A strange case on non-resistance - the restructuring of the Hungarian higher education sector

During the last two years, the Hungarian government implemented the most consequential higher education reform since the 1993 Higher Education Act, the first comprehensive act adopted after the country’s transition to democracy. Except for five universities – without exception in the capital, Budapest – all academic institutions of the country were reorganised into public foundations (with all their assets transferred), which nevertheless are still reliant on public funding. The foundation boards – equipped with far-reaching powers over the appointment of university leadership, finance, institutional structure and even research and teaching – are filled with government loyalists with lifetime appointments. Furthermore, the faculty of the reorganised institutions lost their public employee status. This comes after far-reaching changes in university governance and finance introduced in several steps between 2010 and 2020. These processes gained less international attention than the seizure of the research institution network of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) and the persecution of the Central European University (eventually, literally out of the country). Nevertheless, the new “foundation model”, as the government calls it, removed any remaining institutional and legal safeguards of academic freedom in the reorganised institutions. Hungary is already the worst ranked EU member state in academic freedom (Kinzelbach et al. 2021). Yet this process did not lead to any nation-wide protest movement as the 2012 attempt at a radical reduction in state financed student places had. In 2020-2021 during the speedy and unilateral reorganisation of most of the country’s universities it was only the small University of Theatre and Film where the students and most of the faculty protested. At other, bigger universities, however, the government was able to gain the consent of the senates without much resistance. Some universities, such as the renowned Moholy-Nagy University of Applied Arts even welcomed the reorganisation. Considering that academic mobilization was key to bringing down communism just 30 years ago and the democratization of universities constituted a key pillar of the transformation process, the lack of resistance is astounding. Why would institutions with far-reaching power over university governance (the senates) give it up willingly? What explains the non-response from academic interest groups? Why was there so little mobilisation for academic freedom? Was it even considered during the process? Our analysis concentrates on the actors, the government, public bodies in higher education (e.g., the Rectors’ Conference), and interest groups (unions, student groups, professional groups) to solve the puzzle. First, we explore their perceptions and understanding of academic freedom among key stakeholders. Then we explore the external and internal constraints on their inability to build a collective front against ongoing government intrusions into the internal working of universities. The analysis is situated in an interdisciplinary framework of social movement studies, interest group and lobby research, and state-labour relations, and applies a process tracing methodology. We rely on interviews with stakeholders and interest group leaders and activists, as well as on secondary sources.