Universities in battle to build trust in a hostile world

Central European University (CEU), the bastion of academic freedom being forced out of Budapest, Hungary, received a shot in the arm last month when a team of United States academics recommended it be re-accredited for another five years. “A remarkable institution,” Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels, the team leader, wrote in the Washington Post.

Accreditation, a designation that signifies a university meets standards of quality set out by its peers, has played an important role in establishing CEU’s credibility over the past quarter century and “means a lot to us”, CEU Provost Liviu Matei told an international gathering of accreditation professionals during a speech last month in Washington.

But it was too little and too late to overcome what many observers see as part of a return in Hungary to autocratic government under its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who has been chipping away at higher education autonomy since he was elected in 2010.

A new layer of government oversight holds the public universities’ purse strings tight. Programmes on gender studies are banned, research on migration policy suspended. Hungary’s ministry for innovation and technology last month announced it is withholding funding for scientific research for at least three months.

In 2017, the government took aim at a singular aspect of CEU, a non-profit private university that is chartered in the United States and, Matei said, is “one of the most accredited universities in the world”. In order to continue operating, a new law decreed, a foreign university like CEU must have a campus in its home country. CEU doesn’t.

“Accreditation is a good tool for building and sustaining trust for a multitude of constituencies and stakeholders,” Matei told the audience in Washington. “In undemocratic regimes, nothing may help to build trust, not even multiple accreditation.”

Widespread hostility to higher education

Against the backdrop of significant and unprecedented societal upheavals around the world, the plight of CEU, which announced in December that it will relocate to Vienna, Austria, about 240 kilometres away, seems to symbolise a widespread hostility towards higher education and what it stands for.

In Turkey, more than a dozen professors were rounded up and questioned in November for participating, prosecutors said, in anti-government protests. Brazil’s newly elected president, Jair Bolsonaro, expressed support last year for a proposal that would have allowed students to report anonymously on professors who discussed ideology in the classroom.

Reports last year of scholars from Egypt, Nigeria and Ethiopia being denied visas to attend academic conferences in the United Kingdom have raised questions about future prospects for international mobility.

And it all comes at a time when the universities worldwide are being called upon to address big and often shared problems such as social inequality and climate change.

UNESCO’s 2015 Sustainable Development Goals for the first time called on governments to create international scholarships that would ensure students in developing countries receive a high-quality education. The reason is obvious, at least within academe. Knowledge production will drive the increasingly global economy, and “somebody has to create it”, Matei said. “That’s universities.”

Matei was speaking at the annual meeting in Washington of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation’s International Quality Group (CIQG), where accreditation officials from nearly 30 countries acknowledged a need to restore the public trust in higher education.

Some of the damage is self-inflicted. In the United States, major sexual abuse scandals at Pennsylvania State University and, more recently, Michigan State University, have contributed to a growing scepticism around the motives of higher education leaders.

Fewer than half (48%) of American adults said they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in higher education, a survey last year by the Gallup Corporation found. That figure is down from 57% in 2015.

The largest drop occurred among Republicans. US President Donald Trump, in a tweet last year, said he might try to cut funding from the University of California, Berkeley because he didn’t like the administration’s handling of a controversial speaker who had been invited to campus, while the US Attorney General last year accused the nation’s universities of “doing everything they can to create a generation of sanctimonious, sensitive, supercilious snowflakes".

The US Education Department appears poised to rein in some of the authority enjoyed by accreditation bodies as it proposes new language for regulations that determine eligibility for federal student aid.

Mounting anti-intellectual fervour

To Mo Elleithee, founding executive director of the Georgetown University Institute of Politics and Public Service, the mounting anti-intellectual fervour in the United States suggests the public may be tiring of a certain arrogance that seems to permeate the halls of the ivory tower today.

The university “views itself as essential to the increasing global society, while at the same time there’s a growing perception that universities think they know it all”, said Elleithee, the opening speaker at the CIQG conference.

Rodrigo Guerra Botello, secretary general of the Federation of Mexican Private Higher Education Institutions, said government can interfere with universities in countless ways in his country.

Public universities that want to change their curricula must endure an expensive and time-consuming process, for example, while a government goal to guarantee a free higher education has implications for millions of people but “nobody knows who is going to pay the bill”, Botello said. “Every time the politics and education go together it’s bad news.”

CIQG is on a path ploughed by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, of which it is a division and whose members are mostly US organisations, by encouraging international accreditation bodies to look for ways to increase transparency and public accountability. Wiping out corruption is seen as one way to restore trust in academe, but it is no small task, given how pervasive and wide-ranging the problem seems to be.

“To be non-corrupt in a corrupt society is the biggest challenge to survival,” said NV Varghese, vice-chancellor of the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration in India.

The University of Belgrade in Serbia, still recovering from scandals a few years back in which public officials were found to have plagiarised their doctoral theses, is one example of an institution trying to win back the public’s confidence. It has developed a strategy to raise awareness, encourage transparency and emphasise academic integrity, with initiatives especially aimed at doctoral students, who will be the next generation of leaders.

“The environment we create is important,” Ivanka Popovic, rector of the University of Belgrade, said, adding that “this is taking a really long time.”

In the early 1990s in Budapest, the founders of CEU saw their university as responding to a similar mandate, to develop an opportunity for future leaders to experience and nurture a democratic state.

Asked whether he views CEU’s move to Vienna as a mark of defeat or a sign of the success of enduring values, Matei offered no clear-cut response. “Almost everybody is welcoming us to Vienna [so] CEU will continue,” he said. But “it’s not something we would have liked to do. We have grown roots in Hungary.”