Page - 272 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

272 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 The University of Vienna, the central institution of the empire, offered the most liberal situation not only for Jewish scholars. It was also the place where the government was more lenient toward Polish or Czech nationalist agitation than it was in the respective provinces. At the same time, Vienna was a place in which every conflict could easily be translated into a cultural argument, which led to clashes, especially among the multilingual and mul- tidenominational Privatdozenten, who were competing for fewer and fewer positions and were recruited from groups that after a brief liberal period were becoming more and more disadvantaged. Not only was there cultural uncertainty around 1900,7 but this also translated into social insecurity for highly educated intellectuals, both in the provinces and in the capital. This uncertainty produced tensions that increased the chance of conflicts. Further, this uncertainty also nurtured ideas of an exclusivist ethnicity. Vienna re- mained, however, a melting pot of peoples and ideas from which the whole empire profited. Only after the Great War did Vienna lose this dominance and importance; in the 1920s Prague overtook it as the leading light of cen- tral European academia. Mobility and Careering Career insecurity among Privatdozenten in the Habsburg Empire had both positive and negative effects. Competition soared, and its effects on Habsburg scholars have not yet been scrutinized. Clearly, the scholarly precariat was a problem for the academics themselves and affected both their professional and private lives. At nineteenth-century universities in the German Empire, “the poverty of the Privatdozenten became an almost unquestioned tradi- tion,”8 and this was equally true for the Habsburg Empire. For universities, however, Privatdozenten were a cheap (mostly free) teaching force, helping the universities cope with rising numbers of students, especially in medicine. This made them particularly attractive for the universities and also produced narratives of competition and precarity as an advantage. Most important, politicians and also professors hailed competition and survival of the fittest in an almost neoliberal manner as a means of increasing productivity among young scholars. And this story is not over, as similar narratives still define current academic discussions. Privatdozenten were a vital part of the academic system for other rea- sons as well, connected to their work at private research facilities and their