9630583127

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 extra-territorial factors. Ethnic competition in and through the academe was complemented by antagonizing extra-territorial centres of political and ethno-cultural gravitation. The alleged integrative role of the Cluj/Kolozsvár 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 a continuous strife for national dominance. The fate of the university during these years shows how this struggle for domination could be constructed as a substitute for reform and social advancement, and how repeated failures in these latter could be ascribed to the presence of the rival in the competition