Should Universities Just Leave? 

Imperial Public Library, St. Petersburg, Russia (1890) | Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division / No known restrictions

Over the past year, I have tracked the journeys of five universities caught in the crosshairs of authoritarian pressure: Central European University (CEU) in Hungary; the Higher School of Economics (HSE) and the European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP) in Russia; Nazarbayev University (NU) in Kazakhstan; and the American University in Bulgaria (AUBG). Faculty, students, and administrators (two from CEU, two from EUSP, three from AUBG, three from HSE, and two from NU) shared their stories with me.

Their comments point to the same uneasy conclusion: Rescue may preserve institutions in name, but it often hollows out their communities, detaches them from local publics, and leaves behind intellectual deserts.

And yet the choice to resist rescue can be fatal. 

As one professor in Kazakhstan told me, “I’m not suffering here. I wouldn’t presume to tell someone at the Higher School of Economics to risk their life. We can’t all be Navalny.” The professor was referring to Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian prison in 2024. Navalny, of course, was a political activist, not an academic. So whose standard of defiance should academics hold themselves to? 

In 2017, Viktor Orbán’s government introduced the “Lex CEU,” a law targeting the Central European University, which at the time was located in Budapest, and threatening to close it unless it met a series of demands. 

The attack came as a shock.  

As one professor explained, the CEU “was always about democracy and open society. But we never thought a government in the EU could expel a university. At first, we thought it must be a joke. Two days later, we realized it was real.”

The professor recalled the university community mobilizing quickly. “There was a big demonstration—sixty or seventy thousand people marching for the university.” Students were at the forefront. “They marched in the streets, organized outdoor classes in front of parliament, set up tents, brought faculty, and held lectures so Hungarians could see what we were doing. Their stakes were low—they would graduate before the move—but they were in the front row. They gave the struggle visibility and energy.”

Town halls turned into rituals of solidarity. “Every two or three weeks, the whole university gathered in the auditorium to hear updates,” the professor recalled. “Once, the rector called in from a plane after meeting Nancy Pelosi. When he mentioned it, there was a huge round of applause, a standing ovation. His eyes got wet. He almost cried. It showed the whole university believed that somehow a very small university in Hungary could pull strings in Washington and fight against the odds.”

In an effort to mollify the regime toward its presence in Budapest, the university dutifully tried to follow every one of the government’s requirements: It opened an office in New York, created joint master’s programs with Bard College, exchanged students and faculty, and proved its tax and research contributions to Hungary. 

But there was one final demand the university could not meet. The law required a bilateral agreement between the Hungarian government and the state of New York. Albany was ready to sign—but Budapest refused. 

By late 2018, the university community began to realize that a move was inevitable. “That’s when people started visiting Vienna, trying to imagine life there,” recalled another professor.

The university did end up relocating to Austria, and the move came at a personal cost to many. 

“I’m from Mexico,” the same professor told me: “My wife worked in Hungary, and when CEU moved, she had to give up her job. My daughter was eight, speaking Hungarian, with her school and friends. Suddenly she had to start over in German. She lost everything familiar.” 

For the professor, the lesson was bitter: “Within the EU, we lost rights very quickly. It made me sensitive to the precarity of institutions, of freedoms. How easy it is to lose them.” At the same time, he took pride in the institution’s defiance. “Don’t capitulate. CEU never compromised. We fought with dignity,” he said.

In Austria, the CEU’s institutional mission endured—but its departure weakened the political opposition in Hungary.  

Orbán’s attack on one of Hungary’s most visible sources of principled opposition to his regime offered regional dictators a template that was easy to follow—as the fate of the HSE in Moscow shows.

A former student at HSE remembered arriving on campus from Russia’s Arctic North and discovering a rare oasis. “It was the freest place in Moscow. Professors made jokes, shared their views, and disagreed with each other. Everyone was political. Demonstrations were mainstream,” he said.

This openness contrasted sharply with his high school years, when it was risky for anyone to distribute Navalny brochures. At HSE, political protest was part of the air. “We had cases where students were arrested at protests, and the university helped get them released. That was crazy, even then. The head of the university supported us,” he said.

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine provoked a sudden shift: “Everything changed,” the former student recalled. “It became a different institution. Professors left in waves. Repression became the norm.” 

New laws criminalized public comparisons between the USSR and Nazi Germany. “That made things really difficult for our World War II research center,” said the student. “Suddenly, administrative protection evaporated.” 

One of his professors urged him to flee the country, telling him, “If you really want to study abroad, why stay two more years? Go now.” The student left for graduate school abroad. “Even if I hadn’t always wanted to go to the US, the choice was obvious,” the student said. 

But he was one of the lucky few. “Most didn’t leave. They stayed. And now, the risk of being jailed is very real.”

The European University in St. Petersburg was founded in 1994 as a non-state graduate school, not unlike the CEU in Hungary—nor, for that matter, the New School for Social Research. Its goal was to help Russia train social scientists from around the world about the latest developments in critical empirical inquiry and social theory; the university offered classes in both Russian and English.

Attempts at repression, when they came, took a variety of forms: One was simply suffocation by paperwork. 

In early 2008, following a fire safety inspection, a local court ordered the university closed for six weeks, forcing students and faculty out of classrooms and halting research. The official justification was compliance with building codes, but the timing of the closure raised widespread suspicion that this abundance of caution was politically motivated. 

In the months before the shutdown, the university had run an EU-funded election-monitoring project designed to improve the transparency of Russian voting, a program that the Kremlin quickly denounced as foreign interference. At the same time, its Gender Studies program was attracting official unease for promoting feminist scholarship and challenging the “traditional values” narrative advanced by the state. Both programs were lightning rods, signaling to authorities that the university was crossing into politically unacceptable terrain. 

Classes eventually resumed in March once the university made the required adjustments, but the episode left a lasting reminder of Russian institutions’ vulnerability to both overt political attacks and weaponized bureaucracy.

One historian I spoke with recalled that after 2015 Putin became increasingly  authoritarian, and the European University became a target. “Bureaucrats came constantly—ministry of education, health, consumer protection. It was suffocating. As an administrator, I had to deal with all of it—signing documents on Saturdays, endless inspections,” he said.

For a while, the classroom remained a sanctuary, but only through duplicity. “On paper, the syllabus said Lenin. In class, we were teaching Žižek. The ministry never entered the classroom. They only checked documents. So, we built a fictitious world for them and lived our real lives in another. It was the only way.”

At first, solidarity grew under pressure, the historian said. “When crises hit, the rector or vice rector would call a meeting on 24 hours’ notice—even on a Saturday night—and everybody showed up. There was hunger for information, for being together. It was solidarity born of anxiety.”

But an escalating atmosphere of fear took its toll. Foreign partnerships that were once lifelines (the university had been funded in part by American NGOs like the Ford and MacArthur Foundations) became liabilities. “Foreign networks marked us as foreign agents. They made life harder, not easier.”

Ultimately, he left. “Leaving was agonizing. I wasn’t just a professor; I was a department chair. Students understood when I left, but some colleagues never forgave me.” 

Exile gave this professor the safety of a new teaching job abroad. Those unable to leave the country had to fend for themselves—and so they have, as best they can. The European University in St. Petersburg is still open and still offering social science classes taught in English and Russian. 

At Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan, a degree of academic freedom has also survived—but only under certain conditions. One historian described his relief at the institution’s protections: “Part of the charter is that it is an independent academic institution. I’ve never had any issue.” 

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he and colleagues organized a panel scrutinizing Moscow’s historical claims. “We were told, just keep it within the university. Don’t invite journalists. The event went ahead. No consequences.”

Students face different risks, he said. “They have to live in this country after graduation. They’re more worried about criticizing the government.” 

Another faculty member described growing nervousness: “The original president who protected academic freedom left. Now there’s a lot more scrutiny, a lot more paranoia. Risk aversion is shaping everything.”

Incidents piled up. An art exhibit was censored as “gay propaganda.” A senior administrator declared “diversity, equity, and inclusion is for disabled people, not for gays. That sentence encapsulates the mentality.” Women’s Day marches were banned. Student events grew riskier, said this faculty member. “Students definitely self-censor. They understand that if they write something, it will be around forever. They make calculated decisions about where their future will go.”

At CEU, remaining in Budapest would have meant closure. At HSE, continuing open teaching risked imprisonment. At EUSP and Nazarbayev, duplicity has sustained classrooms for a time, but bureaucracy—and a lack of funding—continues to threaten both institutions. 

As one Nazarbayev professor told me,“The goal should not just be to move universities out of danger, but to rebuild resilient systems where they are.” Rescue in this context can be reimagined as more than sending lifeboats. Friends of these free institutions of higher education should first try to help keep knowledge rooted locally. 

For example, institutional “twinning” can provide resilience: joint degrees, co-taught courses, shared infrastructure. The American University of Central Asia in Bishkek has partnered with Bard to co-teach courses and grant dual degrees, giving students both local recognition and U.S. accreditation. A broader model is found in the Erasmus Mundus framework, where universities such as Leipzig, Vienna, and Wrocław run joint master’s programs that rotate students across campuses and award degrees accredited by multiple institutions.

The relocation of individuals or entire institutions always remains an option of last resort. As a dean at CEU put it, “Authoritarians are ruthless. They are never satisfied. The only way to resist is to rally around your values. We fought with dignity.”