Lajos György Szabó, the education vice-rector of Budapest’s Corvinus University, is stepping down from his position and leaving the institution after eight years in leadership roles. He has also promised to reveal new evidence relating to the controversial case that led to the dismissal of lecturer Zoltán Ádám.

Lajos György Szabó has announced that he is resigning as education vice-rector and will leave Corvinus University at the end of the 2025–2026 academic year. According to the university, Szabó held senior positions at the institution for eight years.

He joined Corvinus in 2016 and became vice-rector for education in 2018, later serving as general vice-rector as well. In 2023, he was appointed acting rector for one year before returning to his role as education vice-rector. His time as acting rector coincided with one of the university’s most controversial scandals in recent years.

The Zoltán Ádám case

The controversy began after a student from an influential business family was reportedly given an additional opportunity to take an examination following intervention by his parents, despite not having met the university’s requirements for sitting the exam.

Zoltán Ádám, then a lecturer at Corvinus, initiated an ethics procedure over the case. However, the affair ultimately resulted in Ádám’s dismissal from the university, with the lecturer, among other things, accused of having insulted the chancellor.

Szabó was one of the university’s key leaders at the time, serving as acting rector in 2023. He has remained in a senior position at Corvinus since then, while Belgian economist Bruno van Pottelsberghe subsequently became the university’s rector. Zoltán Ádám later publicly criticised the university’s handling of the affair, which became a major controversy surrounding Corvinus and its governance model.

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‘This is not a retreat’

In his farewell letter, Szabó stressed that his departure had been planned and was not connected to recent political changes or the controversies surrounding the university. “Obviously, there will be some who will link this to the changes of recent months,” he wrote, while insisting that he had already been considering leaving the university.

After eight years in leadership positions, Szabó said he wanted a change of environment and hoped to return to academic research. He plans to write academic papers and books. He also rejected the suggestion that his departure represented a retreat from criticism or controversy, asking colleagues who had allegedly attacked him in inappropriate terms to refrain from personal and offensive remarks.

Szabó further stressed that he had not sought to promote the foundation-based governance model itself, but rather the development of Corvinus, and said that he had never brought party politics into his work.

‘New evidence’ in the exam scandal

Despite leaving the university, Szabó indicated that the Zoltán Ádám case is not over in his view. In his farewell letter, he said that he would be prepared to make public new evidence supporting his position once he was no longer bound by confidentiality obligations.

He did not disclose what the evidence might contain, but suggested that it could shed new light on the events surrounding the examination controversy. Corvinus University has said it will soon announce who will temporarily take over Szabó’s duties as education vice-rector and his other university responsibilities.

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