For several months now, the ideological war between the progressive left and the conservative camp in Europe and the United States has been waged in the academic world. Gone are the days of conquering Marxism, which in the 1960s infected the most prestigious institutions in the West. But the battle is being waged insidiously against students, professors, and researchers who are committed to academic research in the service of a cause other than that of the Left.
Balázs Orbán, chief adviser to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, recently paid the price for this. Orbán, a respected political scientist and author of several books, as well as a close aide to the Hungarian premier, embarked on an academic career long before entering politics in 2012 with the conservative Fidesz party. He began writing a PhD thesis, titled The Constitutional Relationship Between the Free Mandate and National Sovereignty, on a complex and thought-provoking topic: the global challenges to national sovereignty posed by supranational institutions, set against the backdrop of the democratic crisis in the West. However, he fell victim to a political cabal designed to prevent him from completing his research, following a decision by two professors on the doctoral council who deemed that his work did not meet the standards of ‘academic professionalism.’
Though draped in the guise of supposed scientific rigour, the decision was clearly driven by ideological motives. Orbán is a conservative, a member of Fidesz, and an adviser to the Hungarian government, which is enough to discredit him, regardless of the quality of his research. As the Hungarian newspaper 444.hu, which is opposed to Orbán, pointed out, “Balázs Orbán’s doctoral thesis is the only one at the ELTE (Eötvös Loránd University) Faculty of Law whose continuation was not unanimously approved by the council this year.” Most of the work had already been done, with only the final stage remaining: authorisation of the procedure for obtaining the doctorate and the public defence, usually considered mere administrative formalities, but which, this time, were being blocked.
The motives of the professors who tried to block Balázs Orbán’s path were confusing, to say the least. As the case against him for intellectual and scientific shortcomings was too weak, his detractors sought moral reasons for their censorship: a man involved in politics (on the wrong side) ‘should not’ obtain a Ph.D.
Faced with the enormity of the situation, the president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences spoke out in defence of Orbán, recalling that “Equal opportunities should be ensured for all eligible researchers, regardless of political, ideological, religious, ethnic, or gender affiliation. Diplomas should be awarded through a fair and equitable process, based solely on the scientific merit of the candidate and their thesis.”
This figure is emblematic, but he is not an isolated case. In France, the news is still buzzing with the attempt to intimidate and censor renowned Sorbonne professors when they sought to publish a book analysing the hold of wokeism on French universities. But before them, other researchers were discredited, dragged through the mud, or simply banished from the academic world because they thought the wrong way: Reynald Secher, historian of the Vendée counter-revolution, and Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, specialist in the slave trade, for example, have seen their careers destroyed and their work despised for reaching scientific conclusions that were not authorised by the politically correct camp. More modestly, the author of these lines has been rejected by university selection committees on the grounds that she clearly thought ‘wrongly.’
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the politically correct camp imagines it is fighting the battle of the century because President Donald Trump, since his election, has decided to clean up public funding for universities that openly promote ideologies that are at best useless and at worst deadly. The ‘persecuted’ researchers boast of fleeing the beast and announce with great fanfare that they are joining European universities—Belgian and French in particular—where academic freedom reigns supreme. What a sweet illusion.
In Balázs Orbán’s case, this is not a matter of budget cuts, but simply a decision to prevent an individual from pursuing an academic career because his political commitment ‘is not to their liking’—on the part of those who have otherwise made a speciality of denouncing the alleged control of opinion in Hungary or the restrictions on political pluralism under Viktor Orbán’s government.
The intimidation suffered by the Brussels branch of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium—of which Balázs Orbán is one of the senior executives—during the organisation of its latest event on the new world order is unfortunately proof that the pressure and censorship exerted by the militant Left against any form of research and intellectual rigour on the right can also take the form of violence that is not merely symbolic. Fascism is never where you expect it to be.
