On 19 June 2025, the Democratic Union of Scientific Workers (TDDSZ) organised a workers’ forum for the employees of the HUN-REN research network.
In Hungarian / Magyar változat
The Employees’ Forum declares that the new radical reorganisation of the HUN-REN Research Network, announced by the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) and the HUN-REN Headquarters, to be implemented under strong political pressure, and would annex the Research Centre for Humanities, the Centre for Economics and Regional Studies, the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics and the Centre for Social Sciences to ELTE, severerly jeopardises the functioning of the Research Centres and ELTE.
The reorganisation plan is ill-conceived, improvised, does not guarantee the autonomy of the four research centres, and their funding is not guaranteed beyond the 2026 Hungarian centrtal budget. This adds to the organisational and existential insecurity of the Hungarian Research Network’s employees and it sets a dangerous precedent that former academic research network can be treated as free prey and reorganised to suit current political interests at will.
The TDDSZ Employees’ Forum rejects the plan in its entirety and calls on the directors general to oppose the dismemberment of the research network with every means possible, including expressing their opposition publicly, and on the HUN-REN Governing Board members to vote against the proposal at their meeting on 20 June 2025.
The HUN-REN Headquarters has spent hundreds of millions of Hungarian Forints over the past year on refurbishing its new headquarters, on the evaluation of the Research Centres, and has thrown money at so-called strategy workshops, the so-called Transformation Office and working groups, supposedly to improve the research network, increase synergies among the research centres and keep the network together. It has now become clear that the heads of the HUN-REN Headquarters are incapable of carrying out the tasks they set for themselves. The Employees’ Forum calls on Balázs Gulyás and Roland Jakab not to put further obstacles in the way of maintaining the integrity of the research network and, as they have proven to be incapable managing the research network in an acceptable way, to resign from their posts with immediate effect.
We see this restructuring as a political attack on the humanities and social sciences, which could affect other fields of science at any time, and thus threatens to dismantle the entire research network and further erode the autonomy of the entire Hungarian scientific community. Therefore, the Employee’ Forum calls on the government to
● stop its attempts to dismantle the unity of the research network and the destruction of Hungarian science;
● create stable conditions for research work by ensuring adequate funding and restoring freedom of the academia, rather than keeping it in a state of permanent uncertainty.
In this situation, the unanimous opinion of the TDDSZ Employees’ Forum is that the attempts to restructure the research network have failed, and the only viable way forward is to restore the pre-2019 situation, that is, return the entire research network to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
