Michael Ignatieff is living life in reverse. Most people opt for their most demanding roles early on, then a quieter life. But after a career in philosophy, novel-writing and journalism, Ignatieff chose politics in his native Canada, followed at the age of 69 by his most difficult role to date: rector of the Central European University in Budapest. It is a task that has led him into battle to defend academic freedom against the onslaught of the Hungarian government, as its populist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, strives to bring the CEU to heel through a new education law.

Under recent Hungarian legislation aimed at overseas-registered universities, staff will have to acquire work permits, which the CEU says will restrict its ability to hire staff. The government is also demanding that the university open a wing in America and that it no longer teach US-accredited courses.

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Ignatieff and the university have secured the support of the European Union, which has launched legal action against Hungary over its new law. Brussels says it breaches the CEU’s right to exist and serve its students. Last week, as Orbán came out fighting when he addressed the European parliament, defending his law and claiming the real clash between him and the EU was about refugees, Ignatieff was in London, also talking about refugees.

Orbán has refused to take Hungary’s allocated number of refugees under an EU plan to deal with the exodus of people fleeing strife in Africa and the Middle East. Ignatieff, who was giving a lecture at the University of East London, described how the CEU, founded 25 years ago by the financial speculator George Soros , has striven to educate refugees, offering them the chance to transform their fortunes.

Some say that it is this work in particular that has provoked Orbán’s ire, and Ignatieff told his London audience that outreach operations with asylum seekers marooned in camps on the Hungarian border had been a point of conflict with the Orbán administration.

But – perhaps mindful of how the Hungarian government might monitor his every word – the CEU’s rector was at pains to point out: “We do not work with illegal immigrants. Every government has the right to protect its borders and its country’s sovereignty. The issue here is demonisation of people, the ‘othering’ of others.”

Before he took up his post at the university last year, Ignatieff had been teaching at Harvard. In 2011 he had stepped down from the leadership of the Liberal party of Canada.

“If you want to see hunger for learning, you see it in refugees,” he says. “We are proud to provide them with the education we can offer, albeit limited. Our hope is that by educating refugees, others will regard these folks as human beings.”

At the start of the refugee crisis, this recognition of the essential humanity of asylum seekers was apparent in the response of ordinary Europeans. Ignatieff recalls that the police in Munich asked on Twitter for extra food and blankets for refugees; people turned up with supplies within 20 minutes. The same happened at first in Hungary, he said.

“Now politicians are making a wilful attempt to confuse economic migrants with refugees – that is a distortion of the facts,” he says indignantly.

As he notes, refugee crises are not new in Europe. They happened after the first and second world wars, as well as after the Russian revolution, which brought his grandparents to Dover in 1919, where they were welcomed by the British. Ignatieff was born in Canada and had a peripatetic childhood while his father worked for the Canadian diplomatic service.

After an early academic career which brought him to King’s College, Cambridge, he moved into writing and broadcasting in Britain, which brought a Booker prize nomination for his novel Scar Tissue, a stint as a presenter of BBC2’s The Late Show, and a column in the Observer. In those London years he became a public intellectual, Renaissance-man pin-up, thanks to a shock of black hair, an educated Canadian drawl and a laidback persona. In 2003, Maclean’s magazine named him Canada’s sexiest cerebral man.

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Today, the hair is greyer and this is a far more impassioned Ignatieff. “I have done many things in my career but one thing I had not done was run an institution. When I arrived in Budapest, at first the government was very welcoming. But the geopolitical scene has changed and this is a fight I care about tremendously. If it is my job to defend academic freedom, then I will do it.”

It is also a chance for Ignatieff to reinvent himself as a darling of the progressives, who were dismayed by his take on international relations after 9/11. In 2003, he published Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, which argued that the US had a responsibility to create a humanitarian empire through nation-building and even force. That same year, this philosophy led him to support the invasion of Iraq, causing him to be criticised by human rights activists. Later, Ignatieff wrote a mea culpa.

Now he is on the frontline of the consequences of that invasion and the other recent traumas in the Middle East, as refugees make their way through Europe. But while his defence of academic freedom might please them, progressive thinkers may be surprised by his take on the refugee crisis, for his critique includes the theory that human rights law does not work as a solution. He points to the way that human rights of different groups now compete with one another and, faced with refugees, others counter the new arrivals’ rights with their own. The solution, he says, is to not depend on such a legalistic approach but to return to a concept of hospitality, found in religions.

“There is a deep tradition of welcoming the stranger in many religions, but while you have that culture you also have people struggling against fear. And this is genuine fear, it is not racist. You can’t just lecture people about doing their moral duty. Somehow we have to recover a sense of solidarity.”