Targeted by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Central European University was forced to move its campus from Budapest to Vienna. As of this fall, nearly all its degree programs will be taught from Vienna. If that wasn’t enough, the university had to manage this costly and complicated move in the midst of a global pandemic; many of its students weren’t yet able to make it to campus.

The current situation is all the more painful for a university founded with the mission of promoting open societies—and the pandemic has provided nearly as big a challenge to the university’s core mission as Orbán’s efforts to demonize it.

My fellowship has recently set up an editorial partnership with Slate, so my reporting on CEU was published there—my first piece for Slate! You can read a longer version of the story here, on ICWA’s website.