Michael Ignatieff

GEORGE SOROS BELONGS TO A SMALL and select circle of wealthy men who have founded a university. His story is interesting because it is unlike any other. Other rich men who have founded universities in the past—Leland Stanford, John D. Rockefeller, Johns Hopkins, Andrew Carnegie—did so for reasons that are easy to understand. They wanted to make the final ascent from the ranks of the very wealthy to the exalted realm of the great and the good, and to lift any remaining stain that clung to their money and the way they had made it.

Men like Carnegie and Rockefeller were the robber barons of their era, and their philanthropy was a response to the criticism they sustained: in Carnegie’s case for suppressing the Homestead Strike, or in the case of Rockefeller, for the ruthless tactics toward competitors that fueled Standard Oil’s expansion. Soros was very different. He was a speculator, not an industrialist. He did not turn from finance to philanthropy; he pursued both simultaneously. He was comfortable with money, free of guilt about it, and fundamentally uninterested in it as an end in itself. There had always been money on both sides of his family, and no shame or embarrassment ever attached to the middle-class life he lived in the Budapest of the 1930s. Certainly, he had been miserable and poor when he was studying in London in the 1940s, and doubtless this was a spur to succeed as a speculator when he arrived in New York in the 1950s. But success of the spectacular kind he had achieved by the early 1980s did not produce any sentiment of shame. Speculation was a game that he played superbly well, not a source of guilt he had to expiate.

Founding a university is also a way to celebrate your own greatness. Certainly Soros had the usual human vanities, but on his climb to great wealth, he had avoided self-promotion. For commercial reasons he was not eager to see his name in the newspapers—but some of his deals, especially the shorting of sterling in 1992, earned him global celebrity. Even then, at the apex of his fame, he could have endowed hospitals and clinics, supported orchestras or theater companies—the kind of generosity that celebrates fame rather than inviting controversy. Instead, he took a philanthropic path that was distinctly his own.

Soros seemed to accept that he was destined to remain an outsider, as a European, as a Jew, and as an intellectual, no matter how successful he was. Instead of agonizing about his outsider status, he appears to have reveled in it. He understood that his contrarian streak and outsider status had contributed to his success. So his philanthropy was not driven by a desire to gain social acceptance. He could easily have bestowed a gift on his alma mater, the London School of Economics, as an efficient way to consolidate his reputation in the London elite, but while his foundation did support projects at the school, he never endowed LSE with a benefaction that sought to associate his name with the school.

Instead, beginning in 1990, he bestowed his money, as well as time and energy, on an improbable university start-up in Central Europe. The beneficiaries were not well-heeled and respectable academics in prestigious universities, but a small cluster of dissidents in Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw who, while utterly powerless, had kept their honor as defenders of academic honesty through the communist era. Certainly, Soros admired their courage, but he saw something more exciting: they might have history on their side.

Under their influence, he allied his philanthropy to a grand historical change—the transition from communism, from closed to open societies. He saw himself as the angel investor at a hinge moment in European history. His goal was not respectability but historical significance.

It takes Olympian self-confidence to believe you can change history. What set Soros apart as an investor was a strategic sixth sense, anchored in a deep understanding of European politics, about how political change could impact, among other things, currency and exchange rates. He specialized in making money from the interaction of markets and politics and made himself a master of volatile and uncertain markets. He was fundamentally at home in uncertain worlds. Risks that made others fly to security were the opportunities from which he sought to profit. This pattern started early. In March 1944, when he was thirteen, the Germans invaded Hungary, and the Jewish middle-class world he had thought was solid disintegrated at the first touch of terror. From this he learned, mostly from his father, that in situations of existential uncertainty, you could never trust what other people told you, only what your own eyes could confirm, and that if you were a Jew, you were on your own. Again, his reaction to this trauma was distinctive. A figure like the entrepreneur Peter Munk, who came from a similar milieu, escaped Hungary in 1944 and never came back, instead building a career and devoting all of his philanthropy to his newly adopted home of Canada. Andrew Grove, another Hungarian Jew who fled to the United States in 1956 and later founded the microchip company Intel, said he would never return to a place that had persecuted his people. Unlike them, Soros not only returned but created an institution. This suggests how deeply he remained attached to Hungary and how deeply he saw himself as a Hungarian.

Even Soros’s Hungarian identity was distinctive, for it was deeply influenced by his own father’s brand of cosmopolitan internationalism. Tivadar Soros had been one of the leaders in Hungary of Esperanto, an international language invented in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, a Polish Jew from Białystok, as a response to the rise of linguistic nationalism in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. Esperanto promoted itself as a cosmopolitan, transnational alternative to the linguistic nationalism of these empires, and it attracted large numbers of Jewish adherents, including Tivadar Soros. Esperanto was, in a sense, a cosmopolitan competitor to Zionism as a solution to the dangers that increasingly threatened Jewish communities in Central Europe before and after World War I. When Tivadar changed the family name from Schwartz to Soros in 1936, in response to the anti-Semitic legislation of the regime of Admiral Miklós Horthy, he chose an Esperanto word, soros, the future tense of the verb “to soar.” So the cosmopolitan internationalism and the visceral hostility to nationalism were constitutive features of his outlook from the beginning. In his deepest commitments as a philanthropist and founder of institutions, George Soros has remained, to the last, his father’s son.

All of this complex reckoning with the history of Central and Eastern Europe went into the shaping of his historical reflexes. That he made a lot of money betting on these reflexes must have seemed an unchallengeable proof that he should trust them when he moved from investing to giving. In Eastern Europe in the 1980s he saw history being made, and he wanted to be something he had never been before: an architect of history.

The closest parallel to this historical ambition was Andrew Carnegie’s attempt before World War I to use philanthropy to avert the headlong rush to war, by creating the international tribunal at The Hague and the Church Peace Union. By investing in international arbitration and an international network of spiritual leaders from different faiths who were supposed to find commonalities of faith and ethics, Carnegie believed philanthropy could stop war by generating international movements in favor of peace. All this turned out to be fanciful, but in its bright-eyed ambition, Soros’s project to use money to shape the transition from communism across the former Soviet empire was in the same league as Carnegie’s.

There is pathos in how it all turned out: he bet on open societies, but thirty years later, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, open societies are struggling against the rising tide of nationalist dictatorship and single-party rule. The university he founded in the country of his birth has been expelled and has had to start again in Vienna. It is easy to tell his story as a cautionary tale of one man’s self-deceptions. Yet he went into his philanthropic adventure in Central Europe with his eyes open. He knew how easily historical progress could be reversed. He retained what he had always displayed as an investor, a cold-eyed realism that sheltered him from euphoria and disillusion alike.

His desire to use philanthropy to make history distinguished him from other founders of universities, but acquiring these ambitions required a radical change in how he thought about his own money and his own success. He had made a fortune through speculation, by taking positions and taking a profit before prices fell. To be a successful speculator, you need to be ruthless and unsentimental: vacating positions at the right time, keeping your options open, and managing risks by staying mobile, agile, light on your feet, and unencumbered by loyalties and past positions. As one of his longtime friends, the Swiss banker Pierre Mirabaud, recalls, Soros liked to joke that investment is a speculation gone wrong.

This attitude toward investment led him to view institutions with instinctive suspicion. He himself had felt throttled inside investment firms in the 1960s, which led him to set off on his own. His own firm deliberately sought to avoid becoming an institution itself. It was essentially a two-man operation for many years. As for academic institutions, his memories of the London School of Economics in the 1940s were not happy. He had been a lonely expatriate in his twenties who made few friends or academic contacts. He idolized one of the faculty’s leading figures, the philosopher of science Karl Popper, whose landmark book The Open Society and Its Enemies was to have an enduring influence. He fancied himself a philosopher in the style of Popper, but Popper didn’t have time for him or his ideas.

Yet this same man invested in an untried academic start-up, in a region with no private universities at all, and put his faith in dissident professors who had never run anything in their lives. Even more remarkable, he has stayed with the investment, through thick and thin, good years and bad, for thirty years. The university remains his largest single institutional commitment. He has invested $2 billion of his own money in it, and a skeptic might ask what return he has to show for his investment. History has not taken the path he hoped. Central and Eastern Europe are still struggling to escape entrenched patterns of political culture—single-party leaders, nationalist dogma, and corruption—that were shaped by communism. Far from securing recognition to equal Rockefeller or Carnegie, Soros has been targeted as the malign spider at the center of a liberal cosmopolitan conspiracy. He says he is proud of the enemies he has made, but there must have been moments of pain at the venomous hostility of the government that rules his native land. Yet he has stood by CEU, and instead of liquidating a struggling position has doubled down. As for returns on the investment, they are all long-term, to be measured in the lives he has changed, particularly the eighteen thousand CEU graduates who owe their education to him. For someone who was hostile to institutions, he can take consolation in the fact that regimes, good and bad, come and go, but universities—among the oldest institutions in Europe—endure. He has good reason to think that his will, too.

BY THE LATE 1970s and early 1980s, Soros began to explore ways to use his money’s power. From the beginning his philanthropy was political, and his conception of political philanthropy was distinctive: it was not a matter of funding politicians or political campaigns—though he does some of that—but the more grandiose ambition of nudging historical change itself. After attending seminars convened by the human rights activists Jeri Laber and Aryeh Neier, he began providing financial support to what eventually became Human Rights Watch. After a visit to South Africa in 1979, he started funding scholarships for Black students there. In the early 1980s he financed a key meeting of South African business leaders and the African National Congress to explore ways to end apartheid without destroying the South African economy. Around this same time he turned his attention to Central and Eastern Europe. He was introduced to Western intellectuals who had established contact with dissident thinkers in the Soviet bloc. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor persuaded Soros to fund the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, which had been established by several other philosophers, including Taylor’s Oxford colleague William Newton-Smith, along with several Czech dissident émigrés. The foundation channeled books and lecturers to Prague. A few months earlier, Newton-Smith had gone to Prague to give a lecture on the philosophy of science in the apartment of the philosopher Julius Tomin, only to be arrested fifteen minutes into his talk, interrogated, bundled out of the city, and expelled at the West German border. Soros also supported the work of the Paris-based activist Annette Laborey, who ran a small institution that enabled Eastern European intellectuals to visit French universities. In the 1980s few thought that this work would produce imminent change. The dissidents and their Western friends were tunneling under the walls of the communist regimes, but they assumed that it would take a long time for the regimes to collapse under the weight of their accumulating failures.

In 1984 Soros established a foundation in Budapest, with the cooperation of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, to support Hungarian intellectual and cultural life. It was the first free foundation inside the Soviet bloc, and after tough negotiations, Soros got his way: his foundation, not the academy or the government, would have control over how it spent his money. The foundation imported thousands of Western books and donated them to university and state libraries. It shipped in photocopiers to facilitate the circulation of free scholarly and political opinion. It gave grants to enable Hungarian philosophers, historians, and writers to travel to the West. Many of the eventual founders of Central European University were among the initial recipients of these grants.

János Kis, then the editor of an underground journal and a member of the democratic opposition, received a grant from Soros’s foundation to translate Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason into Hungarian, and subsequently received a stipend to spend a year at the New School for Social Research in New York. Soros visited Kis at his apartment in Budapest in 1985. For Kis, it was a strange experience. He had never met a very wealthy expatriate capitalist before, and clearly Soros had not met many people who had chosen internal exile. Kis remembers him asking a rhetorical question: “Why do you do what you do? I couldn’t.”

Soros would look back with nostalgia to this early period of his philanthropy in Hungary. He was to tell his biographer Michael Kaufman that the Hungarian foundation was “the most fun of all” because he was able to help people of the caliber of Kis, while also importing photocopiers, which broke the party’s monopoly on information. Critical essays that once were typed and circulated in a few copies could now be distributed so much more widely that they escaped the control of the party and the secret police altogether. “With just $3 million, we were having a bigger influence on the cultural life of Hungary than the Ministry of Culture,” Soros remembered.

Hungary also represented a homecoming of sorts. Soros returned with his mother and other members of his family, renewed contact with childhood friends, and even appeared on the Hungarian media. On one celebrated occasion he used his fluent mother tongue to give the communist regime an ultimatum when it sought to ban publication of a list of recipients of Soros’s grants. He told the interviewer that unless the ban was lifted, he would take the foundation out of Hungary. The regime blinked and allowed the list to be published.

These early successes encouraged Soros to support another initiative—funding the Inter-University seminars in the idyllic medieval city of Dubrovnik on Yugoslavia’s Adriatic coast. These seminars were established by the Croatian nuclear physicist Ivan Supek, the rector of Zagreb University, in 1970. Dubrovnik became a venue where Russian, Balkan, Central European, and Western European intellectuals could meet in an atmosphere of relative freedom. The Dubrovnik seminars were exciting affairs since they sought to re-unify European intellectual life around the ideals of a shared search for truth free of ideological shackles. In some sense, these academics were trying to live in the future, even though Yugoslavia continued to be repressive, even though the wall still divided Berlin, even though the Soviet empire showed no signs of collapse.

By early 1989, however, the tectonic plates in Europe had begun to shift. The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had unleashed perestroika and glasnost but was soon losing control of the Soviet state apparatus and of public opinion in his empire. In Hungary, the regime was losing its capacity to create fear and buy off discontent. A steady stream of samizdat publications, concerts, dance performances, and seminars started a ferment the Communist Party proved incapable of controlling. In the summer of 1989, a young Hungarian dissident named Viktor Orbán made a dramatic public speech in one of Budapest’s historic squares calling for the withdrawal of Soviet troops. Shortly thereafter, Soros funded a fellowship for Orbán to spend a semester in Oxford. This was the heady context in which the Inter-University seminar met in Dubrovnik in March 1989. Bill Newton-Smith, who had attended these gatherings for more than a decade, persuaded Soros to take part. Talk was beginning to circulate, both in the Hungarian foundation and in the Inter-University seminar about setting up a new university, but when Soros arrived in Dubrovnik, he remained skeptical. Newton-Smith remembers him grumbling as they came in from the airport together, “They all think Uncle George has come to town to give them a university. Well I will listen to them but I’m not convinced. I think it’s better to reform existing institutions.”

Soros remained cautious, believing, to use a phrase of Popper’s, that “piecemeal social engineering” was the most effective way to make change. This was how he had worked with the Academy of Sciences. Young dissidents like the historian István Rév warned him that the academy was cooperating with him only to maintain its privileged position, but Soros stuck with the collaboration, believing that he should work with existing institutions. In Dubrovnik, however, as he listened to intellectuals and graduate students from Budapest, Belgrade, Prague, Warsaw, and Moscow, he began to change his mind.

He was flattered by their attention, of course, but he also felt a deeper affinity to these Eastern European intellectuals than to the arbitrageurs, stock pickers, and fund managers he worked with in New York. He had been writing down his own theories for years and had just published The Alchemy of Finance, a labored and laborious attempt to apply his Popper-influenced theories of reflexivity to moneymaking. The book also included this declaration of his intentions as a philanthropist: “I would value it much more highly than any business success if I could contribute to an understanding of the world in which we live or, better yet, if I could help to preserve the economic and political system that has allowed me to flourish as a participant.”

Like the university founders of old, he wanted philanthropy to “preserve the economic and political system,” but unlike them, he also wanted to understand the historical transition at hand and use his resources to ensure it succeeded. The intellectuals at the conference may not have taken his philosophical pretensions very seriously, but they certainly regarded him, in the words of one of them, as a “providential person.” Here, in Dubrovnik, was this extraordinary Hungarian billionaire who listened, took notes, asked questions, kept his counsel, and watched as the intellectuals debated where the university should be located, what it should teach, who should lead it.

The historian László Kontler, then a young instructor who attended the 1989 Dubrovnik meetings, remembers that while the creation of a university was on the agenda, no one realized how quickly events were moving in the region. The talk was not, he remembered, about transition from communism, but how to support a university curriculum that would “undermine the credibility of Soviet ideology.”

A few months later, the fall of the Berlin Wall accelerated the plans and discussions. The question ceased to be whether there should be a university, but when it should start and where. The Hungarian intellectuals said there was only one choice: Budapest. The Slovaks said it had to be in Bratislava, the Czechs in Prague, and so on. There were meetings in Bratislava, where Soros secured a promise by the new Czechoslovak prime minister Petr Pithart, himself a former dissident, that the new university could have a lease on a trade union building in Prague. That seemed to settle the question of location, but Soros still hesitated.

Through the whole of 1990, Soros vacillated, sometimes thinking he should invest in existing universities, sometimes believing he needed partners and couldn’t finance a new university all by himself. He gave the impression of a man who changed his mind after every conversation. Bill Newton-Smith disengaged from the process, disillusioned by Soros’s apparent indecision. Slowly, Soros realized that if he wanted to start a university, he would have to do so with his money alone. In December 1990, at a meeting in Newton-Smith’s rooms in Oxford, he finally told a gathering of Czech, Polish, British, and Hungarian academics that he would fund the start of a new university that would open in Prague in September 1991.

Once he made up his mind, his instincts were radical. Once established in Prague, the university should also have campuses in Warsaw and Budapest. For him, it was evident that Central Europe had a common culture and history and should have a university to reflect that identity. Newton-Smith privately thought the idea was “ridiculous,” and as time went on, the fragmentation of Central Europe became ever more evident, but in this bright and hopeful moment of transition, it still seemed possible to have a university in three capitals in the region.

In thinking about what kind of university the region needed, Soros reasoned that in a time of transition, the region needed experts in transition: lawyers to write constitutions, more lawyers to privatize state companies, economists to figure out how to unleash the disciplines of a price system on a socialist command economy, political scientists to assist in the creation of free political parties. Founding a university to change the course of history meant training a new elite to take the place of the discredited and bankrupt communist cadres in government offices, factories, research institutes, and social institutions. The focus of the education offered should be practical, vocational, and policy-oriented. Soros was enamored of intellectuals, but he was even more enamored of “doers,” the legal scholar András Sajó remembers, people like himself who “get things done.” What the region needed, in other words, was a “trade school for transition,” a place that would train a new elite to manage the shift away from communism. If this was what Soros wanted, Newton-Smith reasoned, he wouldn’t want a philosophy department.

But that’s not how things turned out. Two of the founding faculty members of the university—István Rév and Jiří Musil, the directors of the Budapest and Prague campuses, respectively—persuaded Soros that its graduates would need academic training in the social sciences and humanities. A transition would not be enduring unless its new elite acquired a substantial grounding in purely academic learning. After long months of disagreement and discussions, Soros accepted their arguments. Instead of a training school, the institution George Soros got for his money was entirely different. It was a highly academic graduate school in the social sciences and humanities. It taught medieval history, classical philosophy, the history of Eastern Europe, and environmental sciences. Why? Because these were the disciplines the dissidents knew and because he listened to them. Gábor Klaniczay, a young medievalist, for example, convinced him that medievalists were the custodians of a vanished but vital tradition in the region, before the region became locked in the nineteenth-century prison house of nationalisms. In the Middle Ages, it was in the medieval university in Bologna, for example, that young students from across Central Europe had met and conversed in the lingua franca of Latin. Whenever wars broke out, there remained a regional elite, schooled in a common culture, that could rebuild the bridges. To someone raised on the dreams of Esperanto, this must have struck a chord. Why not a twentieth- and twenty-first-century version of the same: a universitas where, with the lingua franca of English and a common devotion to scholarship, a new generation could see themselves as the heirs of these university traditions and escape the imprisoning modern discourse of nationalism? Soros took some convincing, but he listened to people like Klaniczay and the historian Péter Hanák, who made similar arguments. Little by little history and the humanities made their way into the curriculum of Central European University. For someone who thought he was making history happen, for someone whose success with money taught him his instincts were nearly always right, the largest surprise about the university’s founding is that Soros listened and learned. Because he did, the institution is what it is today.

János Kis credits Soros with listening, but also ascribes this willingness to listen to Soros’s deepest motivations: “It is true that George imagined CEU as a trade school for the transition to democracy. But this is not a complete account of what he had in mind. He also wanted CEU to be the lighthouse of the liberal thought in the region. Regardless of whether he was clear about this (he was not), a trade school couldn’t have become a lighthouse of the liberal thought. So George’s commitment to liberal values, including the value of open society, was a driving force moving CEU away from his other ideal, a trade school for practicians, and in the direction of a graduate school in social sciences and the humanities.”

Once Soros gave the go-ahead in December 1990, the founding of a university in the space of nine months was an almost inconceivable undertaking. At any other time, it would have been absurd to try, but in the euphoria and energy released by the collapse of the Soviet empire, anything seemed possible. There wasn’t time to select faculty with formal searches. The dissident intellectuals essentially chose among their own contacts to staff the new departments. As a result, CEU is among the only universities essentially created by its departments. The inevitable result, over the years, has been that each department became a separate feudal micro-kingdom. At the beginning, however, each department shared the same vision of a new university that would rebuild the broken bridges to the European and North American academic world. Péter Hanák established the history department; Gábor Klaniczay and János Bak founded the medieval studies program; János Kis was asked to set up the political science department; Ernest Gellner, one of the illustrious Western academics recruited to the new university, agreed to found a nationalism studies department in Prague, the city of his birth. Richard Southwood, a distinguished Oxford scholar, established an environmental sciences program. Roman Frydman, from New York University, established the economics department. András Sajó set up the legal studies department, with flying visits from American academics like Stephen Holmes. This created a distinctive CEU collaboration between dissident intellectuals from Central and Eastern Europe and senior faculty from prestigious Western universities.

By September 1991, Central European University opened for classes in the trade union building in Prague, with offerings in art history, economics, political science, and sociology. The sociology department then moved and established itself in Warsaw. The Budapest programs started with legal studies, history, environmental sciences, and a year later with political science and international relations. All students—there were seventy-six in the first year—received full scholarships and stipends, courtesy of Soros, many of them recruited from the Open Society Foundations that he was establishing from the Baltics to Armenia and deep into Central Asia and the Russian Federation. The early students, in the words of the political scientist László Bruszt, were all prime-ministers-in-training, intensely political and committed to returning and leading the transition in their countries. Their eagerness was exciting, but the isolation, ideological rigidity, and provincialism of their communist educations required a lot of remedial work. The early students did not know how to read a text critically. They were accustomed to rote repetition of lectures, copying down ideologically correct sentences from the official texts. Bruszt remembers a student from the Urals who came to him and said he wanted to study political theory. When Bruszt asked him what political theory he knew, he dutifully mentioned Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and then added that in his university library back home he had come across a few copied pages in English of a text by someone called Dworkin, and that had inspired him to study at CEU. This was the Anglo-American legal scholar Ronald Dworkin, who later became a recurrent visitor at CEU. Interactions like this convinced the faculty that their task was nothing less than building their academic disciplines from the ground up, training doctoral candidates to return to their countries and establish true disciplines on the Western model. At the beginning, Soros was cautious about this goal, deciding that in order not to aggravate relations with the existing institutions in the region, CEU should not issue degrees. This quickly changed, and by 1992 the university had secured accreditation in New York and was able to issue US-accredited degrees, making it the only institution in Europe at the time offering American-style master’s degrees.

In 1993, Alfred Stepan, a distinguished scholar of political transitions in Latin America, was persuaded to leave Columbia University and become CEU’s first rector. Before he took the job, he spent two full days at Soros’s summer home in the Hamptons, seeking approval for his plans to create a serious, academically respectable graduate school in the social sciences and humanities. On Stepan’s watch, the basic scaffolding of CEU’s academic structure was erected: history, political science, medieval studies, environmental science, and gender studies—departments that at their founding were unique in Central Europe. The new university drew European and American scholars with international reputations, to share not only in training a new elite, but in using comparative and historical analysis to understand the transition itself. László Bruszt published a groundbreaking study of the politics of transition. In the department of legal studies, András Sajó and Wiktor Osiatyński made the East European Constitutional Review, the leading journal for constitution-making in the Eastern European countries. Stepan, with Soros’s help, established the university’s board of trustees and recruited as its founding members Ralf Dahrendorf of Oxford University, Wolf Lepenies of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, and Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College.

In the first decade, Soros was deeply involved in the university’s governance, sitting on the executive council, chairing its board of trustees, overseeing budget discussions, and questioning hiring decisions. In one notable instance, Soros reproved Roman Frydman, the founder of the economics department, for not doing enough to get the new market-based economic thinking into public discourse in the region. This led to Soros funding supplements in key newspapers in Eastern Europe, with articles seeking to popularize market insights and the idea of open society. These supplements, in turn, led to the foundation in Prague of the syndication service Project Syndicate, which to this day disseminates progressive economic and social opinion pieces in newspapers around the world.

Soros committed $5 million a year for five years to CEU, and at every budget meeting would reinforce the message that the university would have to secure additional funding from governments or other philanthropists. “No stock, all flow” was the financial motto. And yet every year would pass, and no additional resources were found. The Austrian government made promises, but nothing came through. The new governments in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland were reluctant to subsidize what they dismissed as an American billionaire’s vanity project. A similar thing happened when Bill Newton-Smith went cap in hand to wealthy private donors in the UK or Europe. They asked whether he was kidding. Why did Soros need help with his pet project?

It began to dawn on Soros that if the university was to survive, it would have to be with his money alone. Against his own intentions and contrary to his wishes, he was being driven toward permanent support for an institution that he had thought would be a temporary instrument of transition.

Stepan wanted Soros to endow the new university, but Soros turned down this request, and by 1996 Stepan had left to resume his scholarly career, this time at Oxford. It would not be until 2000, under one of Stepan’s successors, Yehuda Elkana, who came from the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, that Soros agreed to endow the university, initially with $250 million. This reluctance about endowments spoke to Soros’s growing desire to keep control of the institution he had founded. This dynamic—constantly supporting the institution, renewing his commitment, sometimes year by year, but being reluctant to capitalize and recapitalize the endowment—was to remain a constant feature of his engagement with the university for the next twenty years.

THE UNIVERSITY GREW rapidly in the 1990s. Students were flooding in from all parts of Central Europe and Central Asia. Distinguished academics began regular visits and new faculty from the region began filling out the ranks of the professoriate. At the same time, the political moment of 1989 was replaced by the return of darker and more disturbing forces: nationalism and authoritarianism.

Soros cannot be charged with naivete about these developments or failure to anticipate their return. As early as April 1990, in a speech, he said, “There is a grave danger that the universal closed system called communism will simply disintegrate into national entities which fall short of an open society.”

An authoritarian populist, Vladimír Mečiar, began a campaign to break up Czechoslovakia, and in 1992 Slovakia became an independent nation. In the Balkans, Yugoslavia broke apart and disintegrated into civil war, with catastrophic violence, ethnic cleansing, and outward migration. In 1992, Dubrovnik (now within an independent Croatia) was shelled by Serb forces, and the Inter-University Centre, where intellectuals across the region had once gathered, was reduced to rubble. In Budapest and Prague, CEU welcomed students from all of the warring republics of the former Yugoslavia, especially those from Serbia who were escaping compulsory military service, and the university provided a safe space, throughout the war, in which they could learn and live together in peace.

For a time, Central Europe seemed to be spared the ethno-nationalist carnage in the Balkans and was proceeding in a market-oriented, liberal democratic direction. As long as this held true, CEU’s project—to train the new liberal democratic transition elite—seemed in tune with the direction of history. But even in the early 1990s, there were a few straws in the wind that indicated history might take a different turn. A deep current of right-wing anti-Semitism surfaced here and there. A disgruntled right-wing Hungarian dissident, István Csurka, wrote a deeply anti-Semitic attack on Soros and CEU in 1993, describing him and other Western liberals as termites undermining the foundations of the Hungarian nation. At the time it was easy to dismiss Csurka as a radical outlier.

Another sign of the change in the political climate came with the election of Václav Klaus as prime minister of the Czech Republic in 1992. CEU had been welcomed by Václav Havel and Petr Pithart, and now CEU encountered the other side of Czech politics: right-wing, conservative, authoritarian, and inveterately hostile to Soros. Within six months of coming to power, Klaus had rescinded the lease on the trade union building in Prague, and CEU underwent its first forced relocation, to Budapest. Around this time, the sociology department relocated from Warsaw to Budapest as well. Soros’s original dream of a networked university in three capital cities in Central Europe had to bow to the reality that the politics of each country was resolutely national, and the regional identifications, even among intellectuals, were relatively weak. The university still called itself Central European, but by the late 1990s it had become a Hungarian institution, with US accreditation. Soros secured a magnificent former palace, in the heart of the historic downtown, that was to become the home of the university.

While he was increasingly excited by the institution taking shape, Soros himself was immune to the euphoric illusion that the liberal democratic transition was irreversible. He was fiercely critical of the failure of the Americans and the Western Europeans to grasp how epoch-making the collapse of the Soviet Union had been and how fragile the prospects for democracy were. He had been calling for a Marshall Plan for the economic reconstruction of the whole Soviet empire, but his appeals had fallen on deaf ears. In the absence of concerted investment by the “winners” in the Cold War, he had stepped in himself, establishing foundations throughout the region, increasing his annual spending to upward of $300 million, and taking on projects himself, like preventing the emigration of Soviet scientists and the destruction of Soviet scientific culture. Not content with his investment in CEU, he also poured money (as much as $40 million a year) into the Higher Education Support Program, which created new social science departments in universities throughout the region and founded three new universities: the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, the European Humanities University in Minsk, and the European University at St. Petersburg. He set up a Research Support Scheme to fund social science in the public universities in the region. No founder of universities had ever entertained such extraordinary ambition: to make the transformation of higher education the driver of an entire historical transition.

Soros’s ambitions, it could be argued, met the historical moment, but he was disillusioned to discover how few governments and foundations followed his lead. As he watched the West missing its chance to link the former Soviet empire to the West and its democratic ideals, as Yugoslavia descended into a downward spiral of violence, his public commentary on the region became ever darker. In testimony before the US House of Representatives in 1994, he said, “When I embarked on my project, I was planning on a short-term campaign to seize the revolutionary moment and to provide an example that would be followed by the more slowly moving, more cumbersome institutions of our open societies. But I was sadly mistaken. Now I must think in biblical terms—forty years in the wilderness.” He could not have imagined how true these words would turn out to be.

All this lay in the future. In the heady 1990s, CEU grew year on year, attracting students from the former Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Balkans. From an enrollment of 76 in 1991, CEU was taking in 674 students by 1998. But slowly the demography of the university changed. At first, it was an attractive option for students in the region, especially if Soros was paying full scholarships. Many of these students then went on to complete doctorates at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Stanford. Instead of training an elite who would stay in the region and lead it forward, CEU became a means of exiting the region altogether. When Soros and the CEU leadership recognized the danger that CEU might be contributing to the brain drain, the Higher Education Support Program set up a new program to pay salaries for graduates willing to return to their home universities after having finished their doctoral studies at CEU or at Western universities.

At the same time, demographic growth in the Central European region was faltering and the number of young people eligible for graduate education began to decline. A university founded to create a transition elite in the region was slowly losing its core student constituency from the region. In its place, CEU began recruiting world-wide. In 1991, it recruited students exclusively from the twenty-seven countries of the former Soviet bloc. By 2000 it was recruiting from the United States, the UK, and Western Europe, and after 2010 from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It currently recruits students from 120 countries.

The CEU story, therefore, is about unintended consequences, which should not have surprised its founder. Indeed, a deep sense of human fallibility was foundational to his understanding of market behavior, as well as the ironies of history itself. It is no accident that this quotation from Soros is prominently displayed inside the door of the CEU building on Nador utca in Budapest:

Thinking can never quite catch up with reality; reality is always richer than our comprehension. Reality has the power to surprise thinking and thinking has the power to create reality. But we must remember the unintended consequences—the outcome always differs from expectations.

BY THE TIME of CEU’s tenth anniversary in 2001, it was firmly established not as an insurgent start-up or a training school for transition, but as an elite social science and humanities graduate school, distinguished by a unique collaboration between senior figures from the North Atlantic academic elite and dissident intellectuals now transformed into university professors.

The university was increasingly global in its recruitment pattern, and under Yehuda Elkana began to build up its research reputation. In the decade between 2000 and 2010, it launched departments in network and data science and experimental cognitive psychology, with distinguished figures like Dan Sperber (from the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris) making regular professorial visits to the new department. CEU quickly established a reputation for its baby lab and its studies of infant cognition before speech. The university also established a business school and a school of public policy.

By the time Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Croatia, and the Czech Republic joined the European Union in 2004, Soros could have been forgiven for believing that his investment in transition had paid off. All of these countries had been stabilized by the powerful incentives of the European integration process. The expectation was that, once inside the Union, the European Council, the European Parliament, and the European Commission, together with the European Court of Justice, would exert a transnational regulatory role, ensuring that these countries remained on the democratic path. Guided by this expectation, the Open Society Foundations began scaling back its investments in the Balkans and Central Europe. It believed its job was done.

George Soros’s attention shifted to other areas—particularly the foundation’s work in the United States and in South Africa—but personally he became ever more attached to Hungary. With his wife, Tamiko, he began spending more time in Budapest, delivering a series of lectures at CEU while staying in a hotel suite around the corner from the university.

Soros’s involvement in university life was not without controversy. Any university so dependent on a single donor will want to defend its institutional autonomy. When Yehuda Elkana stepped down as rector, Soros asked him what he could do for the university. Elkana told him that he should step down from the board of trustees and increase the university endowment. In response, Soros took up a new role as the honorary chairman of the board and doubled the endowment to $500 million, but he took care to ensure that the management of the endowment remained not in an independent university endowment committee, as is the practice in most US universities, but with the managers at Soros Fund Management. He respected academic freedom and did not intervene in university hiring or governance, but he kept close control of the purse strings. And even in his more limited governance role, he remained involved in board decisions, supporting the creation of a School for Public Policy to further his aim of a university with a more practical policy orientation.

While the university continued to grow, the political climate in Hungary began to darken. After Hungary joined the European Union, thousands of Hungarians had taken out mortgages with Western banks denominated in euros. When the financial crisis hit in 2007 and 2008, they suddenly found themselves under water, and the government struggled to offer any help. Public finances collapsed. In 2010, the socialist government was swept from office and the Fidesz party under Viktor Orbán took power. Orbán had already served as prime minister between 1998 and 2002 and had prepared the country for entry into the European Union. But after he was turned out of office, he was stung by the defeat and vowed in a famous speech that never again would “the Hungarian nation” be in opposition. The faculty at CEU had never heard rhetoric of this kind before, especially the idea that Orbán and his party incarnated the nation, and that the nation could not be in opposition. During his time out of office, Orbán built a civil society movement of the right, based in the Hungarian churches, and developed an ideology with deep appeal in the small towns and rural areas: hostile to Europe, resentful of Western European condescension, assertive of Hungarian pride and language. Once in power, Orbán’s new government rewrote the constitution, slapped down the liberal media, and set about consolidating party control over the Supreme Court and other key institutions. From the beginning, CEU professors joined with the liberal media in analyzing and denouncing these trends. The hope at the time was that the university could ride out the radical change in political climate.

Slowly it became apparent that the Fidesz victory represented a deep-seated change in the direction of the transition itself. Creating a new liberal transition elite had been Soros’s explicit strategy, but the problem, which the university’s political scientists like Béla Greskovits began to analyze, was that the new elite—drawn from the former dissidents—had been too small to lead a successful transition. To succeed, the liberal dissidents had had to make common cause with members of the former communist elite, individuals who inhabited an ambiguous “gray zone”—inside the communist apparatus while maintaining relations with the dissidents. This political alliance, between former communists who now rebranded themselves as socialists and the liberal democratic dissidents, was necessary for a transition to succeed, but it entailed compromises—for example, an agreement not to purge former police informers or members of the security apparatus. These compromises doomed the liberals and socialists alike.

The new transition elite was also tarnished by the radical economic disruption of the transition itself, which created a political opening to the right, throughout Eastern Europe. By the early 2000s, politicians like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, Vladimír Mečiar in Slovakia, and Václav Klaus in the Czech Republic were lining up together to accuse the liberal transition elite of weakening national culture and protecting the former communist elite. Dissidents who had been in prison or under surveillance prior to 1989 now were attacked for being insufficiently anti-communist. Still, the attacks worked, in part because the conservatives were more successful than the liberals in building up support in “conservative civil society”: the church, small-town professionals, and village dwellers who had known stability under the communist regime. These conservative social groups now looked with alarm at the depopulation of villages, the weakening of the health and social security system, the closure of factories, and the sale of public lands and properties to a wave of private and foreign speculators. The liberal transition elite had laid the foundations for a new Eastern Europe: they had written the constitutions, privatized the state companies, created the new commercial law for a capitalist economy, and prepared the post-communist states for entry into the European Union. But in the process, these changes cost them the support of voters, who gravitated toward right-wing political parties better positioned to exploit their anxieties about identity, community, and religious faith.

Viktor Orbán was himself a former beneficiary of George Soros’s support. The sudden attack that Orbán mounted against Soros, beginning in late 2016, was not the pursuit of a personal vendetta or a son’s revenge against a father figure. It was purely political. Targeting Soros as the epitome of everything Fidesz stood against—Europe, multiculturalism, immigration, secular tolerance, the open society—was a brilliant way to mobilize a rural, small-town base disoriented by change. Making an alien US-based speculator public enemy number one also appealed to “the national bourgeoisie,” the urban middle class whose own fortunes depended on allegiance to a single party with control of state assets and state budgets.

Orbán also understood CEU’s vulnerability better than CEU did: a foreign-accredited university, paying high salaries and preaching values of multicultural tolerance and openness, turned out to have solid support in Budapest itself but not in the small towns and villages, the political power base of all Hungarian parties.

In late August and early September 2015, the migration crisis broke upon Europe and shattered the uneasy truce between Viktor Orbán and the European Union. A million Syrian refugees flooded across the Aegean Sea, into Greece, and then northward through the Balkans and across Serbia into Hungary, eager to take advantage of Angela Merkel’s call to give them a home in Germany. Orbán tried at first to hold the line, and then opened the border. Migrants engulfed trains in Budapest railway stations, heading to Austria and Germany.

Orbán, whose poll numbers had been languishing that summer, quickly grasped the political opportunity that had been handed to him. He became Europe’s most prominent and vituperative opponent of Merkel’s generous gamble and an ever more strident critic of Muslim immigration and the supposed threat it posed to European civilization.

Soros was among Orbán’s most determined critics. As a Holocaust survivor, as an immigrant, as an American citizen, he believed that Europe should respond with generosity to the plight of the Syrian refugees fleeing the civil war in their home country. In editorials he urged Europe to give the refugees a home. At the CEU, students and faculty went to help the refugees who were camped out at the Budapest railway stations. Students brought plugs to charge refugee phones, food, water, and maps to guide them to safety in Germany.

After the traumatic days of the migration crisis, CEU sought to establish businesslike relations with the Fidesz regime, and for a time the university’s leaders believed it had succeeded. But that did not mean CEU professors stopped criticizing the government. The university’s constitutional experts analyzed the gerrymandering of the electoral system, the neutering of the Supreme Court, and the new media laws, while other scholars denounced the corruption of what one university affiliate, Bálint Magyar, called Orbán’s “mafia state.” The regime appeared to ignore these criticisms, as the CEU administration sought to secure the government’s consent for a key project, the rebuilding of its Budapest campus and the erection of a new classroom and library building. After tortuous negotiations, demanding all the diplomatic skill of the university’s rector, John Shattuck, CEU secured government approval, and by the autumn of 2016 the new building was ready for opening.

When I succeeded Shattuck as rector that fall, George Soros flew in for my inauguration and for the opening of the new building. At the ceremony, key figures close to the Orbán government were in the audience, including the rector of Corvinus University of Budapest and the chairman of the parliamentary foreign affairs committee. The ceremony emphasized the university’s Hungarian associations and pointed to a renewal of a good working relationship between the Hungarian government and CEU. The university, after all, was a major employer, paid taxes, and was regularly cited in international rankings as the best institution of its kind in the country. To signify all this, there was a speech of welcome in the Hungarian language, and a student read a poem by the great Hungarian poet Attila József.

As we left the platform together after the ceremony, Soros tugged my academic gown and whispered sharply, though in good humor, “You read the wrong poem.” He then recited from memory, in Hungarian, a much sharper and more bitter poem written by Attila in the 1920s, when he had been expelled from university for his radical political views.

The whole incident, the university’s founder reciting a Hungarian poem from memory—and then telling me later how the poet and his father had known each other in the 1930s—showed how deeply Soros’s Hungarian identity ran and how strongly he associated himself with Attila’s resistance to academic oppression. We did not know then, but that was the last time George Soros would set foot in his native land.

During the fall of 2016, the university’s relations with the Orbán regime appeared good. The minister of higher education, László Palkovics, visited the new building and expressed a mixture of amazement and approval at CEU’s new classrooms and library. When I asked him whether our relations with the government were in good shape, he assured me they were. When I pressed him about some recent comments in the government-controlled media that were critical of Soros’s stance on the refugee issue, he dismissed them. “It’s just politics,” he said.

In November, Donald Trump won the US presidential election, and almost immediately CEU’s relationship with the Orbán government began to deteriorate. The Obama administration had put the US-Hungarian relationship “in the deep freeze” to express its disapproval of Orbán’s corruption and violations of the rule of law. Now with the incoming Trump administration signaling to Orbán’s lobbyists in Washington that it would change that policy, Orbán seemed to have decided that the way was clear for a direct attack on George Soros.

The assumption at CEU was that the target of the attack, if it were ever to come, would be the Open Society Foundations hub in Budapest, a substantial administrative center that processed more than $100 million of foundation grants every year. In the event, the attack was directed instead at what many called “the jewel in Soros’s crown” in Budapest, the CEU.

The first sign of the attack came just before Christmas, when Orbán delivered a speech rallying Fidesz members of parliament and supporters to prepare for the 2018 national elections. Orbán declared that his objective in the coming campaign was to drive George Soros and all his works from Hungary. This campaign strategy had been proposed by a US Republican campaign adviser, who urged Orbán to label Soros as the man threatening Hungary with mass migration. This is how a populist “politics of enemies” works. Orbán needed an enemy of stature, and the Hungarian opposition was too weak and too divided to give him a really worthwhile target. It was far more effective to make a man not even resident in the country responsible for all its woes, and to make his “open society” the symbol of everything Orbán was running against.

Campaign posters soon filled every available space on the subway, the trams, and the outdoor billboards: a picture of George Soros in profile with a smile on his face, and the slogan, “Don’t Let George Soros Have the Last Laugh.” When critics pointed out that the figure of the “laughing Jew” had been a trope of the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party newspaper of the 1930s, the regime reacted with indignation: How dare you accuse us of anti-Semitism! Thus a new kind of anti-Semitism, directed at Soros, made its first appearance in Europe. It made shameless use of Nazi-era tropes, while indignantly denying that it was doing so.

The campaign of personal defamation was followed by a direct attack on his institution. In March, CEU heard from friends inside the Hungarian government that the regime was preparing a revision of the higher education law. When that revision was proclaimed, in the official gazette, it was instantly clear that while it was nominally directed at all foreign higher education institutions working in Hungary—there are about thirty of them—the legislation was in fact targeting only one. Hence, the law quickly became known as “lex CEU.” It required every foreign institution working in Hungary to negotiate a bilateral agreement between its country of origin and the Hungarian government, and to maintain a campus on its native soil. CEU is one of many US institutions overseas—the American University in Cairo, for example—that does not maintain a domestic campus in the United States.

With support from Soros and the board of trustees, the CEU administration publicly opposed the legislation as a discriminatory attack on academic freedom and set about mobilizing support in Hungary, the United States, and European capitals. Immediately, students from CEU, joined by students from universities across Budapest, ringed the campus to protect it from an expected police attack. An international digital campaign seeking international support from fellow institutions attracted letters of support from faculty, student associations, and university administrators from around the world. They flooded Viktor Orbán’s inbox for weeks at a time. International condemnation, led by the German president in a speech to the European Parliament, followed soon after.

On a warm Sunday afternoon in late May 2017, a crowd of Budapest citizens, estimated at eighty thousand, gathered on the Buda side of the river, crossed the chain bridge, and marched past CEU to Parliament Square, chanting “Free Universities” in a “Free Society.” It was the largest demonstration in Budapest since the heady days of 1989, an unforgettable show of support for the idea that an attack on academic freedom is ultimately an attack on democracy.

Thanks to this outpouring of public pressure, Orbán agreed in early June to enter into negotiations with the State of New York, where CEU is chartered, to see whether an agreement between Hungary and New York could secure a way for CEU to stay in Budapest. Over the summer of 2017, the chief legal counsel of the governor of New York met with Orbán’s designated representative, and in late August an apparent breakthrough occurred. CEU would establish a campus at Bard College and conduct educational programs there, satisfying the Hungarian requirement for a US campus, and the Hungarian government would allow CEU to stay in Budapest. The university signed the agreement and waited for Orbán to do the same.

The signature never came. Instead Orbán announced that he would give the university another year to comply with the new law. In October, at a meeting in London, Soros turned on me, as rector, and said sharply that I had been “played.” The implication was that I should never have conducted negotiations with Orbán. I vehemently disagreed. I was responsible for the faculty, staff, and students who were fighting to stay in Budapest, and I had to keep faith with them. Soros shared that objective but didn’t believe a deal with Orbán was ever possible. It turns out that he was right.

For the remainder of the year, right through until the election in April 2018, the anti-Soros barrage was unrelenting. Not only were subways, buses, and streets plastered with anti-Soros posters, but there were also incessant television attacks claiming that an open society meant submerging Hungary in a deluge of refugees. The strategy, directed by Orbán’s US campaign strategists, had the desired result. In the election, Fidesz once again secured the two-thirds majority of the seats in the Parliament necessary to make constitutional changes. Within weeks, Soros ordered the closing of the Open Society Foundations offices in Budapest, and by the fall of 2018 CEU was in advanced negotiations with the city of Vienna and the government of Austria to secure a new home there.

Had a US administration been prepared to defend US institutions overseas, the outcome might have been different, but in the summer of 2018, the Trump administration’s new ambassador to Hungary, David Cornstein, a wealthy Republican donor from New York, arrived in Budapest. During his confirmation hearings, under questioning from Democratic and Republican senators (some of whom had visited CEU), Cornstein had promised to keep CEU in Budapest. But instead of fighting to keep a US institution in an ally country, he concentrated instead on securing Orbán a visit to the White House in the spring of 2019.

By the fall of 2019, the university began offering its US-accredited degrees, now illegal in Hungary, in Austria, and by the summer of 2020, it had secured accreditation as an Austrian private university, with the right to offer Austrian degrees. In the fall of 2020, the European Court of Justice ruled that “lex CEU” violated World Trade Organization rules relating to freedom of commerce, European Union law in relation to freedom to establish a business, and European human rights law in relation to freedom of expression. CEU’s legal victory was comprehensive, but it came too late. The university by this time had decamped its teaching to Vienna, while retaining research establishments and administrative functions in Budapest.

CEU had survived the most serious crisis in its history. It had remained in Central Europe and had maintained the unbroken continuity of its teaching. More students than ever were applying, and it continued to hire new faculty. None of this would have been possible if the university’s founder had decided, as he had done with so many bets in the past, to cut his losses. Instead, in the summer of 2019 Soros agreed to a substantial cash injection of 550 million euros, phased in annual payments over the following twelve years to support the university, and he also committed a further 200 million euros to defray the costs of moving to Vienna. Further, Soros agreed to a loan of 185 million euros to pay for CEU’s permanent campus in the Otto-Wagner-Areal in Vienna, with occupancy to begin in 2025.

These astonishing numbers—nearly a billion dollars in total—indicate the full extent of Soros’s determination to stay true to his commitment to the university he founded. On top of that, in February 2020 he committed a further billion dollars to support the creation of an Open Society University Network, to enable universities across the world to develop curricula, exchange students, and facilitate social change in their societies. Other wealthy founders might have chosen to bail out in the face of the unremitting hostility of the Hungarian government, the general darkening of the prospects for open society in Eastern Europe, and the democratic recession worldwide. The speculator that George once was might have done so, but the CEU experience had changed him. He had originally thought of his adventure in Eastern Europe as a temporary venture, a risky speculation that might pay off. Over time, he had discovered just how difficult it was to change the political culture of a whole region. His foundations had been expelled from Russia. His philanthropy had been unable to stop the consolidation of single-party authoritarian rule in Belarus and Hungary. He had sought to mobilize Western European governments to bring down the divide with Eastern Europe and genuinely integrate the two halves of the continent. He had been rebuffed, and instead of his philanthropy drawing support and encouragement from governments or private donors, he ended up having to go it alone.

Nothing had turned out quite as he had hoped, but he was not surprised. Unintended consequences are the stuff of history, he knew, and history is never over. The future of Hungary will have many chapters after the one written by Viktor Orbán. Poland is more than Jarosław Kaczyński, just as Turkey is more than Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. These rulers seek to foreclose the future, to define it in their image, but their hold on power is not eternal. As Soros turned ninety-one, his commitments to CEU indicated that he had come to an important insight that might not have occurred to him in the 1980s, when he began his efforts to change the history of his native region. He had grasped that regimes come and go, single-party rulers come and go, but institutions, universities especially, endure. Some of what Soros had tried to build had been swept away, but there were institutions, CEU among them, that would survive, prosper, and endure as his lasting legacy.

1. All quotations from identified sources, unless otherwise stated, come from interviews with sources conducted by the author in December 2020 and January 2021. See notes on pages 266–267 for a list of those interviewed.