The Early Years of Central European University as a Network: A Memoir

Alfred Stepan The Early Years of Central European University as a Network: A Memoir REPRESSION NOTWITHSTANDING, CENTRAL EUROPE IN THE MID-1980S had numerous pockets of political resistance and intellectual creativ­ ity. Virtually no samizdat (dissident literature) ever had a second issue in Bulgaria or Romania, but samizdat was a virtual underground industry in Poland. New forms of civil society resistance were constantly being invented by playwright Vaclav Havel and others in Czechoslovakia. Hungary’s domestically successful 1956 Revolution was only put down by the entry of Soviet tanks, but relatively autonomous intellectual spaces were soon reconquered. “Flying Universities” functioned in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Fellowships from the philanthro­ pist George Soros enabled leading intellectual-activists to do research and meet members of their invisible colleges in Oxford, the London School of Economics, the New School, New York University, Columbia, and Sciences Po and to meet with interested journalists. But, no univer­ sity existed with the right to design its own curriculum and freely hire its own faculty. The freest polity in Communist Europe in the 1970s and 1980s was Yugoslavia. Since 1971 the premier intellectual gathering place was the annual Inter-University Seminar in Dubrovnik. In April 1989 in Dubrovnik, before the Berlin Wall came down, a group of scholars social research Vol 76 : No 2 : Summer 2009 687 from different Central European countries began to discuss the idea of the eventual need for a new type university if and when Soviet control ceased. They approached George Soros with the idea of starting such a university. But Soros, in his 1994 founder’s statement, acknowledged that he initially “opposed the founding of a new institution because I felt the purpose could be better served by informal, non-institutional initiatives. But the fall of the Berlin Wall changed my mind. I recognized the need for an institution to reinforce the idea behind the Revolution of 1989” (Soros, 1994: 7). Numerous decentralized nondegree initiatives related to the Dubrovnik idea emerged very quickly in Prague, Budapest, and Warsaw, and with the end of the Soviet Union, in Russia and Ukraine. The name, Central European University, began to be used in 1991 but that same year Soros still stated that “to avoid any conflict with existing institu­ tions, the CEU does not intend to award its own degrees” (CEU Gazette, 1991). In the spring of 1991, Juan Linz and I were halfway through a book on democratic transitions when I was asked by Jacques Rupnik, the Czech civil society scholar then at Sciences Po in Paris, to help run with him and Pierre Hassner experimental summer courses in Budapest on democratic transitions for the emerging CEU network.1We taught, in one seminar, as a key part of our experiment, students from most of the countries in postcommunist Europe. It worked. The students shared enough common Soviet-rule experiences, enough excitem ent about building alternative futures, and enough anxiety about the poten­ tial collapse of their welfare systems (and the emergence of dangerous nationalisms) to constitute a historical and existential cohort. It was one of the most intense and rewarding seminars I have ever taught in my life. In this period, a dilemma about the future of universities in the social sciences in Central and Eastern Europe became increas­ ingly apparent. I will call this dilemma “purge or petrifaction.” Many core courses necessary for an inclusive democracy in a noncommand economy did not exist. For example, a cutting-edge course on democ­ 688 social research racy in the 1990s—whether in Brazil, Spain, or Czechoslovakia—had to address (philosophically, constitutionally, and politically) the ques­ tion of rights, especially rights against the state, and how to construct vertical and horizontal checks on the state. As in Brazil, civil society in Poland had been the “celebrity” of the resistance to the state. However, if that state were overthrown or greatly weakened, democratic theorists and activists had to work on creating a democratic polity. The rhetoric of antipolitics was still strong but it was not a sufficient response. A new curriculum, driven by the new research agendas, was widely seen as an imperative. But, the dilemma was that, given the existing university power structures and curricula in...