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Times Higher Education (THE), which also publishes the annual World University Rankings, has failed to provide coverage of the legal and misconduct allegations engulfing Dr James Orr, a Cambridge academic and suspended Reform UK policy chief – who is also chair of the Hungarian government-funded Roger Scruton Foundation – since THE signed a sponsorship agreement with Hungary in 2024.
Times Higher Education (THE) is best known for publishing the annual World University Rankings, which evaluate and compare higher education institutions globally.
Since 2004 THE has partnered with both Thomson Reuters and Elsevier using their data alongside reader input to rank the top 200 universities and 11 academic disciplines.
To be in the top 10 of Times Higher Education World University rankings, where the University of Oxford, University of Cambridge and Imperial College London, take positions, 1, 3 and 7 respectively is to be envied by higher education institutions around the world and is studied rigorously by ambitious parents.
That envy is no more evident and made tangible in its 2024 partnership with Hungary’s former Culture and Innovation Ministry, a new ministry that was created by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s administration in 2021.
During Orbán’s tenure his administration took control of large swathes of Hungary’s media landscape, altered judicial structures and placed political allies in key regulatory and institutional positions. Orbán himself declared that his government was building an “illiberal” state in 2014.
The partnership was announced with great fanfare. Phil Baty, Times Higher Education’s chief global affairs officer, said upon closing the deal that: “Hungary’s ambitions for its higher education and research sectors are impressive and inspiring and Times Higher Education is delighted to have been selected to partner with the ministry to provide our trusted data, global benchmarks and insights to support the sector.”
Balázs Hankó, then Hungary’s Minister of Culture and Innovation, said: “Our aim by 2030 is to have at least one university in the world’s top 100 and three among Europe’s top 100. […] Significantly, Hungary is already a prominent higher education hub in Europe, and through our HEIs’ performance in THE rankings we expect to attract even more attention.”
Times Higher Education’s website now also hosts a page called Discover Hungary.
THE introduces the advertorial as follows: “Higher education in Hungary reflects a deep tradition of academic excellence paired with a forward-looking commitment to innovation […] where scholarship, scientific progress and international collaboration can thrive”.
The Discover Hungary landing page links to numerous articles, each with its own link to the official Hungarian Government website. Each article on the page discloses that it is sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and Innovation, Government of Hungary, but not who wrote them.
In 2021, just three years before the long-term partnership was signed there had been global outrage, when it was revealed that Hungary had been attempting to place political ads in some of Europe’s most respected newspapers. Reuters reported that France’s Le Figaro, Spain’s ABC, and Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten were some of the recipients who agreed to publish the ads. Further to that in 2025 it was exposed that Hungary had spent 1.1 billion since 2015 on state advertising subsidies around the world.
Following Prime Minister Viktor’s landslide election defeat in April a House of Commons briefing notes that: “Controversial legislation adopted under Orbán brought Hungary into conflict with the EU, with the European Commission taking legal action against Hungary on several occasions. This included action in relation to judicial reforms, restrictions on civil society organisations and the refusal to implement EU migration policies.”
Writing in Univ…