The Early Years of Central European University as a Network: A Memoir

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REPRESSION NOTWITHSTANDING, CENTRAL EUROPE IN THE MID-1980S had numerous pockets of political resistance and intellectual creativity. Virtually no samizdat (dissident literature) ever had a second issue in Bulgaria or Romania, but samizdat was a virtual underground industry in Poland. New forms of civil society resistance were constantly being invented by playwright Vaclav Havel and others in Czechoslovakia. Hungary's domestically successful 1956 Revolution was only put down by the entry of Soviet tanks, but relatively autonomous intellectual spaces were soon reconquered. Flying Universities functioned in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Fellowships from the philanthropist George Soros enabled leading intellectual-activists to do research and meet members of their invisible colleges in Oxford, the London School of Economics, the New School, New York University, Columbia, and Sciences Po and to meet with interested journalists. But, no university existed with the right to design its own curriculum and freely hire its own faculty. The freest polity in Communist Europe in the 1970s and 1980s was Yugoslavia. Since 1971 the premier intellectual gathering place was the annual Inter-University Seminar in Dubrovnik. In April 1989 in Dubrovnik, before the Berlin Wall came down, a group of scholars