Autocrats dislike independent, internationally-oriented, autonomous universities free of corruption and hence, they attack them. In order to add the appearance of legitimacy to purely political actions, autocratic regimes use the law to advance their goals. That is why their favorite strategy is to work through the legislature and courts. This seems to be the case with the European University at St. Petersburg and the Central European University in Budapest, both currently being harassed by the ruling political regimes. The European University at St. Petersburg is a private university, founded in 1994 by the Committee for Real Estate Management of St. Petersburg City Government, St. Petersburg Institute for Economics and Mathematics at the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg branch of Sociology Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences, and St. Petersburg Association of Scholars with support from the MacArthur, Ford and Soros Foundations. Organizations funded by George Soros, through the Open Society Foundation, were expelled from Russia in 2015. This is no surprise, since authoritarian regimes fear democratic initiatives and do not share the idea of civil society that is promoted by George Soros. Russia’s Federal Agency for Supervision in Education and Science says that the university’s political science and sociology departments do not have a sufficient number of full-time faculty who do applied research, and that faculty on fixed-term employment contracts are not properly certified. Quite a few other minor violations, including missing a fitness center, are cited as well. While the university administration works on addressing these issues, the state agency continues its offensive. The European University at St. Petersburg has lost its state license and accreditation and may well lose its historic building, the Small Marble Palace. It turns out that the university installed new plastic windows in parts of the old building, and it goes against the city’s historical preservation ordinance. Russian Pr
