Gender Studies Banished in CEU

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.