The event takes place at Central European University in Budapest (Room N15 106)

What does it mean to defend academic freedom in contexts where universities are under sustained political, financial, or military pressure? This public discussion brings together scholars from Hungary and Ukraine — two countries whose recent histories offer sharply different but instructive cases of how state power, war, and institutional restructuring reshape the conditions of knowledge production.

Hungary has become a reference point in debates on democratic backsliding and the squeezing of university autonomy, from the forced relocation of CEU to the transfer of public universities to government-aligned foundations. Ukraine, meanwhile, faces the dual challenge of running and reforming higher education under full-scale war — protecting institutions physically while continuing to integrate into the European academic space. Read together, the two cases raise broader questions about who controls universities, how academic communities resist or adapt, and what institutional autonomy actually requires in practice.

Organised by

Virtual Ukraine Institute for Advanced Study (VUIAS) and the CEU Institute for Advanced Study