Zwischen Autonomie und Ausgrenzung? - IG LektorInnen

methodological reflection and explicification. Questions are asked concerning concrete knowledge
about, perception of and perspectives towards external lecturers and freelance scientists; diagnoses
and perspectives in education policies especially in view of the advancement and the taking advantage
of the resources of this segment of scholars.
We are an interdisciplinary research group of 15 members, all working in small part-time units on the
project; the project is financed by the austrian ministery of science and transport through a period of 18
months.
2. Recent developments of the situation of external university lecturers
The situation of the external lecturers in Austria has been changed by a law in 1996. The
remuneration, which has been cut off 17%, is now approx. 370 Euro per month for a seminar of two
hours weekly, social security included (about 45% of the external lecturers in the social- and cultural
sciences have their social security only through this activity). Most of them (60%) teach only one or two
ours weekly. These data stemm from a first inquiry among lecturers during a strike in 1996 (a sample
of 500 lecturers in Innsbruck and Vienna), 50% are less then 42 years old and 58% earn less then
15.385 Euro (brut) a year. In the natural sciences, jurisprudence, medical and technical sciences the
portion of lectures done by external lecturers was 20%, in the social and cultural sciences up to 55%.
This has changed since, because of the new law which obligates the “internal” staff to teach more than
before.
Lecturers were massively called to teach at the university since the seventies, when the number of
students began to grow very fast (especially in the beginning of the eighties): from 1970 to 1985 the
number of students trippled, the number of staff members grew to plus 63%, until 1996 the number of
students was multiplied by 4,4, the number of staff members by 2,2.There is certainly an analogy with
the “GastarbeiterInnen”, the foreign workers, who were called for to work in Austria (also in Germany)
but never got equally integrated in the labor market and/or the social system there (the term
differenciates this “host workers” from immigrants because they are always supposed to go back when
they are not needed anymore). The high amount of lecturers was even termed “Überfremdung der
Lehre” (too many foreigners in the teaching system) by a professor of psychology in Vienna (Fischer).
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