Page - 249 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 7 ♦  249 the universities quite crowded. Since universities did not consider this a long-lasting change, ways to cope with this growth without a permanent bud- get increase were considered. Not only Austrian universities faced this trend: in 1918–19 the Czech University in Prague experienced a rise in students since many who might have studied in Vienna remained in the country.23 While the new boundaries were expected to make the studentship more homogeneous, the opposite was true: students from the previously com- mon space of the empire readily followed the path of their predecessors. In Graz, for instance, foreigners, predominantly from southern Europe, who were recorded in the statistics as non–German speakers (“fremdsprachig”), constituted up to 48 percent of students in the 1920s.24 In Vienna foreign students comprised just under a third of the student population, with a de- cline during the 1920s; slightly less than half of the foreigners were German citizens.25 Also, Prague proved to be a multicultural hub among students. It was not, however, the German University26 that attracted the most foreigners but the Czech University, which had up to 40 percent foreign students at the medical faculty. These students were predominantly Ukrainians from Little Poland, as Galicia was now officially known, in addition to Yugoslav, Russian, and, especially, Jewish students.27 The issue of foreigners, in both a civic and a cultural sense, also occupied the universities in another way: the issue of internal others, especially Jews. In Hungary a limitation on the number of Jewish students (numerus clau- sus) was introduced in 1920 and set at 6 percent. In Poland and Austria, this issue was discussed intensely in 1923, and a numerus clausus was introduced in these countries in 1937 and 1938, respectively. Clearly, anti-Semitism was soaring, and universities had a more or less formally approved means of discrimination. Some universities in Poland had informal quota systems in the 1920s, and in the 1930s witnessed the so-called ghetto benches (getto ławkowe), segregated seating of students.28 In Austria one can also find matriculation hurdles enacted by some universities: in 1923 in Innsbruck, the academic senate, for instance, recommended that the deans should not enroll non-Austrian Jews, especially the “Ostjuden . . . and Jews from states that have introduced the numerus clausus.”29 New boundaries and the fear of foreignness also meant pressure to assimilate to the cultures of the new states. While Jewish students had frequently studied at German-language universities in the Habsburg Empire, in the new states they increasingly turned to institutions teaching in the state language. In Prague, for instance, after 1918 the number of students of Jewish nationality or Jewish faith who