Page - 241 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 6 ♦  241 at other German-language universities, but experience as a professor at a provincial institution was almost a requirement for nomination as a professor in Vienna or Prague, as shown in chapter 4. However, even in Vienna, the atmosphere was increasingly tense after the late 1890s, and the growing influence of German nationalist scholars and students led to anti-Semitic street protests and, finally, street fights directly before World War I.141 Historians often mention that Jewish scholars had to wait longer for professorships because Catholic faculties were promoting Catholics, bait- ing Jewish Privatdozenten with titles and remunerations but hindering their entrance into faculty positions, which would have bestowed the right to vote on important academic matters. These career inequalities were what the Viennese jurist and politician Josef Redlich meant in a widely discussed speech from 1907.142 The statistics cited by Karl Lueger in 1907 to sub- stantiate his claim that Cisleithanian universities were turning into Jewish strongholds—that seven of the eight most recent appointees were Jewish— concerned paid and unpaid associate professors,143 which Lueger neglected to mention. This glass ceiling was most significant in Vienna and Prague; the universities there, hesitating to appoint scholars from within and seeking the best available scholars, tended to look outside their own walls. At the same time, Jewish scholars were generally unwelcome at other universities, which limited their appointment opportunities to universities where they had the most competition, without having any real chance of proving themselves as professors elsewhere. In other words, they had a double burden of work outside the university to improve their financial stability and thus had fewer chances for research and publications. Through this vertical glass ceiling and the horizontal invisible ghetto wall, a large number of Viennese Jewish Privatdozenten were left adrift, leading them to concentrate on other activ- ities, such as Volkskurse (people’s courses) and semiprivate laboratories, largely contributing to the paradigmatic image of a culturally and scholarly flourishing Vienna in 1900.144