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250 ♦ Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918
chose the Czech University grew continually, equaling the numbers at the
German University by the 1930s.30
Growing nationalism was not the only cause of disturbances. In Vienna
between 1923 and 1925, the question whether Karl Horovitz was a commu-
nist led to a political scandal over his habilitation. After a right-wing article
instigated by university scholars accused the young physicist of being Jewish
and a communist,31 the faculty repeatedly rejected his applications owing
to “his personality.”32 After two years, with the conflict having spilled over
to the press and the political arena without bringing a decisive solution,
the young scholar moved to Purdue University in the United States and
made pioneering discoveries in solid-state physics. The problem was that
at the University of Vienna an informal clique of eighteen anti-Semitic and
antisocialist professors, calling themselves the Bears’ Cave (Bärenhöhle),
controlled admissions to the university to keep unwanted scholars out.
According to Klaus Taschwer, the clique hindered 13 habilitations out of
173, making it clear to Jewish and socialist scholars that their prospects at
the university were nonexistent and thus deterring them from pursuing ac-
ademic careers in Austria.33 Migration, both abroad and internally, was the
result; for example, the sociologist of knowledge Edgar Zilsel, whose habil-
itation was rejected at the same time as Horovitz’s, taught mathematics at a
secondary school in Vienna before migrating to the United States in 1938.34
Thus, even before the surge of right-wing parties in Austria, it was clear that
Jews were not welcome at the University of Vienna.35 This was reminiscent
of the period when Leo Thun-Hohenstein called Jews personae non gratae
in certain disciplines but went beyond it and extended these restrictions to
the universities as a whole.
Not only were the universities unprepared for the new developments
after World War I, but both they and their respective governments also
reacted to these new realities very slowly, which delayed any changes in
how the universities functioned. In fact, except in Chernivtsi, where after
a transitional period the university became subject to Romanian laws in
1925, the main rules for university business remained largely unchanged
until the 1930s. Then, in a surprisingly parallel development, the govern-
ments of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland all strove to reduce university
autonomy. This took place mainly in Poland under the authoritarian Lex
Jędrzejewicz (Jędrzejewicz’s Law, 1933),36 and to a lesser extent in Austria,
which by this time was under an Austrian fascist regime.37 Only in 1975, 102
years after the last Habsburg reform, did the minister of science and research
back to the
book Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space"
Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918
A Social History of a Multilingual Space
- Title
- Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918
- Subtitle
- A Social History of a Multilingual Space
- Author
- Jan Surman
- Publisher
- Purdue University Press
- Location
- West Lafayette
- Date
- 2019
- Language
- English
- License
- PD
- ISBN
- 978-1-55753-861-1
- Size
- 16.5 x 25.0 cm
- Pages
- 474
- Keywords
- History, Austria, Eduction System, Learning
- Categories
- Geschichte Vor 1918
Table of contents
- List of Illustrations vi
- List of Tables vii
- Acknowledgments ix
- Note on Language Use, Terminology, and Geography xi
- Abbreviations xiii
- Introduction A Biography of the Academic Space 1
- Chapter 1 Centralizing Science for the Empire 19
- Chapter 2 The Neoabsolutist Search for a Unified Space 49
- Chapterr 3 Living Out Academic Autonomy 89
- Chapter 4 German-Language Universities between Austrian and German Space 139
- Chapter 5 Habsburg Slavs and Their Spaces 175
- Chapter 6 Imperial Space and Its Identities 217
- Chapter 7 Habsburg Legacies 243
- Conclusion Paradoxes of the Central European Academic Space 267
- Appendix 1 Disciplines of Habilitation at Austrian Universities 281
- Appendix 2 Databases of Scholars at Cisleithanian Universities 285
- Notes 287
- Bibliography 383
- Index 445