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The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an essay titled “How a University Fights an Authoritarian Regime.” It’s accompanied by a cover image of U.S. President Donald Trump, Chris Rufo, and Viktor Orbán.
Written by Michael Ignatieff, former rector and president of Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, the article characterizes CEU’s expulsion from Hungary circa 2018–20 as a direct assault on academic freedom by Hungary’s Prime Minister Orbán, whom he casts as a nationalist bent on suppressing academic freedom.
Ignatieff’s experience with expulsion apparently qualifies him to advise university leaders facing funding cuts to frame the fight, build alliances, and convince the public that defunding universities is tantamount to threatening American ideals such as scientific progress and innovation. (Read Minding the Sciences to see why that’s not true).
But from Ignatieff’s narrative of, effectively, academic martyrdom emerges an obvious distortion—one that reeks of projection.
CEU was less a haven of free inquiry than a vehicle for political engineering, offering degrees in ideologically driven fields like gender studies rather than in the hard sciences. As Stephen Baskerville cogently put it in his essay “Academic Freedom and the Central European University,”
Some of us who once had high hopes for the CEU have long since been disabused. The CEU was never more than an exercise in political engineering, offering degrees only in the politicized social sciences rather than the real sciences … From the start, the university’s mission was ‘teaching, research, and engagement’ (my emphasis)—in other words, political activism … The closing of the CEU, as US Ambassador David Cornstein stated, ‘doesn’t have anything to do with academic freedom.’ No one is being victimized because of his views in scholarship, teaching, or any other area.
Orbán’s goal was not suppression, as Ignatieff would have you believe, but, rather, an assurance that Hungary’s universities recognized and advanced genuine scholarship. Defunding CEU’s politicized programs was a conscientious act of democratic accountability, not an attack on intellectual freedom. Baskerville further explains:
The Hungarian government has decided that it will no longer use taxpayers’ money to fund fashionable but questionable novelties like ‘gender studies’ that in its view and the view of many others are less scholarship or pedagogy than political ideology. Nothing prevents the CEU from pursuing whatever academic or political agendas it chooses, but it possesses no God-given right to force the Hungarian taxpayers to pay its bills.
Ignatieff is engaging in classic projection—attributing to Orbán the very authoritarianism that he and his academic peers embody. In reality, it is not Orbán who threatens intellectual freedom but academia itself, which has systematically eroded open inquiry in favor of ideological conformity. Any serious observer of higher education knows this, and Minding the Campus has extensively documented the trend.
But projection is only one tool in the left’s arsenal for controlling the narrative. Another is the deliberate misrepresentation of conservative thought—a pattern Allen Mendenhall unpacks in this week’s top article.
Mendenhall thoroughly dismantles Samuel G. Freedman’s “The Inconvenient Scholarship of Kevin Roberts,” in which Freedman distorts Kevin Roberts’s transition from academia to conservative leadership as a sudden and radical ideological break. Freedman asserts that Roberts abandoned his scholarly engagement with race and slavery for political gain, but as Mendenhall clearly demonstrates, Roberts’s critique of “wokeism” is a logical continuation of his earlier work—not a betrayal of it. Mendenhall writes:
[Freedman] attempts to illustrate that Roberts’s career parallels the ‘mutation of the Republican Party from conventional conservatism to a hostile, hateful brand of pseudo-populism.’ Strong words, but they fall flat when Freedman, without a hint of irony, follows them with a telling rhetorical question: ‘How can the Kevin Roberts who wrote with incision and sensitivity about the humanity of enslaved Black people be the same Kevin Roberts who, in the Project 2025 introduction, likened the United States’ ultimate rejection of slavery to his hoped-for rejection of ‘wokeism’?’ That Freedman cannot see the consistency in Roberts’s positions here is astounding.
Freedman, in my view, subtly implies that Roberts is a racist, though in reality, it is figures like Freedman who have traded genuine concern for racial justice for empty, performative virtue-signaling. Freedman dismisses Roberts’s intellectual evolution as mere ambition, pretending he himself is above embracing a trendy, shallow ideology for career gain. Again, Mendenhall observes:
[T]he real subject of Freedman’s essay isn’t Roberts at all but the apparent threat to institutional authority … figures like Freedman face an existential threat: the possibility that ordinary citizens might finally discover the intellectual cover for decades of cultural condescension and social engineering. The true source of Freedman’s anxiety may be the dawning realization that the masses are seeing through the façade of elite expertise and questioning whether institutional authority has indeed served their interests or merely disguised ideological manipulation as professional guidance.
At best, we might assume Freedman and Ignatieff are simply projecting and distorting reality without awareness. Mendenhall would give Freedman that benefit of the doubt. But that assumption is generous—and it collapses under the weight of the left’s broader pattern of narrative control. They don’t just get things wrong; they lie.
Just last week, I sounded off on a Reuters report about Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian Columbia student facing deportation after leading pro-Hamas protests. The report implied that Trump, not Khalil, is the true anti-Semite by misrepresenting Trump’s out-of-context “fine people on both sides” remark. Anyone who views the full interview can see that Reuters deliberately misrepresented the facts. In reality, Trump explicitly condemned white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
And this week, Wenyuan Wu exposes another leftist lie. Robert Reich, a prominent left-wing economist, incites outrage against tax rate cuts by distorting their origins and downplaying their benefits. Reich falsely attributes tax rate cuts to conservative policy in the 1980s, branding them as “tax cuts for the rich”—the so-called “trickle-down” theory. In reality, “trickle-down” a pejorative term invented by the left to misrepresent conservative tax policies, and cutting tax rates for wealthier individuals is a policy that dates back to the 1920s when Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon told President Calvin Coolidge that tax cuts would stop rampant capital flight into tax shelters—such as tax-exempt municipal bonds. As Wu writes:
A preeminent public intellectual in the progressive orbit cannot be more wrong about the historical origins and intended mechanisms of federal tax-cut policies. By caricaturing a complex economic policy into a hate-inciting slogan of “tax cuts for the rich,” leftist academics have concocted a false narrative, not to earnestly engage their critics—whom they routinely compare to Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan—but to inflame social tension, polarize the issue and score political points.
Ignatieff’s projection, Freedman’s misrepresentations, and the media’s and leftist economists’ outright lies are part of a deliberate strategy to preserve leftist ideological dominance. By distorting reality, they shield their narratives from scrutiny and aim to make conservative thought appear beyond the Overton window in both academia and our broader culture.
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Image: “Klashorst” by p. klashorst on Wikimedia Commons
