Dear Friends of CEU,
Despite the decade actually ending in 2021, apparently 2020 is the actual season of taking stock of the past 10 years. I spent the last few weeks avoiding all expositions of this genre that Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and etc. have been trying to serve up. Now, I find myself being asked to write such a piece. What a great idea actually. (Isn’t it funny how the world works?) OK. Where to start? Right! In 2010.
In 2010, I was thanking my lucky stars that CEU, in 2008, upgraded my temporary employment to a permanent tenure track Assistant Professor position. Surely, I would not be in academia if I had 2008-2009 in another temporary gig, using the year to find another job in the middle of the economic crisis. At this time all the academic jobs dried up and academia changed forever for the worse as all the financially drained institutions figured out how to replace tasks done by their old permanent positions with temporary post-docs. (I should note, CEU never went down this route. We do hire temporarily, usually our own recent graduates, but only to replace people on sabbatical or until we can permanently replace people who left.)
At the time, I was working on a research agenda which was highly productive for a few years, but quickly dried up in political science. But my methodological foundations (something we actively train our students to excel at) helped me move on to new topics and it probably could have landed me a job in industry as well. At one point I seriously considered applying with this company who shall remain unnamed, but I can tell you that just about all of you use their services daily. They were looking for a senior survey research analyst and one of my old classmates from our Survey Research and Methodology degree was already there heavily recruiting me. But I stayed with CEU and I never regretted it. So, what did I do at CEU for these 10 years?
People generally believe that professors teach. The countless conversations I had with people who simply do not understand what it is we do. I didn’t think this was so difficult. But if someone really dropped their preconceived notions about our profession, or someone who knows what we do asked me what I did over the decade, I certainly did more learning than teaching. I learned to learn (something we train people for in graduate school, though the importance of which I always find difficult to convey when my students complain about the workload, but usually/hopefully they thank us in the end). I learned to switch research agendas (and in the next decade I am ready to do this again). I did all this grounded in my methodological training but I opened my eyes to the limits of my quantitative foundations and learned to listen more to qualitative scholars. I learned how to run a methods school, the ECPR Summer and Winter School in Methods and Techniques, one of the biggest and definitely the most pluralistic in the world. And I learned a lot of other things like how to push students to their absolute limits, marvel in what they can accomplish, to always be proud of them but to also know when to stop pushing. When to be their friend, when to be their mentor, their guide and when to be their enemy, but all in the name of getting the maximum out of them and getting them to get done what they need to get done. And I learned many other things like how to write and edit a book (and I actually liked it, despite it being something I swore I will never do when I was young and green and fresh out of grad school), apply for grants, manage grants, deliver on what the grants proposed; I learned how to have maximal impact with minimal resources invested.
The next decade brings new challenges. With two small kids, I need to learn how to have a work-life balance, how to live in a country I never wanted to move to, how to mentor new colleagues, be an editor of a journal (Frontiers in Political Science, leading their Methods and Measurement section with CEU colleague Matthijs Bogaards) and after a decade and a half, re-learn how to teach undergraduates. I probably need to learn German finally (something all my German teachers in middle and high school failed to accomplish, now Viktor Orban probably manages to make happen). While I don’t like some of these changes, I have come to terms with them. And I welcome the challenges. Starting 2020, we need to build a new home, a new learning community in a new country. And with these challenges come opportunities we need to learn to exploit. Anyone who spent any time at CEU will know that not only will we do all these things, but we will thrive doing it.
I can’t speak for my peers, the other professors, but I suspect if they thought about it, they would also tell you that they spend most of the time learning. We often forget it because it is such an integral part of us, such a second nature to who we are, to what we do, and it is such a misunderstood part of our profession it is probably even misunderstood by ourselves. But if you are thinking about coming to CEU, about sending someone to CEU, about encouraging anyone to look at CEU, they need to know that this is the community they are joining: a learning community from top to bottom, morning day and night and at every minute of the day. And you need to know that the challenges you see us facing will not deter us, will only present opportunities for us, for you, the alumni and especially for the young scholars joining us now and in the future. It certainly should not deter you either in still being CEU.
Best regards,
Levente Littvay, Professor, Department of Political Science
Central European University (CEU), Budapest, Hungary and Vienna, Austria
Academic Convener, European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Methods School
Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow (2019-2020), European University Institute, Florence, Italy