The University of Austin, the school founded by intellectual dark web champion and professional wokeness foe Bari Weiss, proclaims its “fearless” dedication to open inquiry, maintaining that its scholars and students “pursue their academic interests and deliberate freely, without fear of censorship or retribution.” It’s a rather awkward look, then, for the university to retain a dozen scholars and administrators with ties to Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary, which has consolidated state control over the country’s universities and media outlets in the service of an authoritarian agenda that goes by the euphemistic name “illiberal democracy.” (This week, Orbán’s government showcased the incoherence of this idea with a new anti-LGBTQ+ bill that outlaws Budapest’s gay pride march.)
An investigation by The Nation reveals that not only do at least seven board members of the for-profit university in Austin, Texas, have ties to Orbán-linked programs, but that at least five current and former university faculty and staff members do as well.
The university dean at UATX was hired directly after his time as a fellow at a Hungarian-funded program. The dean of the Center for Arts and Letters was a visiting fellow at Orbán-funded Hungarian private college Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC.) A former communications manager spent two years at MCC in Budapest, nicknamed Orbán’s “pet university,” where, critics allege, producing propaganda in service of Orbán’s far-right government is a goal.
President Donald Trump has ramped up his assault on traditional higher education this month, arresting and detaining pro-Palestinian activists without evidence of criminal wrongdoing, and issuing Columbia University a list of demands that show intent to control curriculum and thought at America’s academic institutions. Trump’s escalating rhetoric targeting the independence of American higher education seems to be echoing what Orbán did in Hungary, Kim Lane Scheppele told The Nation—as do his threats to tie university funding to control over curriculum and thought.
Scheppele is a former professor at Central European University in Budapest who studies the rise and fall of constitutional government at Princeton University, where she is the Laurance S. Rockefeller professor of sociology and international affairs. “Orbán does in fact see himself as modeling a new form of autocracy for the world in which independent institutions like universities have no place,” Scheppele said. “And indeed, his destruction of academic freedom in Hungary while purporting to defend ‘free speech’ is precisely what disguises the horror of what he has done.”
Weiss announced the launch of the University of Austin in 2021, calling it an institution “dedicated to the pursuit of truth.” She also said that the school’s curriculum would be designed in partnership with “dissidents who have stood up to authoritarianism.”
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UATX began holding classes in September 2024, taught by 29 faculty members, and with 39 listed staffers, according to the university’s website. Weiss launched UATX with Big Tech backers like venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Palantir executive Joe Lonsdale, along with major academic figures like Larry Summers as advisers. Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who now serves as crypto and AI czar for the Trump White House, has donated, along with major GOP donors like Harlan Crow and Jeffrey Yass, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The school’s funders have touted UATX’s commitment to ideological diversity, and its dedication to free speech. Ackman called UATX “a startup university where truth is the aspiration, free speech is allowed and encouraged, and politics are left at the door,” in a post on X last year. Notably, Ackman has also called for American universities to distance themselves from foreign donors—another position that stands athwart the enthusiastic shilling that UATX scholars do on behalf of Hungarian policy objectives on the Orbán administration’s dime.
The university is not accredited but received approval from Texas to grant degrees in 2023. The first class of 92 students can earn bachelor’s degrees in liberal studies, choosing a concentration from the school’s academic centers, described as “a combination of interdisciplinary research institutes, think tanks, and startup incubators.”
Patrick Shoaf Gray, a professor of literature, is currently dean at one of those centers, the Center for Arts and Letters. Gray, previously director of liberal arts at Durham University in the UK, was a visiting fellow and guest lecturer at MCC in Budapest from 2021 to 2022, according to his CV and MCC’s website. While at MCC, he discussed topics such as how liberalism “hinder[s] the free expression of opinions of those who hold different views.” He appeared on panels with prominent pro-Orbán figures like Hungarian political scientist Andras Lanczi. After that fellowship, in 2022, Gray became the director at UTAX’s Center for Arts and Letters. He was also listed as a guest speaker at MCC in 2024.
The European think tank MCC Brussels, which is affiliated with MCC in Budapest, was accused of violating European Union lobbying rules by a EU watchdog group last week. The complaint alleges that the Brussels group failed to disclose financial and other ties to Orbán’s government. But MCC Brussels is just one among a growing network of groups pushing the current Hungarian government’s agenda to a global array of right-wing interests. An increasing number of fellowships, think tanks, and online magazines that are funded by the Hungarian government are attempting to influence politics in the United States, according to international watchdog groups.
Benjamin Crocker is a former fellow of an MCC-funded program who has also found a home at the University of Austin. Crocker became a university dean at UATX this year, and previously served as the school’s director of special programs and associate director of admissions as well as associate vice president for students and community. Before UATX, Crocker was involved with several Hungarian-government backed programs. He was a Europa research fellow in music studies at the Common Sense Society from 2022 to 2023, a fellowship funded by MCC, according to the organization’s website.
Common Sense Society is a DC-based think tank run by conservative intellectual Marion Smith, who’s married to Anna Smith Lacey, a former member of the Hungarian foreign ministry who runs the pro-Hungary lobbying group The Hungary Foundation.
Crocker, originally from Australia, gave a presentation at MCC about classical music in November 2023, and was interviewed by The Hungarian Conservative, where he extolled Hungary as a model of conserving national culture. The Hungarian Conservative is funded by Orbán’s government through a nonprofit, according to Hungarian watchdog groups. “You have a country that is clearly taking its culture seriously. And that’s not just music, that’s also the rebuilding of architecture, the idea that we have an identity that is Hungarian, and that we need to look after it,” Crocker told the outlet. While a fellow at the Common Sense Society, Crocker also traveled to Budapest for the group’s inauguration of a music library in September 2023.
A former communications manager for UATX, Audrey Unverferth, spent two years at MCC in Budapest, as a visiting lecturer and then fellow, studying Soviet totalitarianism, and writing pieces for The Hungarian Conservative accusing the European Union of trying to illegally censor Elon Musk. She also wrote for The European Conservative, another outlet funded by the Hungarian state indirectly through Hungarian grant money, according to Hungarian news reports.
Before UATX, Unverferth was an outspoken critic of what she called the “mob’s crusade against free speech, through what she called “thoughtful conservative and libertarian commentary,” while a student at the University of Chicago. She founded a conservative student-led news outlet at her alma mater, and appeared on Fox News and in The Daily Caller to denounce the scourge of campus wokeness.
Michael Shellenberger is the university’s chair of politics, censorship, and free speech. In 2021, a launch for the Hungarian edition of his book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, was held at the Climate Policy Institute (CPI) which is an offshoot of MCC that purports to study climate change but pushes skepticism around green energy policies. MCC helped publish the Hungarian edition of Shellenberger’s book. Balázs Orbán, who since 2021 has served as political director for Viktor Orbán (and who is no relation to the president), attended the book launch event.
In addition to these four staff and faculty members, at least seven UATX board members have connections to Hungarian-sponsored programs and have come out in support of Viktor Orbán’s strongman agenda.
Founding faculty adviser at UATX Peter Boghossian was a visiting fellow at MCC in 2022. He is now a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute, another Orbán-linked think tank that has spent more than $1.64 million over the last three years paying American conservatives like Christopher Rufo to influence public opinion about Orbán and his government.
Niall Ferguson, another UATX founding fellow, gave a speech at a ceremony for the beginning of the 2021 academic year at MCC, with Orbán in the audience. Ferguson also sits on the board of the Common Sense Foundation.
Joshua Katz is on UATX’s board of advisers. He spoke at an MCC event last week called “Can Higher Education Be Fixed? The Battle for Academic Freedom.” Katz’s ties to the group go back at least to 2022, when he spent a week as a guest of the think tank. “Mr. Orbán mounted what I thought was a surprisingly strong defense for the need in Hungary right now for ‘illiberal democracy,’” he wrote in the wake of that junket.
The 2021 and 2022 activities of Boghossian, Katz, and Ferguson at MCC were first reported by The New Republic in 2022. Other board members’ ties to Hungarian government-funded activities haven’t yet been reported. Rob Henderson, who also serves on UATX’s board of advisers, gave a presentation to the Danube Institute in 2023 deploring the American liberal elites’ habit of “bowing to the woke doctrines.”
Jeremy Tate serves on the board of advisers at UATX’s pedagogy institute, and advocates for the revival of classical education. He appeared at MCC last year to deliver an address on the subject.
Ian Rowe, also an adviser to UATX’s pedagogy institute, joined Balázs Orbán on a panel for The Heritage Foundation’s 50th Anniversary Leadership Summit in 2023. The theme of their session was how to “take back cultural institutions from the left.”
Elizabeth Spalding is also on the advisory board for the Center for Education and Public Service, which is the UATX’s pedagogy clearing house. Her main gigs are chairing the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) and serving as the founding director of the Victims of Communism Museum. Orbán himself was a recipient of VOC’s Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom back in 2002. More recently, the Hungarian government gave VOC $10 million for its Victims of Communism museum in DC, which opened in 2022.
Sohrab Ahmari is another board member at UATX who joined a panel discussion at a book event for Balázs Orbán in Washington, DC, this past fall. Orbán spoke about his book The Hungarian Way of Strategy ; the event noted that the book was “recommended by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.” Ahmari has appeared multiple times with Gladen Pappin, the leader of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, a state-run research organization. The two wrote an op-ed together for The New York Times arguing against neoconservative foreign policy in Ukraine and for “cultural nonaggression abroad.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a UATX board member who has also repeatedly praised Orbán’s government. She did a 2021 interview with Hungarian outlet Magyar Nemzet, which German media has called “Hungary’s unofficial government paper.” “I believe that the Hungarian government balances the benefits of EU membership with the security of Hungarian citizens,” Ali said then. “I don’t think there’s anything far-right about this, it’s just listening to common sense. ” Ali has also spoken at MCC, at the 2019 MCC Budapest Summit called “Migration—The Biggest Challenge of Our Time?”
Weiss and Gray didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Weiss, for her part, has been critical of Orbán in the past, and what she called his “Holocaust revisionism” in 2018. Meanwhile, as Hungarian journalists continue to warn about Orbán’s attacks on the free press, Weiss’s website The Free Press last wrote about Hungary’s descent into authoritarianism in 2022. It seems likely that a similar, all-too-eloquent silence on such topics will continue to be the order of the day at Weiss’s free-speech citadel in Austin.
