The Central European University, Budapest, like Jawaharlal
Nehru University in New Delhi has been going through a tremendous period of
unrest, as there is danger of it
partially closing down, in Hungary. The Hungarian Prime Minister
believes that since CEU has American funding from the billionaire Soros, it
implies the degradation of the
nationalist values of the present
Hungarian government. Conclusively, the greatest alarm that Prime
Minister, Viktor Orban experiences is
regarding the Gender Studies Department at CEU.
Gender Studies is a discipline which has specialized, in the
last couple of decades, in sensitizing students to the questions of biology and
social orientations. As a result, it communicates that sex is a social
question, and men and women are socialized to their specific tasks, in uniquely
different ways, in different societies. This is not acceptable to the Orban
government, because the post modern questions of the legal rights of third-gender citizens,
human rights, androgyny, and same sex love, are all essentially problematic to
the present Hungarian government, who are seeking to return to the fascist
preoccupation with kitchen, church and kindergarten as the sole interests of
women. As a result, this has meant that for several months now, the Director of
the CEU has been busy finding an alternative space for its afflicted
departments in Vienna, so that students applying to the Gender Studies Course
in 2019, can do so with accreditation from Vienna, and the course will continue
to be taught.
Ofcourse, the more general shunting of CEU to Vienna has
gone side by side, so that a partial
exodus to the Vienna campus, is planned next summer. The heads of academic
Departments have been busy all year, in planning the survival of their units,
and the preparation of new syllabus in the 2019 academic year, which includes
undergraduate courses they have not taught before. Administrative officers in the CEU are
anxious that they will lose their jobs, as they may not be able to learn the
legal rules for a new Viennese campus in time, involving new language skills in
another country. The teaching faculty, however,
have been essentially problematized by the certainty of the Vienna
campus, affecting their present
routines. The roster of faculty who can stay back in Budapest had to be made in
time for the advertisement of courses so that
fresh candidates applying for courses know which campus they would be
going to. Since many courses are
interdisciplinary, these have created new hurdles for teachers and students
alike. A two-campus attendance is
essentially a financial burden as teachers and students would have to oscillate
between Vienna and Budapest, a distance of three hundred miles. CEU library is
a public library, open to the public, which will be adversely affected with the
departmental transfer. So also the café culture, so charming to all university
environments will be adversely affected.
All these problems are essentially because under the name of
nationalist loyalties and interests, the present Hungarian government is trying
to shut down a very popular university, with a thriving international student
presence, including many Indian students availing scholarships. Michael
Ignatieff, the Director of CEU, a well known sociologist of Borders, Boundaries
and Ethnic Violence, finally
decided that the threats by Prime
Minister Orban was too hard to handle from
year to year, and as a result, laid down the operative rules for the
migration of those departments which did not have Hungarian creditation, along
with their American certification.
Sociology, for instance, did not have this, as courses were not taught in
Hungarian, and did not have sufficient courses with content relating to
Hungary. So for teachers and students of Sociology and Gender Studies, the
shift to the Vienna campus is fait accompli. The question for faculty now is
how to get their children transferred to schools in Vienna, how to find
residential accommodation in a short time, how to organize the daily routines
of old people living with them, and how to arrange for their spouses to
accompany them, or transfer their existing employment responsibilities to a new
work place. Commuting from Budapest to Vienna would take three hours everyday,
like travelling from Delhi to Agra, and while it can be done, it would be
expensive and time consuming.
As a result, the demonstrations by students who have taken
to the streets in freezing winter conditions has now expanded to include
workers resisting dictatorial rule. The numbers demonstrating on the square
outside Parliament, at Kossuth metro station is huge. There are lectures and
theatre performances, and the intelligentsia and the working class are very
adamant that freedom of expression depends on their daily attendance and informed participation at these. Why do
politicians fear feminist theory so much? Gender Studies was the legal manner
in which feminist engagements entered the classroom. This was supported by
democratic political institutions, which are present even in fundamentalist and
totalitarian state craft. Feminism demands that those who are enslaved would
benefit from the ideologies of emancipation and freedom, and this includes
younger sons and slaves, who have not the benefits in patriarchy, of the free
citizen.
Sociology, further is fearsome to fundamentalist political
organizations, because the basic axiom of Sociology rests on its methodological
atheism. It presumes that since there is so much diversity in religious belief,
and the variability of these are so vivid, the Gods are constructed by humans.
The Greek Gods/Goddesses slipped into oblivion after the Romans domesticated
and renamed them, and the Egyptian and Roman Gods later had no followers except
in literature and art, for they had been obscured by civilisations which
followed. Whether in Hungary or India, the orthodoxies are confounded by the
rationality of the University intellectuals and seek to suppress them.
