A leading historian forced to hide from Red Army agents as he fled the Hungarian Revolution in the 1950s has criticised the climate of “illiberal thought and intimidation” at his alma mater Edinburgh University.
Gabor Gabriel Ronay, who graduated in 1960 and went on to write several books on medieval history, has told how the university allowed him to restart his life in Britain after being chased out of Hungary with the “Red Army’s GRU [military intelligence agency] hot on my tail, following our fight for national freedom, free elections and multi-party democracy in the 1956 Revolution”.
However, in a letter to The Times, the historian accuses the university principal Professor Peter Mathieson of allowing an “illiberal culture to take root, lecturers to be silenced and the heritage of the Scottish Enlightenment in the university to be dissipated”. It was reported yesterday that senior academics at Edinburgh University had called on Mathieson to resign, claiming that he had sacrificed free speech to placate a small group of political “zealots”.
It follows the decision to rename the David Hume Tower after activists highlighted discriminatory comments that the father of the Scottish Enlightenment made in 1742. It has also launched an investigation into Dr Neil Thin, a senior lecturer in social anthropology and a vocal opponent of the renaming decision, after students accused him of being racist, sexist and “problematic”.
In his letter, Ronay says he needed to speak out against what he claimed was Mathieson’s acquiescence to a “small unrepresentative student group” who have been allowed to “intimidate staff, expunge historic names and silence free speech”. He added: “A flurry of snowflakes cannot be allowed to turn into a permanent winter.”
The writer has two grandchildren at Edinburgh University and has vowed to bequeath money to the institution.
A university spokeswoman previously said it had a “responsibility to take all complaints seriously and investigate them thoroughly. We will not prejudge the outcome of this investigation.”
