Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian & Hungarian ...

ZOLTÁN PÁLFYIn the early 1920s, about three-quarters of the refugee students wereheading towards the already overcrowded academic agglomeration ofBudapest. Meager as they were, the city’s resources kept attracting morethan one-half of the Hungarian higher education clientèle, refugee or not.This was the case throughout the interwar period. In the first year of exile,the refugee universities of Pozsony and Kolozsvár were also placed here.Such a temporary arrangement presented a precarious condition, as all thebelongings of the dispatched universities were retained by their new owners“at home.” The number of students was also quite low, amounting to 2,000in the second year. 19 According to the census carried out by the Ministry ofEducation in 1921, the total number of refugee students was 4,632, (37.5%of the Budapest student body; see Table 1 below). 20 Most of them came fromTransylvania (43.1% of the total number of refugee students). Those fromCzechoslovakia followed with 33.9%, and then those from Yugoslavia with23.7%. 21 The rate of refugee students was the highest at the University ofKolozsvár (56.5%), but it reached a high percentage (37.2%) at the Universityof Budapest as well (most specifically at the faculty of medical sciences,where 41.7% of the students were refugees). At the Technical University ofBudapest, their number slightly exceeded one-third (38.8%).Thus, according to the above-mentioned census, 22 in the universitiesof Budapest there were altogether 12,338 students in the 1920-1921 academicyear. The distribution of refugees among the different faculties anduniversities is presented in Table 1.Regarding the proportion of refugees within the various branches ofstudy, a relevant comparison can be made only if we add up the similar facultiesof the different universities. It is evident from the table above that thechoice of university related to a more complicated pattern than sheer territorialprovenience. Table 2 refers to the distribution of refugees according tofields of study.Thus, related to the total number of students in the different faculties,there was a significant disproportion between the number of studentsat law and technical faculties, where Transylvanian presence was aboutone-quarter above the average, and those listed at arts and economics,where the number of Transylvanian refugees was approximately one-quarterless than the average within the entire Transylvanian refugee-group.One can see that law and engineering were proportionally twice as largeas the arts and economics. Very few chose economics, an otherwise recentlycreated faculty (the separate University of Economics in Budapest wasopened in 1920). Still, regarding the absolute numbers, there is a strikingdifference between Transylvanian refugee presence in the humanities andthe technical fields. More than twice as many students were enrolled atthe “traditional” university than at the more “modern” Technical Univer-184