Hungary's Higher Education Model is Not for Export

June 9, 2025

by Will Collins

The story of the last decade of Hungarian politics can be told through a series of clashes between Fidesz, the ruling conservative party, and academia. The opening move came in 2018, when the government banned gender studies across public universities. Central European University (CEU), a private, American-style institution, was largely pushed out of Budapest in 2019. In 2020, the government appointed a new board of trustees to the Színház és Filmművészeti Egyetem (SZFE), the national university of the performing arts, provoking public protests, faculty resignations, and a prolonged campus occupation by disgruntled students. In the early stages of the pandemic, yellow ‘Free SZFE’ masks could be seen all over Budapest.

These clashes offer a window into the strategy of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has unapologetically wielded state power to reshape Hungary’s academic, cultural, and media output. They have also attracted a surprising amount of attention abroad. To liberal pundits, Orbán's approach purportedly offers a blueprint for an American conservative movement grown hostile to higher education. In The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum warns that Trump plans to emulate Orbán on a range of issues, including policies that have “robbed universities of their independence.” Lee Bollinger, the former President of Columbia University, says that President Trump’s “authoritarian takeover” is modeled on the Orbán playbook. 

For conservatives, however, Orbán’s policies suggest that a frontal assault on universities’ privileges and prerogatives can yield results. Both sides miss the mark. An Orbán-style strategy can’t work in the United States because Fidesz’s entire approach is premised on the centralized nature of Hungarian higher education. Although tax policy and research funding give the federal government considerable leverage over universities, the fragmented nature of American academia precludes an Orbán-esqe campaign from being implemented in the United States. 

Hungarian Centralization

There are two signal facts about Hungarian higher education. First, Hungarian intellectuals and scientists have historically enjoyed an outsized reputation on the world stage, at least by the standards of a small Eastern European country. For centuries, the provincial Hungarian city of Debrecen was known as “the Protestant Rome” for educating fierce Calvinist theologians. A coterie of exiled Hungarian scientists led by János (John) von Neumann was instrumental in the development of the Manhattan Project. More recently, the Hungarian-born Ferenc Krausz was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics while the Hungarian-born Katalin Karikó pioneered the science behind the Covid mRNA vaccines and their rapidly-proliferating successors. Both Krausz and Karikó were educated at state universities during the late communist era. 

The second is that the Hungarian system has always been remarkably centralized. The amount of direct authority exercised by the Hungarian government has ebbed and flowed through different eras, but the country’s major institutions of higher learning have been part of a national system since the late 19th century. There are decided advantages to this arrangement, such as modest tuition fees and a streamlined admissions process that avoids the ever-multiplying essays, recommendation letters, and extracurriculars American colleges demand of their applicants. However, this also means that universities, technical schools, and other post-secondary institutions are subject to direct control by the central government. Education is a hot button topic in Hungarian politics because elections determine who controls the entire edifice, from kindergarten classrooms to postgraduate research programs.  

Although the question of how much autonomy Hungarian academia should enjoy is controversial, one thing is certain: public universities are almost the only game in town. The few private institutions that have been established since the end of the Soviet era enroll only small numbers of students and have little impact on the country’s educational landscape (funnily enough, one of the country’s lonely private outposts was renamed in 2018 in honor of Milton Friedman, who presumably would have despised the statist system his namesake competes with). Hungary’s most prestigious institutions are all public and are mostly concentrated in Budapest, although historically significant and selective state universities can also be found in the provincial cities of Szeged, Debrecen, and Pécs. Over the past decade plus of Fidesz rule, the national government has steadily centralized control and curtailed institutional autonomy, but these moves are best understood as a strategy of consolidation, and not a dramatic shift from a system that previously featured private institutions or autonomous regional university systems. 

American Pluralism

The United States, by contrast, has historically relied on a patchwork system of state institutions and private colleges and universities. Famously, Congress ignored George Washington’s suggestion to found a national university in the capital. The closest American analogues to Hungary’s flagship national universities are the service academies, which are conspicuous outliers in America’s otherwise decentralized landscape. Indeed, the idea of a capital relatively bereft of top-flight universities and a nationwide landscape that includes private institutions as diverse as the evangelical Liberty University, the historically-black Howard University, and the famously left-wing Antioch College is quite alien to European sensibilities. And that’s without even considering the state university system, which encompasses fifty different networks, each with its own distinct features. 

So far, the Trump Administration’s offensive against academia has yielded mixed results. Despite grant cancellations, federal funding cut-offs, and threats to tax university endowments, Harvard has rejected the administration’s demands to reform its admissions and hiring policies. Columbia University capitulated to an earlier round of Trumpian threats but is still contending with a disruptive student protest movement. A defiant open letter from 10 former public university presidents and chancellors in The Washington Post suggests that many state systems will resist Trump’s agenda. Meanwhile, the persistence of DEI programs at state and private institutions across the country–and the merely cosmetic changes many universities have made to avoid scrutiny–raises the question of how effectively a Republican Administration can police the internal policies of thousands of individual schools. 

Tax policy and research subsidies give the federal government leverage over higher education, but this is categorically different from the level of control exercised by the Hungarian government. Hungary’s ban on gender studies in public universities, for example, might be compared to the Trump Administration’s removal of certain books from service academy curricula. This comparison merely highlights the constraints Trump and his allies are working under. Deleting individual books from a West Point reading list has a negligible impact on American higher education (indeed, the mere act of removing certain authors has likely increased their notoriety by provoking a spate of breathless stories about “censorship”). Republicans surely have a low opinion of gender studies, but the Trump Administration lacks the capacity to target an entire academic field. Orbán, by contrast, was able to excise gender studies from Hungary’s public universities in one fell swoop. 

The gulf between editing West Point’s recommended reading list and removing entire departments suggests that the Orbán blueprint for academia is not for export, at least not to the United States. Pace Bollinger, the Republican Party cannot “take over” American higher education. The best conservatives can hope for is to make American universities less systematically hostile to their ideas, less overtly discriminatory against men, whites, Jews, and Asian-Americans, and less prone to inscribing left-wing assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality into their admissions, hiring, and academic practices. The current campaign may yield important results, as in the case with Brown University’s recent decision to embrace institutional neutrality. However, if Trump’s successor loses in 2028, universities could easily revert to their old practices, secure in the knowledge that a more sympathetic administration will leave them alone. 

Building Alternatives 

If conservatives can’t take over higher education tout court, one option remains: build viable alternatives that can compete with left-wing institutions in terms of prestige, research output, and career advancement. This is easier said than done, but a diffuse movement to challenge the academic status quo is already taking shape. The University of Austin, a start-up institution that enrolled its first undergraduate class in 2024, has attracted funding, media coverage, and students by counterprogramming against prevailing trends in academia. The University of Colorado now hosts an independent center for the study of Western Civilization. Under Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida has positioned its state university system as a conspicuous alternative to “woke” higher education. 

These developments and broader public dissatisfaction with higher education suggest a growing willingness to look beyond traditional academic credentials, something conservatives can capitalize on by offering alternative pathways for the young and intellectually ambitious. Slowly but surely, a diffuse and uncoordinated movement is arising to challenge academia’s stranglehold over degrees, job placement, and intellectual output. The long-term success of these ventures will probably never lead to a conservative coup at Berkeley or a right-wing Ivy league, but they do offer the possibility of institutions friendly to conservative ideas emerging for students, scholars, and academics frustrated with the status quo.   

If conservatives pursue this strategy, they will be unknowingly emulating a less publicized but more useful aspect of the Orbán model. In 2021, perhaps in anticipation of future electoral reverses, Fidesz orchestrated the transfer of over a billion dollars in public assets to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a private institution aimed at grooming the next generation of Hungarian thinkers, activists, and political leaders. This move was and remains quite controversial because it involved the transfer of public assets to a private organization, but it suggests that Hungarian conservatives have planned for the possibility of losing power.

The MCC is an interesting case study because it combines the functions of an American think tank with a distinctly continental intellectual lineage. In the 19th century, European countries from Denmark to Serbia established academies and institutes to enhance national prestige, foster scientific and industrial research, and groom promising youngsters. Originally founded in 1996, the MCC was created to train Hungary’s post-communist leadership class. If Fidesz loses the next election, it may function as part of a conservative government-in-exile, or at least an incubator for ideas and policy proposals to power an eventual electoral comeback. 

Like the royal institutes of the 19th century, the MCC has also enhanced its home country’s international standing. The Collegium attracts high-profile international guest speakers, such as Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, and the philosopher Patrick Deneen, and hosts several American visiting fellows. It also brings in academics from countries like Turkey, Russia, and China. Not only is the MCC positioned to help Fidesz survive an electoral defeat, it also seems designed to help Hungary navigate a post-American world.  

Meanwhile, the Collegium supports a range of scholarship in fields that have fallen out of favor in modern academia, such as conservative philosophy, military history, and the classics. And Fidesz’s interest in the MCC is part of a broader strategy of institution building. Around the same time the Collegium was gifted over a billion dollars by the government, 32 other Hungarian foundations and think tanks received more modest sums. 

Just as Hungarian conservatives are planning for a multipolar world, they are also bracing themselves for the possibility of life outside the corridors of power. As the 2026 parliamentary elections loom, Fidesz finds itself trailing in the polls to the opposition Tisza Party. If Orbán and his allies are unseated next year, the Hungarian public university system will suddenly be under new management. Mathias Corvinus Collegium, however, will endure regardless of the election outcome. Trump’s higher education offensive will eventually grind to a halt, either thanks to a political reaction or hard-and-fast constraints on the federal government’s power. Institutional alternatives to the academic status quo, on the other hand, have the potential to long outlive one presidential term. 

Will Collins is a lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.