Zwischen Autonomie und Ausgrenzung? - IG LektorInnen

The legal situation also has been changed in this direction: Until the implementation of the new
organizational law for the universities (UOG ’93) lecturers were regular members of the university and
had an active as well as a passive right to vote. They lost their right to vote since the UOG ’93, except
for one university of arts in Vienna where it got reinstituted in its new autonomous regulation. A general
amendment of this law concerning the right to vote is getting discussed at the moment, but the
interests against it are very strong.
We do not know the exact number of external lecturers without employment at the university, but
approximately there are 5.000 all over Austria, almost as many as assisstant professors. It is very
difficult to count the portion of freelance scientists among the external lecturers, but those among the
500 lecturers who sent back the questionaire in 1996 working on research projects financed by one of
the two main public research fonds are about 13%. In total, the lecturers doing research are about 60%
(the rest are mainly “practicians” or people doing halftime-research). The portion of women among the
external lecturers is about 30%, which is the highest compared to all other professional categories of
teaching personnel at the university. Female external lecturers have a 30% lower income in toto than
their male collegues.
Our current quantitative inquiry will certainly show different aspects and we can be sure that the
numeric data will also be different, especially because of the new legal situation. For some questions
(the portion of external lecturers among the teachingpersonnel and the portion of the quantity they
teach) we will now have official data which did not exist before. This is because the teaching activity of
the university staff was also counted as “Lehrauftraege”, or “charges de cours”, in that it was not
included in their salary until 1997 and was payed like the teaching activity of the external lecturers.
Until 1997 external lecturers did not constitute a proper category in the university-statistics.
Therefore, the main goal of our study is less to build up, found or trace a common professional identity
for external university lecturers who are also freelance scholars or scientists. Rather,we seek to
explore possibilities and realities of existence in the context of changing conditions of job situation and
social security, of university laws and research opportunities, of models of teaching and research, of
research institutions inside and outside of the university, of exclusion from and inclusion in the
management of the university. We try to structure this context of changing conditions for external
lecturers and freelance scientists in systematic correlations and try to sketch a continuity of
dicontiniuties.
3. Topics of relevance for an internationally comparative EU-project
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