John Shattuck, President and Rector, CEU/Professor of Legal Studies, CEU, Delivers 20th Academic Year Opening Day Ceremony Speech
Welcome to CEU, and to our 20th year as a university!
We’re celebrating our Opening Day in a place that symbolizes the future of CEU. This is the construction site of one of our new buildings, and it’s here in this “hole in the wall” that our next two decades will begin to take shape.
In many ways you are CEU’s new construction engineers. You’re what makes this an exciting laboratory for international education, and your time at CEU will be marked by the development of our new campus.
Let me offer a little advice to our new students. When I arrived here a year ago as the new Rector, CEU seemed like a giant labyrinth. So after feeling intimidated by the buildings, I decided to cancel my appointments, leave my office and go out and get intentionally lost. That worked brilliantly–it was certainly easy to get lost!–and after I’d been up and down all the staircases and corridors, and met lots of people, I began to feel at home.
Now, many of you have probably already done that, and my advice is that you continue to do that and immerse yourself in all that CEU has to offer.
One of the distinctive features of this university is the great tapestry of the world represented by our students. Let me tell you a little about yourselves. This year CEU received 5,359 applications from students in 134 countries–about 30% more than ever before, and from 15 new countries. Out of that worldwide pool of applicants, 597 of you –11% of those who applied--are now starting out as new students. So please join me in congratulating CEU for admitting you, and each of you for deciding to come!
You come from 100 countries on all continents, with no single dominant nationality. Every year we have new students from nations not previously represented at CEU. This year the newest country in our global community is the one that’s furthest away–the country of Maldives in the Pacific. I welcome all our new students, and especially our new colleague from Maldives.
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On this Opening Day of our 20th year, it seems appropriate to reflect on our mission as a university, and look ahead to our next decade.
CEU was conceived at the time of the Great Transition in Central and Eastern Europe. It was conceived by the interaction of a powerful idea and a remarkable promise.
The idea was that a multinational university could be a place to study the principles of open society. The promise was that professors and students could be recruited to build a new and unique institution.
Twenty years ago, these principles may have seemed uncontested. But today they are being challenged. The global economic crisis, an erosion of democracy and human rights, a resurgence of ethnic and religious discrimination and conflict, a struggle over resources and the environment, the rise of a new authoritarianism, and the siren call of nationalism –these are the kinds of challenges we face today.
But even as these challenges have grown, CEU has flourished. We have recruited outstanding students from across the world. We have a widely respected international faculty immersed in the study of society. We are a center of excellence in teaching and research. The generosity of our founder has allowed us to plan for growth at a time when other universities are cutting back. CEU is committed to providing scholarships for our students, and funding for more outstanding faculty.
Above all, we have a mission to teach and research what makes an open society.
CEU has five major assets that prepare us for this mission.
First, we have deep regional roots and an increasingly global perspective. We are a “crossroads university”–connected with the history and culture of Central and Eastern Europe, and open as few other universities are to the history and culture of the world.
Second, we are committed to connecting theory and practice. Our public policy and business schools are at the heart of this connection, but so are many areas of social science, where there is much to be learned from case studies, field work and interaction with practitioners.
Third, we teach and research across academic disciplines. As a young university, CEU is well positioned to be a leader in interdisciplinary studies.
Fourth, we are agile–we take intellectual risks. We are entrepreneurial in developing new academic programs like cognitive science, and network science, and public policy.
Finally, we are a university founded on a set of values--commitment to the pursuit of truth, an honest relationship with history, openness to new ideas, respect for the autonomy of individuals and groups, dedication to the rule of law, and determination to resolve differences through debate, not denial.
How then should CEU respond to the challenges to open society?
Above all, we should strengthen our commitment to critical thinking.
We live in an age of instantaneous communication and information overload. Next week, right here in this tent, CEU will join with Google in hosting an international conference on the state of the internet and freedom of expression. Facts on the internet are often less clear than opinions, analysis less understood than advocacy, truth less apparent than prejudice.
As CEU students you will learn to think for yourselves, to sift, analyze and weigh the information with which you are bombarded every day. You will learn to guard against attractive falsehoods, to resist easy conclusions, and above all to exercise your own informed judgment.
As you learn to navigate the world of information, you will also learn about the great contest going on around you over the principles and meaning of open society. In a rapidly changing world, there are many competing models of how political and economic life should be organized, some of which are sensible, and others dangerous.
An authoritarian model of government challenges the assumption that democracy and human rights are necessary for a society to flourish.
A laissez-faire model of financial markets that prevailed in the US and Europe until recently was a major cause of the global economic crisis.
A different socio-economic model of development emphasizes the sustainability of resources and challenges the assumption that unlimited economic growth is a good thing.
As a global university, CEU can educate future leaders like you about the global contest over open society. This will require an increasingly global curriculum, academic expertise across regions, and teaching and research that emphasize the diverse ethnic, racial, religious, cultural, historical and philosophical dimensions of the world we live in.
Let me give you an example of the kind of open society leader CEU produces. Jagoda Gregulska from Poland graduated from CEU in 2009 with an MA in Nationalism Studies. Last year she helped found and now directs a project in Srebrenica, the town in Bosnia where the largest single act of genocide in Europe since the Second World War was committed in 1995.
The aim of Jagoda’s project is to empower young Serbs and Bosniaks who have grown up in the shadow of genocide to overcome ethnic and religious division. What Jagoda is doing is at the heart of what CEU stands for as a university, and a credit to the education she received in our Nationalism Studies program.
I have a strong personal connection to the Srebrenica project. In August 1995 I was serving as the US Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights when I became the first international official to meet with survivors of the genocide, and later the first official to reach the killing site in Srebrenica. Later this fall, I will head a CEU delegation to Srebrenica, where we will meet with the young people of Jagoda’s project who, under her leadership, are working to change the world around them from a closed society to a more open one.
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CEU is a hybrid university. We are recognized by three different authorities–in the United States, the European Union and Hungary. We are proud of our Hungarian identity. Twenty percent of our students and thirty-five percent of our faculty come from Hungary. And of course Hungarian traditions of academic excellence run deep, with many Nobel laureates having Hungarian roots.
Next year Hungary will take the world stage when it assumes the presidency of the European Union. The person who is shaping Hungary’s approach to this momentous responsibility is none other than our keynote speaker this afternoon, His Excellency Janos Martonyi, the Foreign Minister of Hungary.
Janos Martonyi has had a distinguished career in government, law and academia. He has been a professor at ELTEUniversity and the University of Szeged, and I’m proud to say that he has also been a visiting professor at CEU. Dr. Martonyi’s predecessor as Foreign Minister is also a CEU professor, and today we welcome Professor Peter Balazs back to the ranks of our faculty.
I’ve been privileged to know Foreign Minister Martonyi since his first term in office, when I was the US Ambassador to the Czech Republic. We met in 1998 when we flew together to Independence, Missouri for the ceremony marking the accession of Hungary and the CzechRepublic as new members of NATO. I have great admiration for his leadership in world affairs, and I’m honored to call him a friend.
It is now my distinct privilege and pleasure to welcome to the podium our keynote speaker, His Excellency the Foreign Minister of Hungary, Janos Martonyi.