On Friday evening, the billionaire philanthropist George Soros was in Vienna to open the university he founded — for the second time.
Central European University had been based in Budapest, the capital of Hungary, for almost three decades. But it has now been pushed into exile after its founder became a target of the nationalist government of Viktor Orban during the 2015 migrant crisis.
The university Mr Soros established after the fall of the Berlin Wall to educate eastern Europe’s next generation of leaders is one of his greatest legacies. In 2018, CEU ranked among the top 100 universities in the world in the social sciences and humanities.