tito’s Yugoslavia in 1970. The rector of Zagreb University, Ivan Supek, a physicist and a former student of Werner Heisenberg, established the Inter-University Center (IUC) in Dubrovnik. IUC invited academics and students from East and West. Since Yugoslavia was a nonaligned nation, those from the East had a better chance of getting permission to travel to Dubrovnik than, say, to Oxford. Supek also visited Bill Newton-Smith, a philosopher of science, who was then in charge of graduate students at Balliol College in Oxford and later became the first de facto president of CEU. Supek asked Newton-Smith to attract Western participants to IUC, especially from Oxford.

IUC flourished. I heard about it from Newton-Smith, and it piqued my interest. I provided him with funds to increase the participation from Oxford, and from the middle of the 1980s, I also provided scholarships to students and fellowships to scholars from Eastern Europe to take part in the summer programs. I visited Dubrovnik in April 1989, just months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. I attended classes, talked to students and faculty both from East and West, and liked what I saw. In the evenings, I met with the attending professors, who were mainly from Communist countries. They all urged me to set up a new graduate university that would bridge the gap between them and the students they wanted to teach. The only point of disagreement was the location of the university. Not surprisingly, Hungarians argued for Budapest, Czechs for Prague, and Poles for Warsaw. It became clear that a Central European University would need to have three campuses.

The idea appealed to me, but I hesitated. Until then, I had specialized in reorienting the activities of existing institutions, such as the Karl Marx University of Economics in Budapest, or reforming social science curricula taught at Eastern European universities, not establishing new institutions. I didn’t like to spend money on bricks and mortar.

Establishing a new university with three campuses was an expensive proposition. I did not want to be the sole sponsor, not merely on account of the expense but, more importantly, on principle: having a sole sponsor would endanger the independence of the institution. From then on, I followed the same principle in establishing other institutions like Crisis Group, the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), and the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET): I tried to limit my contribution to one-third.

But trying to avoid spending money on buildings turned out to be a big mistake, as I soon discovered. The Czech prime minister, Petr Pithart, offered us a ten-story building under construction but near completion in Prague. It had been intended for use by the trade unions, but they were politically discredited in the post-revolutionary transition period. We discovered that part of the building had been offered to the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education led by Jan Svejnar, a Czech economist who had recently returned from America. We soon found an amicable agreement. The Center became the economics department of CEU, and for a time it was the best-run one. Unfortunately, Pithart was defeated the following year, and his place was taken by Václav Klaus, a neoliberal, market fundamentalist economist who considered me a socialist. We became lifelong enemies.

In January 1993, at the moment of the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, Klaus said that an optical illusion has finally disappeared from the map: the Czech Republic has nothing to do with Central Europe anymore. One of his first acts was to kick us out of the building.

The Slovak government had also promised me a building at the same time as Petr Pithart, but when I wanted to take up the offer, it turned out that the building was meant to serve as the Slovak Parliament. The government offered us another site where a new university could be built from scratch, but that would have taken too long for me. I wanted the university to take advantage of the revolutionary moment and start operating right away.

Erhard Busek, vice chancellor of Austria, was a great believer in the open society. He wanted to attract CEU to Vienna, but when we took a closer look at the offer, we found that it consisted of scholarships and various in-kind services. We would have to buy our own building. (It is ironic that twenty-five years later, we find ourselves in the same situation in Vienna.)

Fortunately, the Polish government had no buildings to offer. Our partner, the School of Sociology, which enjoyed an international reputation, became the sociology department of CEU. That left us with Hungary.

The Hungarian government offered us the Young Pioneer Camp because there were no young pioneers anymore. It was a beautiful pastoral site located in a woody area in the hills above Buda. Bill Newton-Smith was very excited about it, but it was about an hour’s commute from the center of town, and the Hungarian supporters of CEU argued that in the outskirts of the city the new university would be both spatially and intellectually marginalized.

According to an agreement the Hungarian Soros Foundation had signed with the Hungarian authorities in 1984, the government promised to support joint reform projects by providing annually the forint equivalent of every dollar I spent over $3 million in Hungary. But the huge budgetary deficit of the government and the indebtedness of the country prevented the government from fulfilling its promise. When we started looking for a suitable building in Budapest, the government proposed that, in lieu of its financial obligations, it would contribute to the purchase of a state-owned building for the university. This is how we ended up owning a small aristocratic palace in downtown Budapest that the government agreed to sell us. The palace had served as the headquarters of military intelligence after World War II, so we were not surprised when we found spyholes on the doors in the cellars. This is where the most important war criminals were kept in prison during their trial, among them Ferenc Szálasi, the head of the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian Nazi Party, who was later publicly executed.

By 1994, I realized what a serious mistake I had made in expecting governments to provide CEU with buildings. I bought about half of the buildings in that centrally located block and got permission to build a modern high-rise in the middle of the block.

I also realized how important it is for a university to have a home that it can be proud of. Several years later, during the tenure of John Shattuck, an international legal scholar, human rights protector, and diplomat, as rector, we engaged an outstanding Irish architectural studio, O’Donnel+Tumey. They won the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Gold Medal, while Sheila O’Donnel was chosen Woman Architect of the Year 2019 for her work on the CEU campus.

The idea of a new university in the social sciences and humanities was enthusiastically supported by the new liberal politicians, who had fought the Communist regime in the previous decades. The list included Václav Havel; Árpád Göncz, the newly elected president of Hungary; and Bronislaw Geremek, a renowned medieval studies scholar and the future Polish foreign minister.

Neither I nor the people I entrusted with establishing the university knew how to do it. It was amateur hour. The first problem was to gain accreditation. It would have been a long, drawn-out process, and I wanted CEU to start operating immediately. A member of the executive committee, Paul Flather, came up with an ingenious idea. He discovered that there were no universities in Luxemburg at the time, and consequently, the use of the word “university” was not legally restricted. We were able to create a foundation in Luxembourg called Central European University and printed impressive-looking documents attesting to this fact. This allowed us to start recruiting faculty and students without accreditation.

Since none of us had any experience in establishing a university, we relied on energetic and entrepreneurial academics to set up individual departments. CEU is perhaps the only modern university created by those who would be teaching in it; as a result, we had functioning departments even before the university was established. The renowned Hungarian historian Peter Hanák started a department of modern comparative history. The even more highly respected medieval historian, Gabor Klaniczay, set up a department of medieval history that became famous for studying the major medieval religions and their interactions: Byzantine and Latin Christianity, Judaism and Islam. András Sajó, a constitutional scholar who later became vice president of the European Court of Human Rights, together with George Fletcher, a scholar of criminal law from Columbia University, started a legal studies program, focusing on the timely issues of constitutionalism and transitional justice. The famous social anthropologist Ernest Gellner, a close friend of Karl Popper, launched a program in nationalism studies. Not bad for a fledgling university!

We were inundated with luminaries and experts who came to give lectures and short courses. Against the odds, CEU opened its doors in Prague in September 1991. Karl Popper visited the remnants of the Prague campus in 1994, and I was there to give him the first CEU “Open Society Prize.”

Our Luxembourg solution did not stand the test of time, and we needed to find proper accreditation. Our ever-ingenious Paul Flather looked to the United States and found that the State of New York did not require a university recognized by it to be physically located within the state. This is how the famous American University in Beirut has been operating for more than one and a half centuries. We applied to the New York Board of Regents, and they accepted our application. That was the beginning of CEU’s association with Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, who steered us through the bureaucracy of the New York Board of Regents. He later became and is still the chairman of CEU’s board.

In the first years of its existence, CEU operated in three locations: some of the departments (economics, European studies, international relations, nationalism studies, art history) were located in Prague, where Jiri Musil, an urban sociologist and one of Václav Havel’s advisors, was director of the college. History, medieval studies, political science, environmental sciences, legal and gender studies, and, later on, philosophy and mathematics were located in Budapest, where the historian István Rév was the director. He also established the Open Society Archives, containing the richest collection of samizdat publications. CEU set up its sociology program in Warsaw, in cooperation with the Graduate School of Social Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

In the early 1990s, we set up an environmental program in Budapest under the leadership of Sir Richard Southwood, vice chancellor of Oxford, who was an authority on ecology, radiation hazards, and pollution control. It became one of the leading teaching programs in this field, much sought after by students. Gradually all the departments gravitated toward Budapest.

The existence of independent departments created untold problems later, when the university was properly established. The first de facto president, Bill Newton-Smith, had to grapple with the idiosyncratic ways of each department: different entrance requirements, individual examination styles, and even their own term-time dates. Subsequent presidents had to overcome the resistance of entrenched department heads.

Also on the negative side, Newton-Smith failed to meet my requirement for matching funds. It was not his fault. In 1992, I became known as “the man who broke the Bank of England.” After this, nobody would give money to CEU. A man who made more than a billion dollars in a day could surely afford to pay for it himself. I had to accept this fact and became the sole funder after all. Moreover, my principles eventually obliged me to give the CEU a large endowment in order to assure its independence from me. This took care of the bulk of the money that I had made from “breaking the Bank of England.”

The CEU Board appointed Yehuda Elkana as president and rector in 1999. His ten-year tenure marked a significant transformation of the university. Born in Hungary, Elkana was a Holocaust survivor who became a leader of the peace movement in Israel. He was an iconoclast thinker, scholar, and educator. He was also a visionary leader. Deeply committed to the open society mission of CEU, he also believed that no university can deserve its name unless it does serious research. In a few years he transformed CEU into a mission-driven but also research-intensive university. He convinced me that CEU should gradually go global rather than remain confined exclusively to Central and Eastern Europe. He was the first to come up with the idea that CEU is too small and isolated to survive and flourish alone and that it would need to network globally to overcome this handicap. Today, CEU enrolls students from over one hundred countries.

In our last meeting in 2009 I asked him what more I could do to help CEU. His answer was that I should step down as chairman of the Board and double the endowment. I am doing as he advised. By enlarging CEU’s endowment, I will ensure its financial stability, academic excellence, and global reach. I expect it to play a key role in innovation in higher education through the creation of links among institutions across borders and the protection of academic freedom for scholars and students worldwide.

My goal was to create a university that takes its principles and its social responsibilities seriously.

CEU became that university. As I invested increasing amounts in CEU, I also invested equal amounts in a Higher Education Support Program (HESP). CEU was draining the best talent from the existing educational system; the task of HESP was to replace the talent. When my annual support to CEU reached $20 million, I fixed my annual contribution to HESP at that level.

HESP had its own board, and at first it was managed independently from CEU, but of course, the two of them cooperated. Gradually, the separation became blurred, and eventually the two of them practically merged. By then, CEU had done enough for the state systems—mainly by educating professors who worked in the state systems—that they didn’t need HESP to sustain them. HESP became focused on the development of higher education, including curricular development, faculty mobility, summer schools, and the autonomy and management of universities.

The participants of the 1989 Dubrovnik seminar advocated for a new university that would take the medieval university of Bologna as its model. The original Bologna University was a multinational, multiethnic school where the students, coming mostly from the countries of Southern and Eastern Europe, studied together; they had a common language, not only in the sense that they all understood Latin but also in the sense that they could understand each other. Bologna educated a regional elite who could talk to each other because they knew each other.

The founding years of CEU coincided with the outbreak of the Yugoslav wars. Students from Yugoslavia found themselves stranded all over Europe, separated from their families and without financial resources. We gave them scholarships to come to CEU. At a moment when Serbs and Croats ceased to talk to each other in Serbo-Croatian, pretending that they spoke different languages, the students at CEU kept talking to each other in today’s lingua franca, English, the language of instruction at CEU. Despite the vicious armed conflicts and the genocide in Srebrenica, CEU did not witness a single incident of physical violence.

We had Chechen and Russian students, Israelis and Palestinians, Afghans and Americans, Chinese and Taiwanese. They differed, disagreed, argued—but kept talking to each other. Living and studying together, arguing with each other, and learning to think critically helped them to listen to each other and remain engaged.

CEU has been a great success. It has graduated sixteen thousand students from all parts of the world. For many of them, CEU was the only chance to get access to graduate education. When they return home, they often assume leadership positions in developing democracies. This is what I am most proud of.

CEU has steadfastly defended the principle of academic freedom over the years and, more recently, fought back against a concerted attack by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who deployed all the powers of his “mafia state” to destroy the entire higher education system of Hungary and chase away CEU. Its epic struggle against a repressive regime, led by its current rector, the eminent Canadian public intellectual Michael Ignatieff, generated worldwide support. That struggle is still ongoing.

CEU has been forced to move its US accredited degree-giving courses to Vienna. However, it intends to maintain a presence in Budapest. The faculty and students of numerous universities, as well as many ordinary Hungarian citizens, repeatedly took to the streets to demonstrate in solidarity with CEU. CEU feels morally obliged to reciprocate.

Keeping two campuses and moving to Vienna, where the cost of living is much higher, will almost double the cost of maintaining the university. At the same time, CEU must compete for faculty and students with state-owned universities, which are subsidized by the state and charge reduced or no tuition fees. The Open Society Foundations support CEU, but they also need to meet many other urgent demands and, in any case, their resources are insignificant in comparison with those of entire states. That has created a seemingly insoluble problem.

We can survive only if we can offer something outstanding and perhaps unique that can attract funding not only from the Open Society Foundations but also from other sources. We are already among the hundred best universities of the world in the social sciences and humanities, and we are one of the largest recipients of research grants from the European Union in the fields in which we operate. But we must aim even higher.

The only solution is to turn CEU into something unique: a globally networked university that meets the requirements of the twenty-first century. That will deserve the support of many donors in addition to the Open Society Foundations.

We already have the necessary building blocks; all we need is to put them together. CEU, which is a graduate and postgraduate university, already has a close collaboration with Bard College, which is mainly undergraduate. Both have been supported by the Open Society Foundation (OSF) and cooperated with each other for more than two decades; we need to turn this into a binding cooperation agreement. Both Bard and CEU have a network of associated colleges, universities, and other institutions, and the two lists are largely overlapping. The combination of an undergraduate education based largely on Bard and a postgraduate education and lifelong learning built on CEU ought to be very rewarding.

American students are used to donating to their alma mater. Having a unique, global education and having it entirely within the CEU-Bard network should eventually make it largely self-financing. Other donors, in turn, should find this reassuring.

The CEU’s New York campus, which is currently at a rudimentary stage, also needs developing in order to provide donors an opportunity to get to know CEU better. But Open Society Foundations cannot divert its much sought-after resources to that purpose, the expansion of the New York campus has to be donor financed from inception.

Our task is to develop a global Open Society University Network (OSUN) that will be open to institutions that don’t belong to the existing CEU-Bard network but express an interest in joining it. This impressive network will be composed of progressive and well-recognized universities all over the world. We already have nodes in the US (New York and California) and Europe (Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest), as well as in Russia (St. Petersburg and Moscow), Central Asia (Bishkek), the Middle East (Al-Quds in East Jerusalem), and East Asia (China, Myanmar, and Vietnam). Bard College has also extended the reach of higher education to prisons and early colleges.

I am particularly keen to develop the already existing cooperation with Arizona State University (ASU). ASU is a leading institution in online and blended education and, more broadly, in increasing access to higher education. This is of great interest for OSUN, which plans to develop as a globally networked university. ASU’s current leadership also shares our idea of social responsibility and is ready to help us in developing distance and blended learning, in which CEU and Bard are less advanced. Blended learning combines the use of online and electronic media with face-to-face mentoring.

OSUN will be something genuinely innovative and unique. Many first-tier American universities have established academic colonies overseas (e.g., New York University in Abu Dhabi) where the overseas colony is intended to support the mission and, often, the bottom line of the founding institution. OSUN will be a partnership of equals established for mutual benefit. It will be the world’s first truly global university, and it will offer an alternative model of international cooperation.

After the lifetime of its founder, OSUN will be renamed the Soros University Network. It is an ambitious project. But if anybody is able to turn OSUN into reality, it is CEU-Bard in its new incarnation. It will meet the requirements of a twenty-first-century globally networked university and, at the same time, help open societies to confront their enemies—provided it can mobilize sufficient support.