The uncanny howling about Soros’ CEU university hasn’t subsided since last Wednesday. The “whole world” protests against “Orbán’s grave attack against Hungary’s most prominent university”. Open letters, interviews, newspaper articles, a copious amount of media reports on a few thousand strong demonstration in Budapest, a long (and growing) queue of politicians, including Christian Democrat ones!, condemn Hungary because of the attack on… whatever. You know the drill.
According to this German article, “Hungary says no to science”. Now let’s have a quick look at that what we should actually say “no” to. I found a list of some theses which were submitted (and accepted!) at CEU last year. All of them are written in English and they can be read in full at the provided links. Please decide for yourself if they are scientific works or if you agree with me that they are left-liberal political pamphlets.
1. Dispossession and futurelessness : at the confluence of marxism and queer theory
The thesis compares the work of Lee Edelman, the eminent figure of queer theory with the work of Hungarian Communist philosopher György Lukács.
2. Playing with identity : a study on the Budapest BDSM community
The thesis analyses the narratives of Sado-Masochists, with special regard to the role of games.
3. Blasphemy as tool for institutional critique
Through a number of cases, the thesis presents how blasphemy plays a role in post-Soviet art.
This thesis reveals how media spreads nationalist ideology in Macedonia with the help of traditional sex roles and “the typification of the female body”.
5. Polish exceptionalism : hate speech laws between supra-national standards and national politics
This thesis examines why Polish hate speech laws are substandard to international ones and why Polish criminal law does not provide protection for victims of hate speech motivated by bias on grounds of gender identity and sexual orientation.
6. Becoming and being : the experiences of young feminist men in Iceland
This thesis reviews life experiences of young Icelandic feminist males.
“This thesis aims to situate the phenomenon of “homonationalism” into lived experience in order to lay bare the contextual specificities of queer Muslim subjectivites in London, UK and to examine the local refigurations of power that informants enact therein. Through fieldwork at an inclusive Mosque in London, and interviews with queeridentifying Muslims, this ethnographic approach is dedicated to analyzing how those considered inauthentic in homonationalist imaginaries, and who are often elided in critical discourses of homonationalism itself, articulate narratives of sexual citizenship that challenge the regulatory codes of a universalizing script of homonormative sexuality, and how they make these pleas for belonging through a parallel reconstitution of Muslim normativities. ”
8. Migration in the Mediterranean : the smuggler as scapegoat
According to the thesis, even though illegal migration has been going on for decades, human traffickers have been made scapegoats recently.
9. Constructing identity through the Hungarian “migration” discourse
The abstract is gibberish like “On the other hand, the feeling of instability aided the ontological insecuritization process, which was utilized to establish a situation where everyday routines were not working and the ontological insecuritization became possible”, but I guess the thesis argues that Orbán’s government uses the threat of the illegal migrants to Hungary to strengthen racism and xenophobia among Hungarians.
10. Anti-liberalism and antisemitism in dualist Hungary
The thesis presents anti-liberalism and anti-Semitism through the case of Kárpátalja (Transcarpathia) .
Er… check out the link if you really do want to know more details about this particular piece of progressive train of thought.
I think the list speaks volumes indeed. Metaphorically speaking, Soros’ university in Budapest should be razed to the ground and sowed with salt. Mr. Orbán, please do so!