Page - 273 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Conclusion ♦  273 participation in public education (Volkskurse).9 Cities profited from scholars who had to teach outside of universities because they had little chance at a straightforward university career, and this has to be remembered when analyzing the scholarly and cultural productivity of different cities around 1900. At the same time, there was an obvious demand for both nonuniversity research and scholarship in the public sphere: what was and still is debated is what the nonuniversity involvement of university scholars should and can involve and how it relates to an academic career. Universities have long been a privileged place of knowledge, even if historical examples often show that innovation is easier to achieve at smaller, less rigidly organized institutions. And the example of the Habsburg academic system helps us ask what the costs of sustaining scholarly excellence were (and are), as well as what pos- sible strategies for coordinating public and private institutions might be. Austrian universities are currently facing, in fact, similar dilemmas related to tensions among career opportunities, nonuniversity engagement, and mobility. In the wake of rapid academic internationalization in the past two decades, these involve especially the scholarly exchange with univer- sities abroad. The so-called Mobilitätszwang, the necessity to be mobile in order to acquire an academic position, has been strengthened through the construction of contracts at universities. This is true for both young schol- ars, for whom moving abroad after attaining a doctoral degree is a career prerogative, and also those striving for higher positions; longer stays abroad are regarded as an invaluable asset. While fin de siècle Jewish scholars were discriminated against since they could not career throughout the empire, the twenty-first-century Mobilitätszwang is forcing yet another group out of academia—women— as recent studies convincingly show.10 The responsibility of childcare still ties women down to a greater extent than men, preventing them from taking either short- or long-term fellowships abroad.11 While universities have de- veloped more sensitivity to this issue in recent years, this has not resulted in interrogating the predominant idea of excellence, still bound to the as- sumption that scholars should always be ready and willing to travel abroad. Discussions about the effects of nominations from abroad are similarly far from over. With internationalism being hailed nowadays as a necessity, ever-higher number of professors have moved to Austria from Germany, leading to tensions and claims that Austria’s young scholars should be given priority.12 The debate over whom to promote is still open, and many avenues are being discussed, such as a gender-sensitive tenure-track model. Looking