It is architecturally striking, a quiet monument to intellectual ambition. Yet the vital, electric pulse that once defined it has gone.
In 2018, Viktor Orbán’s government effectively forced the Central European University (CEU) out of Hungary through targeted legislation known as “Lex CEU”—requiring incoming cohorts to move to Vienna.
It was the first time since the Second World War that a major European university had been driven out of a European state by political decree.
Yet when I sat down to write my novel set in the CEU, I refused to set it in Vienna. I chose to anchor my characters firmly in the CEU’s Budapest campus in the 2010s.
People asked me why I would write a book about a setting that no longer exists as it once did. My answer is simple: to capture a place only in its current, compromised reality is to let the authoritarians win the argument of history.
I set my novel at CEU Budapest because that specific space, at that historical inflexion point, was a radiant symbol of European humanism. And because its loss is a warning we cannot afford to forget.
In many ways, it was still an act of deferral on my part: I started writing the novel many years ago, when CEU was still in Budapest, because I felt I wasn’t able to write a novel set at the university where I studied – the University of Sarajevo.
My Master’s programme in Bosnia was the most intense year of my life. Living in the Balkans, deeply enmeshed in the complex heritages of the former Yugoslavia, writing a thesis on contested history, and living in the pockets of the thirty other students in the programme made it a transformative time.
It was also one I didn’t want to draw on directly. My Sarajevo friends, rolling their eyes at “those westerners who come here then go home to write novels about Bosnia”, had a strong impact on me as a twenty-five-year-old.
But CEU also spoke to me during that period because it held a singular place in my Balkan friends’ eyes. It was the university they aspired to, the hub of the intellectual imagined community to which they felt an affinity.
At the end of my MA programme, my friends and I spent a month in our favourite Sarajevo cafe, preparing our PhD applications. I needed to go home, but they all wanted to go to Budapest. The CEU was calling.
The Harvard of the Balkans
To understand what CEU meant, you have to leave Western Europe’s comfortable, ancient university towns and look at the continent from its eastern edges.
To the youth of the Balkans and Eastern Europe, CEU was not merely an elite academic institution. It stood between Harvard and the Sorbonne as a signifier of ‘where intellectual freedom lives’, a place where lives can be transformed.
Founded in 1991, in the hopeful dusk following the Berlin Wall’s fall, it was established to foster open societies, critical thinking, and democratic values in a region that had spent decades under totalitarian rule.
The smear later levelled against it (the complex Antisemitism of ‘Soros funding’ as an insult in Eastern Europe, which has always been too much of a matryoshka doll for most Western liberals to unpack) claimed that CEU was a US-backed implant that bulldozed the region’s concerns in favour of USAID-inflected foreign agendas.
Tellingly, the university’s vilification ignored the agency of the students and faculty themselves, who had carved out a space there for a ‘non-aligned intelligentsia’.
CEU offered something revolutionary to a young person from Sarajevo, Belgrade, or Chișinău: a world-class, American- and Hungarian-accredited education in the heart of Central Europe, backed by generous, merit-based scholarships.
It was a place where a student from Kosovo and a student from Serbia could sit in the same seminar room, debating political philosophy under the guidance of world-renowned professors. It was a tangible bastion against the rising tides of local nationalism and authoritarianism.
Budapest was the physical meeting point of those dreams—a city where Eastern Europe met Western humanism, affordable, vibrant, and alive with intellectual urgency.
The smear that it was backed by ‘foreign agents’, a line which has seduced some of the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ Western left contrarians, ignored what the people of the region had made CEU into: their own intellectual sanctuary.
The Assault on European Humanism
When Viktor Orbán targeted CEU, it was not a bureaucratic dispute over accreditation; it was a calculated assault on the very idea of an open society.
By systematically squeezing the university—starving it of legal stability until it was forced to announce its relocation to Vienna—the Hungarian government delivered a devastating blow to the legacy of the European Enlightenment.
The message was clear: critical inquiry, internationalism, gender studies, and independent thought threatened the illiberal state. Forcing CEU to cross the border into Austria sent a chilling symbolic message to the rest of the continent—that tolerance, intellectual rigour, and diversity were Western concepts that could be banished from the East.
What cut almost as deeply as Orbán’s cynicism was the silence that met it.
As CEU fought for its life on the streets of Budapest—drawing tens of thousands of local demonstrators—the wider Western intellectual establishment often responded with depressingly tepid institutional support.
Few prominent Western public figures actively supported a sustained fight for academic freedom in Hungary, beyond merely drafting statements and polite hand-wringing.
There were notable exceptions, of course. Figures such as historian Timothy Garton Ash consistently sounded the alarm, calling the attack what it was: an unmitigated tragedy for European democracy and a direct assault on free speech and academic autonomy.
My former doctoral supervisor, Professor Denis Galligan, who had travelled to Eastern Europe in the early 1990s and worked with local lawyers to build more robust, independent judiciaries and universities, stood in solidarity with his former colleagues.
But for the most part, Western academia watched the exile of a sister institution with the distant, comfortable detachment of those who believe “it couldn’t happen here”.
The 2010s, Youth, and the Value of Universities
This loss is why I wrote the novel. Fiction has a unique duty. It preserves an era’s emotional texture before history rewrites or flattens it.
The 2010s were a fascinating, chaotic decade for young Europeans. It was an era defined by the lingering hangover of the 2008 financial crash, the rise of digital hyper-connectivity, the refugee crisis, and the sudden, creeping realisation that the “end of history” was a myth—that democracy could slide backwards just as easily as it had moved forward.
My novel follows a group of young people as they navigate love, ambition, intellectual awakening, and ideological heartbreak in the 2010s. CEU is not merely a backdrop to their lives; it is the catalyst.
I wanted to capture the electric energy of its library late at night, the debates over coffee on the Danube embankments, and the exhilaration of realising that your mind is expanding alongside peers who have survived histories entirely different from your own.
I hope that, in its small way, the book is an urgent reminder of what universities are for. In our current cultural moment, higher education is increasingly reduced to a transactional commodity, a machine for delivering job certifications, optimised for market efficiency.
But a true university is a sanctuary. It is a physical space, protected from the immediate demands of the state and the market, where young minds are free to test ideas, challenge dogmas, argue fiercely, and imagine better futures.
When you exile a university, you do not merely move bricks, mortar, or servers to Vienna. You rupture an ecosystem woven into the fabric of a particular city. You sever a light source that shone directly into the darker corners of Central and Eastern Europe.
Preserving the Ghost Campus
I felt that writing about CEU in Budapest today was, in a small way, an act of literary resistance and a statement that memory matters. It was small compared with what all my friends at the University of Sarajevo fought for, and a small posthumous act after the fight for CEU in Hungary was lost, but it felt like a small offering to honour these people and places.
Orbán’s government may have forced the physical institution out of Hungary, leaving the Nádor utca buildings diminished. But it cannot erase what happened within those walls, nor destroy the collective memory of the generation transformed there.
By keeping that campus alive on the page, I hope to offer readers not just nostalgia for a lost sanctuary, but a reminder of what we risk losing everywhere if we fail to defend our universities, our academic freedom, and our young people’s right to think without fear.
Photograph courtesy of ITU Pictures. Published under a Creative Commons license.
