National Controversy In The Transylvanian Academe

This book offers an assessment of the Hungarian and the Romanian academically based elites of Transylvania in times of spectacular political change coupled with relative social stagnation. During the first half of the 20th century, the Transylvanian higher educational market was governed not only by conflicting local needs, but also by extraterritorial factors. Ethnic competition in and through academe was complemented by antagonistic extraterritorial centers of political and ethno-cultural gravitation. The alleged integrative role of the Cluj/Kolozsvr University proved to be exerted, not so much along socio-economic lines, but instead along ethno-political ones reflected in radical changes of the guard in the university's clientele. Higher learning was thus less an agent of modernization than an instrument for survival in the continuous strife for national dominance. The fate of the university during these years shows how this struggle for domination could be constructed as a substit