Charles Kurzman

Skip Navigation
  • 2013
  • 2014
  • 2015
  • 2016
  • 2017
  • 2018
  • 2019
  • A Century of Acceleration
  • Acknowledging State Terrorism
  • Americans’ unfavorable attitudes toward Muslims since 9/11, by party affiliation
  • Arab Spring
    • Winter Without Spring
  • Big Data and Mega Corpora in Middle East Studies
  • CHHS-2019-02-19
  • Confidentiality of Human Research Subjects, 1927
  • Covid Disparities in the United States
  • Crossword Cosmopolitanism
  • Death Tolls of the Iran-Iraq War
  • Forecasting
    • When Forecasts Fail
  • From Brain Drain to Brain Flush
  • International Education
    • Crippling International Education
    • How Global Is K-12 Education in America?
    • Sources and Data
  • Introducing Powerblindness
  • Making the United States Plural Again
  • Middle East Studies at Carolina
  • Nativism, Then and Now
  • Online Catalogs and the Invisible Heritage of Arab Libraries
  • Panopti-Claus
  • President Oligarch
  • Prosecuting Mass Destruction
  • Racial Inequality in the United States
  • Rightwing Postmodernists
  • Syria’s Four Revolutions
  • Syria’s Human Development Crisis
  • Teaching Middle East Crises
  • Ten Unfortunate Place-Names
  • Thank You, Civil Society
  • The Destruction of Syria
  • The Disparaging Implications of Strategic Location
  • The False Premise of Travel Ban 3.0
  • The Man Who Broke the World
  • The Meth Vote
  • When Republicans Needed Muslim Allies
  • Who Polices the Police?
  • Women’s Assessments of Gender Equality
  • #4 (no title)
  • Bio/Contact
  • Democracy Denied
  • Iran
    • Hard-Liners Agree: Good Riddance to Iran Nuclear Deal!
    • The Khomeini Wanna-Be
  • Curriculum Vitae
  • Islamic Parties
  • Islamic Terrorism
    • Chasing the Ghosts of Violent Extremism in the Middle East
    • Data Sources and Suggested Readings
    • Gremlins of Terror
    • Prism’s Paltry Yield
    • The Heresy of the Hijackers
    • The Rights of Roamers
  • Liberal Islam
    • Liberal Islam Web Links
  • Modernist Islam
  • Teaching/Advising
    • Teaching the Middle East in 10 Quiz Questions
    • Social Theory
  • Muslim-American Terrorism
    • Annual Report
    • Press Release, March 9, 2011
  • The Missing Martyrs
    • Q & A on The Missing Martyrs
  • World Peace
    • Will $500 Billion Make America Feel Secure?
Home » From Brain Drain to Brain Flush

From Brain Drain to Brain Flush

Central European University officials announce that the school is being forced out of Hungary, October 25, 2018

Charles Kurzman, “From Brain Drain to Brain Flush,” October 31, 2018.

Hungary lost hundreds of its brightest minds last week. Some were distinguished professors; some were promising students. Some were Hungarians; many were from other elsewhere, attracted by one of the leading universities in the region. Their school, the Central European University, announced that it is leaving Budapest for Vienna, Austria.

This is not a typical case of brain drain. This is a case of “brain flush.”

The university is being forced out by the Hungarian government of Viktor Orban, who has spent years suppressing independent institutions that might challenge his increasingly authoritarian rule. The university, with its insistence on academic freedom and its international collegial networks, was a thorn in his side — or as Orban described it, part of “a real threat” to create “a mixed-population Europe.”

So Orban and his government flushed away an intellectual gem.

Other countries are engaged in brain flush as well. Turkey has fired thousands of university professors, along with hundreds of thousands of civil servants, as part of a purge of supposed coup plotters. No evidence of guilt was presented, only suspicions of oppositional sympathies. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government have intentionally transformed Turkey from a country that attracted international scholarly talent to a country that is hemorrhaging talent.

A decade ago, Iran arrested dozens of social scientists, many of whom had returned from higher education abroad to help build their home country’s academic programs, and convicted them in a mass trial of such crimes as teaching the work of the iconic German sociologist Max Weber. More recently, Iran has locked up environmental scientists.

These brain flushes do not compare with the scale of Stalin’s purges or Mao’s reeducation camps, which stunted entire generations of intellectuals. But the damage is real nonetheless.

Hungary, Turkey, and Iran have invested hugely in their education systems over the past generation. Like many middle-income countries, they recognized that human capital is essential for the high-end social and economic institutions that most wealthy countries enjoy. But human capital is not just some abstract investment. It involves critical thinking, and this skill inevitably leads to political critique. You can’t expect well-trained minds to be satisfied with things as they are.

Brain flush is a desperate attempt to reap the social and economic benefits of advanced education while avoiding this political edge. It is desperate because it signals a lack of self-confidence — an inability to embrace independent research and evidence-based debate as characteristics of healthy political life. Behind the bluster of Orban, Erdogan, Iranian leader Ali Khamenei, and their ilk, I imagine, is an anxiety that their legacy will not survive serious scrutiny. Their governments may produce heroic-sounding textbooks, but surely they know at some level that future generations will blame them for flushing away some of their country’s greatest brains.

Projects:

  • Arab Spring
  • Democracy Denied
  • Forecasting
  • International Education
  • Iran
  • Islamic Parties
  • Islamic Terrorism
  • Liberal Islam
  • Middle East at Carolina
  • Middle East Sociology
  • Modernist Islam
  • The Missing Martyrs
  • World Peace

About Me:

  • Home Page
  • Bio/Contact
  • Curriculum Vitae
  • Teaching/Advising