How a Cold War underground university smuggled in Western ideas | Aeon Essays

Oxford philosopher of science Bill Newton-Smith had been arrested prior to his trip in the middle of a talk in Prague , taken to secret police headquarters for interrogation, then driven in a convoy through the snowy night to the West German frontier and expelled.

The IUC was founded by 30 universities in 1972 , under the leadership of the physicist Ivan Supek , at the time rector of the University of Zagreb .

The marathon sessions, sometimes in Tomin ’s flat, often lasted six hours .

The Jan Hus Foundation was an alliance of the political Right and Left.

It included Roger Scruton , a conservative champion of traditionalist values, the Left-wing anti-communist Wilkes and Newton-Smith , and Derrida , who sometimes referred to his deconstructionism as a radicalisation of the spirit of Marxism .

At its most risky, the Jan Hus academics became smugglers.

Visitors could fly into Vienna and purchase a bus ticket there, avoiding detection, and then travel into Czechoslovakia .

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and George Soros brought Central European University ( CEU ) into being in 1991 .

In 1990 , the rationale for the Jan Hus Foundation and other Cold War philosophy initiatives changed with the Cold War .