In the past few weeks, Hungary has been getting heat for moving to enact legislation that could close down the Central European University, a Budapest education institution founded by Soros.
Ostensibly, this is because the CEU has unique ability to issue both Hungarian and American degrees, by dint of having accreditation in both countries. This puts it at a competitive advantage relative to Hungarian institutions. Critics however say that Fidesz is picking on it as a bogeyman to pump up his party’s ratings in time for the parliamentary elections next spring (though opinion polls seem to indicate he doesn’t have any real need for such a boost).
However, on looking deeper into the CEU’s operations, one starts to realize why the globalists are really unhappy with this:
(1) The list of classes it offers:
Gendered Memories of the Holocaust
Queer Theory
Gender and Migration
Communism and Gender
Introduction to Feminist Literary Studies
Preserving and Interpreting Knowledges of the Past and Promoting Social Justice
Islamic Feminism in Historical Perspective
Transnational Migration
Immigrant Integration Policy and Practice in North America and Europe
Minority Rights, Migrants and the Cosmopolitan Challenge
(2) All of Hungary has only one Women’s Studies department. Guess where.
(3) Not only was it founded by George Soros, but as Matt Forney points out, it is also run by Michael Ignatieff, one of those second tier “liberal interventionist” IYIs who hasn’t seen a war where he doesn’t want the US to intervene and will tell you all about it in the Washington Post.
So the CEU appears to be a nest of neocon-in-all-but-name propaganda pushing cultural dissolution on the Hungarians, and apparently without even any academic merit to balance it off (it does not appear in ARWU’s top 500 list of world universities, though in fairness, neither does any Hungarian university).
Good on the Hungarians, I guess.
But the above weirdo courses don’t seem exclusive.
The page https://courses.ceu.edu/ at least lists a “Department of Cognitive Science” and “Mathematics and its Applications” as well as “Economics” (acceptable if it doesn’t teach exclusively Keynesian BS, I wouldn’t know).
It’s supposed to be the best Hungarian institute of higher education in the humanities and social sciences, including economics. (Citation indexes of teachers, etc.) It also has a library operated jointly with the biggest state university, and, well, they’re giving the money.
So unfortunately there’s some academic merit, especially with Orbán idiotically spending all the money he has on football (soccer) stadiums.
Okay then, corrected.
Sorry to hear that. Unfortunately, it’s a familiar story.
It’s interesting to note that the American embassy (the ambassador hasn’t yet been nominated, much less confirmed) has already come out against the proposed legislation. So I guess Trump might get into a conflict with Orbán to protect Soros’s university. If that happens, it will mean Trump has gone full cuck.
That train has definitely left the station. But the irony of Trump going to bat for Soros in Hungary just highlights the clusterfuck that is US politics.
Oh God, Ignatieff? This guy again… the guy who had the worst-ever electoral result in Canada’s political history as leader of the Liberal Party (partly because of his past support for the Iraq war, which Canada under Chretien had stayed out of). I’ve seen him in the news every so often since then, and he always turns up in the slimiest places, writing the slimiest editorials.
He’s an intellectual toady hanger-on is what he is – his schtick is writing up intellectual justifications for whatever the rulers’ opinion on something is. He has no views or integrity of his own.
I still remember when the Canadian media was first promoting him, they had what was supposed to be a flattering biography (in the Toronto Star, I believe) of how he was the first of his lefty British intellectuals to see the changing winds of the 1980s and become a firm defender of free-market global corporatism.
Soros really is like a comically exaggerated anti-Semitic caricature come to life. Does he have any self awareness at all?
I’m not a conservative, obviously, but good for Orban for shutting down this “open society” garbage at CEU. As anticommie as Anatoly is, even he acknowledged that Hungary’s performance since 1991 had been ….disappointing at best. Of all the Warsaw Pact countries they should know what a sham the promises of liberalism are.
I became aware of Ignatieff in the 1980s when he became a pundit on late night BBC programmes. He always struck me very Jew-acting, despite being a Goy and the grandson of one of the Tsar’s last Education Ministers, Count Pavel Ignatieff.
I learnt he had been the amanuensis of old Jewish philosopher Isaiah Berlin when he was at Oxford. Now he is hooked up with Soros. Connecting to old Jews seems to be role for which he is very well adapted, particularly if there is monetary or other advantage to be gained.
A US Department of State official arrived in Budapest in recent days, and came out strongly against the proposed legislation. Now Orbán and his minions are talking about not enforcing that law or something.