Higher Education Interest Organisations in Illiberal Times – The Strategies of Higher Education Interest Organisations in Hungary during the Recentralisation of Academic Governance between 2012 and 2019

The Hungarian higher education system has been subject to constant change in the past 30 years. In the context of permanent austerity, a novel form of simultaneous re-centralization and privatization has recently taken place. The December 2012 funding reforms meant many fewer state-funded places in general and a radical reduction of state-funded places in the social sciences, economics, law and humanities. The chancellor system, implemented in 2014, severely constrained the financial and academic autonomy of universities. In summer 2018, the newly created Ministry of Innovation drafted legislation, which would radically alter academic research in Hungary. The government plans to take the research institutions employing 5000 researchers away from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) to implement direct control over basic research. Simultaneously, the Ministry of Innovation implemented legislation that practically privatizes the prestigious Corvinus University, Budapest as a pilot project for the entire sector. Professors and lecturers will lose their public employee status and there will be high tuition fees and a scholarship program instead of state funded places. Moreover, private firms will exert greater influence on study programs to the detriment of academic research. While the ever-increasing centralization and the new trend towards privatization of the higher education sector cannot be separated from the ever-strengthening authoritarianism of the Orbán governments (Freedom House 2019), the developments in Hungary present a significant empirical puzzle. After all, the Hungarian student movement significantly contributed to bringing down communism, while institutions of Humboldtian-style academic self-governance were quickly re-institutionalized after the fall of communism to protect the integrity of academic research. This went hand in hand with the establishment of numerous institutions and governing bodies to preserve academic self-regulation and fend off state influence (Kovats 2017). Therefore, the shift towards re-centralization, the restrictions on academic autonomy and the planned large-scale privatization constitute a significant twist in Hungary’s higher education policy trajectory. Within this context, it is puzzling that the previously well-organized and assertive academic community was not able to mobilize against increasing statism and privatization. Against this background, our paper focusses on the changing opportunity structures, resources and mobilization capacity of academic interest organizations and student unions as crucial variables in understanding the ongoing changes in Hungary. An online survey with higher education interest organizations and a series of personal interviews being conducted at the time of the submission of this abstract constitute the empirical foundations of our research. Our analytical framework draws on Avdagic’s (2005, 2006) dynamic framework of state-labour relationships in Central and Eastern Europe and applies it to higher education. This theoretical framework goes beyond institutionalist accounts by explaining long-term trajectories in industrial relations as contingent upon both institutional and behavioral variables. Based on this actor-based framework, actors’ strategies and preferences are developed and revealed during their interactions and informed by their former interactions in the context of structural constraints. We generate insights on how the change in the relative power resources (structural constraints) of the respective actors shaped their actions (perceptions and strategic decisions) and the policy outcomes.