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PEN America and the Magna Charta Observatory cohosted a symposium Wednesday in Washington.
Ryan Quinn/Inside Higher Ed
Liviu Matei knows firsthand what it looks like when an authoritarian leader seeks to reshape higher education.
Matei was provost at Central European University when the parliament led by Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, passed a law in 2017 essentially forcing his institution out of the country. The law supposedly targeted foreign branch campuses, but many saw it as an attack on a university founded by liberal Hungarian American financier George Soros.
The situation became a worldwide “cause célèbre of academic freedom,” Matei said during a panel Wednesday. But he added that “you might be surprised to hear that there was almost no discussion about academic freedom in Europe between the fall of the Berlin Wall” and the new millennium.
“Academic freedom was taken for granted, as was democracy,” Matei told the attendees of an international symposium in Washington, D.C., that focused on academic freedom, its connections to democracy and how both are under attack.
“There was an atmosphere of consensus about democracy, yes,” Matei said. “And, more than that, there was an atmosphere of exuberance. We all kind of believed that there would only be democracy and more and more democracy—you know, ‘end of history’ atmosphere—until these things happened.”
Matei, now head of the School of Education, Communication and Society at King’s College London, connected what happened in Hungary to what has more recently occurred in Florida. Republicans there have, among other things, passed a law seeking to limit public classroom discussions of race and other topics. Influential American conservatives have visited Hungary and expressed affinity for Orbán—and vice versa. Rod Dreher, a conservative writer and editor who lives in Budapest, said Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law was “modeled in part on what Hungary did.”
“America is importing bad models,” Matei said.
He was among multiple speakers Wednesday at the one-day conference. The symposium was held in the former Newseum building—now occupied by Johns Hopkins University—less than two weeks before the U.S. presidential election. JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential candidate, has called professors “the enemy” and said that Orbán’s approach should be a model for the conservatives in the United States.
The free expression advocacy group PEN America cohosted the event alongside the Magna Charta Observatory. That latter organization is urging American universities to join the nearly 1,000 worldwide that have signed the Magna Charta Universitatum—a statement, released in 1988 and updated in 2020, that supports academic freedom and other obligations of universities.
“Intellectual and moral autonomy is the hallmark of any university and a precondition for the fulfillment of its responsibilities to society,” the statement says. “That independence needs to be recognised and protected by governments and society at large, and defended vigorously by institutions themselves.”
The statement also says, “Universities question dogmas and established doctrines and encourage critical thinking in all students and scholars. Academic freedom is their lifeblood; open inquiry and dialogue their nourishment.”
Only about 20 U.S. institutions have signed the statement, said Patrick Deane, president of the Magna Charta Observatory’s governing council and principal and vice chancellor at Queen’s University in Canada. He said the group has, in recent years, taken its annual conference “to parts of the world in which these issues are live and potentially under threat.”
Wednesday’s conference was the first time the Magna Charta Observatory has hosted an event in the U.S.
Asked what concerns him about the U.S., Deane told Inside Higher Ed that “for universities to function properly in terms of the benefits they bring to society, there does have to be a respect for the boundary between society and the universities.”
“Universities—though of society—cannot in a crude sense be the tools of the will of the electorate,” Deane said. He pointed to governmental censorship attempts and said that “for a university to truly be a force for good in its society, it has to be able to look at questions from all points of view, and discussions should happen on a campus about even distasteful topics.”
Deane added, “It is that onslaught on the independence of intellectual inquiry in the university that is concerning.”
About 50 people attended the conference, which included two panels during its public morning portion that ran for about two hours. The speakers included the former rector of a Brazilian university and the former president of the European Students’ Union.
Jeremy Young, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Learn program, told the international attendees that just as American higher education is decentralized, “the attacks that we’re seeing in the United States are coming in very decentralized ways.”
Young said that, starting last year, PEN saw a shift toward restricting universities’ autonomy, including laws governing curriculum, tenure and diversity, equity and inclusion offices.
“Depending on the outcome of the presidential election, there is a push to nationalize some of these restrictions,” Young said.
While he said there’s increasing organization among multiple groups to push back, “the real gap” in the U.S. is in understanding “the value of university autonomy from ideological control by the government.”
“We talk a lot about academic freedom for individual faculty members, but not so much the freedom of the university governing board and the university president from being dictated to on ideological grounds by lawmakers,” Young said.
“We really need a more concerted response to say taxpayers pay for a university to be a university,” Young added. “They pay for it to be a place of intellectual freedom.”