An organisation with links to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Russian oil companies has funded events and student societies at both Cambridge and Oxford, according to a new report.

A Good Law Project (GLP) investigation has alleged that the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation (RSLF) has received £512,500 in funding from Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), a private Hungarian university, since 2023 – this constitutes 90% of its funding.

The MCC itself is reportedly funded by an endowment of over €1 billion from the Hungarian government, which includes a 10% stake in MOL Group, a Hungarian company that refines oil of primarily Russian origin.

In 2023, RSLF signed an agreement in Budapest with MCC, that would enable its students to participate in “academic, literary, and public life” programmes at Cambridge and Oxford.

Since then, it has reportedly spent over £190,000 across both universities, including funding student societies, such as the Scruton Society at Cambridge. GLP alleges that RSLF spent £54,458 on its Cambridge programmes in 2024, an increase from £29,185 in 2023.

The foundation is named after Roger Scruton, a conservative philosopher and alum of Jesus College, who died in 2020. It was formed in 2021, describing itself as an “international network of institutions and scholars dedicated to furthering the philosophical and cultural achievements of the West championed in Scruton’s work”.

The foundation consists of two companies, with a US and a UK board of directors, as well as advisory boards encompassing both companies. Professor James Orr, of the Faculty of Divinity, has served on RSLF’s UK board since 2021, while Professor Robert Tombs, a professor of French History at St John’s College, serves as an academic advisor. The former Conservative cabinet minister Michael Gove joined the foundation as a director in 2025.

In 2023, the foundation invited the American tech billionaire Peter Thiel to speak at Oxford, where he compared equality, diversity, and inclusion initiatives to the Chinese Communist Party. Varsity previously reported that Orr recently hosted Thiel for a series of private talks, entitled ‘The Antichrist Lectures’, in Cambridge.

RSLF hosted a conference in 2025 called ‘Now and England’, where politicians from both the Conservative Party and Reform UK spoke. Among the speakers was Joanna Williams, head of education and culture at the conservative think tank Policy Exchange – the controversial Cambridge University Society of Women hosted Williams for a talk last week (13/02).

At Cambridge, RSLF funded a conference called ‘The Pursuit of Beauty’ in 2023, which took place at Peterhouse over the summer vacation. RSLF described the theme as confronting “the myriad challenges facing our art institutions today – from the pressures of decolonisation initiatives and diversity and equity mandates to the rise of political art and the impact of vandalism.” The conference included Michael Gove as a panellist.

The RSLF has also funded a residential at Oxford, ‘The Oxford Seminar’, which purports to allow undergraduates to “explore the philosophy of Sir Roger Scruton and the broader Western tradition that shaped his work”. The programme’s website describes lecture topics such as “the roots of culture” and “national loyalty and the nation-state”.

The foundation also runs the annual Oakeshott Lecture Series, previously titled the Scruton Lectures, which are held in Oxford. The lectures have previously featured speakers such as the philosopher Kathleen Stock, who resigned from the University of Sussex in 2021 after being accused of transphobic rhetoric, and the historian David Starkey, who resigned as an honorary fellow of Fitzwilliam College in 2020 after comments he made on a podcast were widely decried as racist.

GLP reports that RSLF’s 2025 symposium was hosted by the Hungarian embassy in London, and featured a representative from the Hungarian energy industry. Alongside this, RSLF is registered in the US, and has previously received funding from the non-profit organisation DonorsTrust, which funds conservative movements such as the Alliance Defending Freedom (a Christian right organisation).

Charlene Pink, GLP campaign manager, said: “It’s shocking to see elite universities lining up to use Russian oil money to indoctrinate students with far-right ideology.

“You might expect that academics would have learned the lessons of history instead of handing foreign propaganda outfits a megaphone on campus. It’s time for Oxford and Cambridge to cut ties with networks like the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation who are pushing an extreme agenda which fuels harmful culture wars in the UK.”

A spokesperson for the University of Oxford said: ”The Scruton Lectures (now the Oakeshott Lectures) are run by the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation and only use Oxford as a venue – they are held in the Sheldonian Theatre, but the theatre operates as a commercial venue hosting hundreds of external recitals, talks and other events throughout the year.

“Similarly, the Oxford Summer School may use the location of Oxford and some of the University facilities as venues, but they are not official university-affiliated activities; university venues such as colleges host a wide range of summer schools and act as conference venues for a wide range of events, which are separate from and independent of the University’s core activities of teaching and research.”