Page - 250 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

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