Speech on the beginning of the academic year | Mathias Corvinus Collegium, Budapest

The relationships between a student or a professor and a university are remarkably important to the functioning of a free society; as are the relationships between universities and other institutions, including not only the nation state but also foreign organizations and states.

The beginning of a new academic year is therefore a solemn as well as an exciting occasion. Although I am not Jewish, for the majority of years of my life, beginning in 1982, I have regarded the New Year as beginning not on January 1, but at around this time of year—that magical time in the northern hemisphere when the summer still lives, but the first intimations of autumn can be felt.

At Harvard it was late August, early September; at Stanford mid-September; at Oxford and Cambridge, a bit later. But always I felt the same sense of expectation that I imagine most of you are feeling today. The students look ahead with a thrill but also a shudder toward the intellectual challenges of the new academic year. The professors feel perhaps a certain sadness that their summer of article and book writing is coming to an end, and the autumnal time of teaching and grading papers has arrived. But though we know that hard work lies ahead, we also know that there will be the compensations of new ideas and new friends with whom to discuss them.

Just how potent these social aspects of academic life are was made clear last year when the Covid-19 pandemic forced so many universities around the world to give up their normal classes and lectures and resort to “online education” or “distance learning.” The fact that instruction is technically possible over “Zoom” did not compensate for the loss we all felt at not being able to be together on campuses, sharing not only lecture notes but everything else.

Wherever we work, whether it is in the Bay Area, Boston or Budapest, we all earnestly hope that normal academic life is now back for good.

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Now let me turn to a more profound point. In my view, by far the most important thing a university can provide is not just an atmosphere of intellectual freedom but meaningful guarantees of that freedom. We come to college to think—as Immanuel Kant puts it in his famous essay “What Is Enlightenment,” “to dare to think”: sapere aude! When I was first an undergraduate, at Oxford in the 1980s, that was not hard. Mr. Prime Minister, I am sure you remember from your time at Oxford the truly limitless freedom of thought, speech and publication that we enjoyed in those days.

I do not doubt that at times I and others abused that freedom. I and my friends certainly made many offensive jokes—jokes that took no account of the feelings in others that they might hurt. On the other hand, others were perfectly free to mock us in return—and I can assure you they did.

At the time, it seemed to me, the price that we were occasionally obnoxious was a small one to pay for the privilege of attending a truly free institution—an institution where we and our tutors and professors could dare to think.

I remember with nostalgia how some of the older Oxford dons used to do that. Isaiah Berlin was one of the most brilliant men of his generation. Unlike others, Berlin dared to think aloud. I vividly remember the torrent of words and insights that poured forth as Isaiah pondered the great questions to which he dedicated his life: on the nature of freedom and the threats to freedom posed by a too rigorous rationalism or a too mercurial romanticism.

My old mentor, Norman Stone, whose funeral you and I attended, Mr. Prime Minister, here in Budapest two years ago, liked nothing better than to say what more reserved or politically correct professors considered unsayable. Norman—along with Roger Scruton, Maurice Cowling, and others—was one of the great influences on my early academic career. At a time when the government of Margaret Thatcher was deeply unpopular at Oxford—when her old university went so far as to deny her an honorary degree—Norman did not hesitate publicly to defend her and her policies.

At a time when others naively interpreted “the end of history”—Francis Fukuyama’s famous phrase—to mean the irreversible triumph of both capitalism and democracy, Norman was one of the first to point out that history, in the form of nationalist sentiment and civilizational differences, would not oblige the liberal intelligentsia by ending.

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There are people, including friends of mine, who would criticize me for having accepted the invitation to give this address here in Budapest in the presence of the Hungarian prime minister. As you know, there are many harsh criticisms directed at his government in Western Europe as well as in North America.

Let me make very clear that my speaking here today should not be interpreted by this audience or anyone else as some kind of endorsement of the policies of the Hungarian government. For five years I was a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing. That did not represent an endorsement of the policies of the Chinese Communist Party either. The great German sociologist Max Weber famously said that there should be separation of Wissenschaft and Politik—that one should leave one’s politics at the door of the lecture hall.

My view of a university is that, wherever it is located, it ought to be a place where a professor can speak freely to students, but that there is an obligation not to abuse the academic lectern or podium for the purpose of making political speeches.

Instead, I want to use this opportunity to offer my thoughts on the two very different ways that academic freedom is threatened in the world today. And I want to make the argument with some literary examples that date back nearly 70 years. In other words, I am going to be not political but rather academic.

In his book The Captive Mind, first published in 1953, the great Polish author Czeslaw Milosz described all the different ways in which the Communist regimes of post-war Central and Eastern Europe worked to extinguish or at least to suppress individual freedom.

Milosz pointed out that the devastation wrought by World War II on a society such as Poland’s created fertile ground for Marxism-Leninism—the dictatorship of the proletariat, but in fact the dictatorship of the Party—to flourish. He described, for example, with great brilliance the way intellectuals rationalized to themselves their participation in the creation of Party propaganda. He takes from Stanisław Witkiewicz’s novel Insatiability, which imagined a new Mongol Empire conquering Poland and introducing Murti-Bing pills as a cure for independent thought. In an especially memorable chapter, Milosz described the various kinds of lies—he uses the word Ketman, borrowed from Gobineau’s account of Islam—that people told themselves to make the experience of unfreedom bearable.

In an authoritarian regime, whether it is communist or not, the pressures inexorably grow to ensure the conformity of the universities. Those who deviate from the Party line find their careers abruptly ended or that, at least, their prospects of promotion fade. Those who seek to advance themselves find that there are incentives to inform against their superiors or colleagues. Those informed against find themselves subject to investigations notable for their lack of due process. In the extreme cases, the dissident disappears—perhaps to a reeducation or labor camp, perhaps altogether. We know that such things still happen today; that there are millions of captive minds all over the world.

Yet only a few of the captor regimes—North Korea but also, increasingly, the People’s Republic of China—continue to practice the distinctive repression of Marxism-Leninism. It turns out that there are other and more subtle ways to achieve roughly the same objectives of keeping minds captive.

This was something Aldous Huxley correctly foresaw. In a remarkable letter written in October 1949, Huxley—who had been the young Eric Blair’s French teacher at Eton— warned George Orwell that the latter’s most famous novel was capturing his own present rather than the likely future. “The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty- Four,” Huxley wrote, “is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion. … Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.”

In Huxley’s 1932 novel, we arrive at a very different dystopia (in AD 2540) from Orwell’s 1984: one based on Fordism plus eugenics, not Stalinism. Citizens submit to a caste system of rigid structural inequalities because they are conditioned to be content with the satisfaction of their shallow physical desires. Self-medication (“soma”), constant entertainment (the “feelies”), regular holidays, and ubiquitous sexual titillation are the basis for mass compliance. Censorship and propaganda play a part, too, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but overt coercion is rarely visible.

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Now let me turn to another, less famous book: Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano. The novel, first published in 1952, a year before The Captive Mind, is set in a future America, “ten years after war, after the men and woman had come home, after the riots had been put down, after thousands had been jailed under the antisabotage laws.” With considerable prescience, Vonnegut imagined what the United States would be like if the process of automation of economic life were taken to its logical conclusion—in which almost every human activity except engineering and management were mechanized.

This is unmistakably a capitalist world. The central character, Dr. Paul Proteus, is a senior manager at a huge industrial factory in Ilium, New York. As a result of technological progress, the plant now employs only a small number of people. The former workforce has been made redundant and now engages in only two activities: street-sweeping and military training. But their living standards remain the highest in the world, their spacious homes with their bewildering array of domestic appliances unlike anything outside the United States.

And yet this is also an unfree world, as becomes clear when Dr. Proteus begins to break the rules by allowing his rebellious, alcoholic friend Finnerty to wander unsupervised through the Ilium Works. This is an America where the inequality is based strictly on intellectual aptitude: on IQ tests and examinations. It is also an America where uniformity of thought is imposed not so much by propaganda as by stifling social conformism, exemplified by the ghastly “Meadows,” where the engineers and managers participate in a highly ritualized camp at which the values of their system are drilled into their minds.

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Which, then, is worse: to be a “captive mind” in some kind of authoritarian regime? Or to be one of the “organization men” in a computerized corporate dystopia? The answer, I think, is that there is not a great deal of difference.

Today, governments not only in Hungary but also in Poland are frequently criticized, including by other European leaders. As you know, there are accusations about corruption, about the independence of the judiciary, about the freedom of the press. Attacks on George Soros are interpreted as anti-Semitic. The new law against coverage of LGBT issues on day-time television is condemned as homophobic. The last time I spoke at a university in Budapest it was at the Central European University (CEU), which has since been forced to move its campus to Vienna.

A university is not the right place to air political criticism, any more than it is the right place to endorse a government’s policies. The question I would ask is simply: Can one dare to think here? For one thing is clear to me—namely that it is becoming harder and harder to dare to think in many of the academic institutions from which the criticism of Hungary most loudly emanates.

Trigger warnings. Safe spaces. Preferred pronouns. Checked privileges. Microaggressions. Paradoxically, there is less free speech and free thought on American campuses these days than anywhere else in the United States.

Some students repudiate fundamental liberal tenets—due process, as well as the 1st amendment. Overwhelmingly liberal faculty support them. So called “progressive administrators” positively encourage them. Two-fifths of American colleges have established some form of bias reporting system. And academic leaders almost never punish bad behavior (e.g. Middlebury). The losers are academics who arouse “woke” outrage and find themselves on the receiving end of a new “cancel culture.”

In a pre-pandemic research based on surveys of U.S. college students in four-year programs, Jonathan Haidt and co-authors at Heterodox Academy found that:

• 58% thought colleges had an obligation to protect students from offensive speech and ideas that could create a difficult learning environment

• 60% agreed that society could “prohibit hate speech and still protect free speech.”

• Fewer than 70% of conservative students thought they could freely express their own views on campus, compared with more than 90% of liberals.

• More than 50% of all students and 2/3s of all very conservative students said that they had stopped themselves from sharing their ideas and opinions in class.

In Heterodox Academy’s latest Campus Expression Survey from last year:

• 62% of sampled college students agreed the climate on their campus prevents students from saying things they believe, up from 55% in 2019.

Earlier this year, the Challey Institute for Global Innovation published even more disturbing findings, based in surveys of a representative sample of students in four-year programs:

• 85% of liberal or liberal-leaning students said they would report a professor to the university if the professor said something that students found offensive.

• 76% said they would report another student.

How do we explain this? Jonathan Haidt and and Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (Fire) argue in their book The Coddling of the American Mind that young Americans have been raised by their parents and their schools to believe three very wrong things about the world:

• “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker”

• “Emotional reasoning: always trust your feelings”.

• “Life is a battle between good people and evil people”

But I would argue that bigger problems are:

• the political skew to the left amongst faculty, which has increased over time; and

• the tendency of university administrators to appease the “Red Guards” among the student body.

Where this leads is a very dark place indeed. In a study published in March entitled “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship,” the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology showed that in the U.S., the UK, and Canada, academic freedom is in a dire state.

• 75% of conservative American and British academics in the social sciences and humanities say there is a hostile climate for their beliefs in their department. This compares to just 5% among left-wing faculty in the United States.

• Younger academics are twice as likely to support dismissal as older academics in the US and Britain, with 40% of American social sciences and humanities academics under age 40 supporting at least one of four hypothetical dismissal campaigns.

• PhD students are even more intolerant than other young academics. 55% of American PhD students under 40 support at least one dismissal campaign.

• “High-profile deplatformings and dismissals” get the attention, the authors of the report conclude. But “far more pervasive threats to academic freedom stem … from fears of a) cancellation – threats to one’s job or reputation – and b) political discrimination.”

And these are not groundless fears. The number of scholars targeted for their speech has risen dramatically since 2015, and undergraduates increasingly are to blame, according to research by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The Foundation has logged 426 incidents since 2015. Some 74 percent of incidents thus far resulted in some kind of sanction—including an investigation alone or voluntary resignation—against the scholar.

Whereas there were just 24 such incidents in 2015, according to the database, there were 113 in 2020. The first half of 2021 saw 61. Of the 426 incidents total, 63 percent involved a scholar expressing what FIRE determined to be a personal view or opinion on a controversial social issue.

Remember something I said earlier: In an authoritarian regime, whether it is communist or not, the pressures inexorably grow to ensure the conformity of the universities. Those who deviate from the Party line find their careers abruptly ended or that, at least, their prospects of promotion fade. Those who seek to advance themselves find that there are incentives to inform against their superiors or colleagues. Those informed against find themselves subject to investigations notable for their lack of due process. In the extreme cases, the dissident disappears—perhaps to a reeducation or labor camp, perhaps altogether.

I always assumed that such things went on only under totalitarian rulers. But I was wrong. As the evidence I have presented today makes clear, it is perfectly possible for people to become informers; for administrators to become apparatchiks; for professors to have their reputations and careers destroyed—even in a society that proclaims itself to be a beacon of freedom.

Can one dare to think? That is the most important question I put to you today. If the answer is yes, then I applaud you and your institution. But increasingly in the universities of the United States, as well as Canada and the United Kingdom—and it is gradually spreading to the universities of Western Europe—the answer is no. The American mind risks not merely being coddled; it risks becoming captive.

I urge you all not to allow the Hungarian mind to suffer the same fate.