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This study explores how soft authoritarianism repurposes neoliberal reforms to reshape higher education in Hungary. While neoliberal reforms typically emphasize financial efficiency, in Hungary, they are instrumentalized to embed control over knowledge production. Drawing on qualitative interviews, the analysis traces three mechanisms: (1) governance change that shifts decision-making and public assets to private foundations led by regime-aligned actors, reducing transparency, and normalizing audit culture; (2) creating parallel institutions for research and teaching and redirecting funds toward regime-aligned scholarship while gatekeeping sensitive-to-the-regime-ideology research; (3) selective coercion enabled by authoritarian legalism, to signal punitive capacity for non-compliance. These dynamics produce a diversified academic freedom system where model-changed universities offer higher pay but discipline research, whereas academic freedom in public universities is better exercised yet under chronic underfunding. The research contributes to the literature on governance and academic freedom, illustrating how neoliberal precarity functions as a ‘soft authoritarian’ mechanism to control academia.
Zahra Jafarova (Thu,) studied this question.