Trump’s battle with Harvard is familiar to a university forced to exile

In a former bank building, far from the palaces of Vienna and operas, the University of Central Europe lives in exile.

The school, founded by George Soros, was once an example of a flourishing academic in post-Soviet Europe. Now, less than a decade after the right -wing government in Hungary The forced to leave BudapestPeople are warnings that seem to be President Trump seeks to bring the best American universities to the heel.

“It is as if we continue to shout at the vacuum, and no one listens,” said Sepphora Llanes, a student graduate from Colorado.

But some are.

While the Trump administration degenerates its pressure campaign, more people in American higher education – and in Vienna – believe that the American government has borrowed from a refined play book in recent years by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has used the power of the state to threaten a university which he disdained, Upende And strengthen its ideological grip over Hungary.

“At the abstract level, it is the same thing,” said Carsten Q. Schneider, a German scholar who has worked for CEU for more than 20 years and will become its acting president and rector in August.