Casting Orbán’s attacks on higher education as an “authoritarian playbook” oversimplifies a broader illiberal movement—and risks treating the erosion of academic freedom as inevitable, not contingent on conditions we can still change.
A popular explanation for today’s attacks on academic freedom is that the Trump administration is following an authoritarian playbook, with Hungary under Viktor Orbán cast as the model. This metaphor has appeared in publications ranging from an Ohio news station to The Atlantic, presenting Hungary as a preview of America’s future.
As someone who lived in Hungary for five years, earned two degrees in gender studies at Central European University in Budapest, and later completed a doctorate in the United States, I have firsthand experience with Hungary’s attacks on higher education. The playbook metaphor oversimplifies and suggests that the future is inevitable. It’s not.
But Hungary’s severe curtailing of academic freedom—and ways that gender has become a symbol of the liberal world order—should serve as a grave warning.
Hungary’s attacks on academic freedom cut teeth in 2018, when gender studies were banned nationwide, the same year the university where I studied was forced out of the country (it’s now in Vienna, Austria.)
For the feminist scholars who experienced—and resisted—these assaults, the idea that Orbán fashioned a playbook that Trump and others are now copying misses the point.
The playbook metaphor oversimplifies and suggests that the future is inevitable. It’s not.
“Orbán isn’t writing the playbook,” sociologist and gender studies professor Eva Fodor of Central European University told me over the phone on Feb. 16, 2026. Instead, she described the international illiberal movement that circulates money, ideas and strategies across borders and networks, often drawing on funds from liberal democratic institutions such as the E.U. When Hungarian politicians attack “gender” and higher education, they use these concepts as a shorthand for, and rejection of, the liberal world order.
“I’m not sure peers in the United States want to hear what I have to say,” Fodor commented. “Total destruction of the higher education system is the goal of the [Hungarian] government, because universities are where students learn tolerance and liberal values.”
In other words, universities are not incidental to Hungary’s political projects—they’re one of several targets.
To understand how that’s happened, it’s helpful to look to the past. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Hungary was one of the wealthiest and most promising new democracies in the post-socialist region. But the economic and political restructuring that followed—privatization, foreign investment and widening inequality—alienated the working- and lower-middle classes from center-left parties, the champions of liberal democracy.
Fast forward to the 2010s, and illiberalism in Hungary is, in part, a recoil from the social costs of the harsh neoliberal policies of the 1990s.
In tandem with attacking universities and, in many cases, replacing academic governance structures with boards of loyalists, Hungary has launched pronatalist policies. While Hungarian women have long participated in the workforce, today’s policies encourage women to have multiple children, offering generous leave benefits, childcare and mortgage support.
These policies could sound like a “feminist dream,” said Fodor, but they are not. The benefits are not universal but limited to heterosexual married women under age 40, and typically only for ethnic Hungarians. And they’re part of the broader effort to reshape society along nationalist and exclusionary lines—an effort that includes weakening academic institutions.
Assaults on higher education are not unique to Hungary—Türkiye, Brazil and the Philippines are also places where governments are using legal levers to silence and control universities and curtail dissent. Nor is it surprising that backlash to neoliberalism—visible in the United States with movements like Occupy Wall Street—has helped create the conditions in which gender becomes a scapegoat for the failures of liberal capitalism.
That means Hungary’s approach to controlling universities is a warning for academics across the United States to pay attention to the extent to which similar conditions of unrest have taken root in our communities, especially as public support for higher education has dwindled and high costs and downward social mobility have made college degrees unattainable for many students. The attacks succeed when the conditions are ripe.
I understand the impulse to name closures in the United States, such as the shuttering of the Texas A&M gender studies program, as another page in an authoritarian playbook crafted by a leader somewhere else. But we should be careful not to slip into anticipatory fatalism. Expecting the worst won’t save U.S. higher education.
Instead, let’s remember that disciplines such as gender studies were born out of collective defiance and sustained—in the case of my feminist colleagues in gender studies in Hungary—by bucking playbooks and persisting despite the conditions.
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Editor’s note, April 13, 2026:
In a stunning political upset, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has conceded defeat after 16 years in power, as opposition leader Péter Magyar and his Tisza party secured a landslide victory in national elections. Preliminary results show Tisza on track for a constitutional majority—enough to dismantle key elements of Orbán’s governing system, often described as an “electoral autocracy.”
Magyar, a former Orbán ally turned critic, campaigned on promises to restore judicial independence, tackle corruption and reverse policies reshaping Hungary’s education system, including attacks on academic freedom. He has also pledged to realign Hungary with the European Union and distance the country from Russia.
The result complicates the increasingly common framing of Hungary as a fixed model for democratic backsliding. Instead, it underscores the article’s central point: that illiberal systems are neither inevitable nor immutable—and that political conditions, civic mobilization and electoral participation can still produce rupture and change.
Ms. Classroom wants to hear from educators and students being impacted by legislation attacking public education, higher education, gender, race and sexuality studies, activism and social justice in education, and diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Cue: a new series from Ms., ‘Banned! Voices from the Classroom.’ Submit pitches and/or op-eds and reflections (between 500-800 words) to Ms. contributing editor Aviva Dove-Viebahn at adove-viebahn@msmagazine.com. Posts will be accepted on a rolling basis.
