Nation-Building and Contested Identities - MEK

The Dislocated Transylvanian Hungarian Student Bodystudents’ share was only around 9.0% in Budapest. According to the firstcriterion, the place of birth, the decrease of the Transylvanian refugeecontingentamounted to one-quarter between 1921 and 1924. Regardingthe second criterion, i.e., the permanent residency of parents, the Transylvanianstudent body of Budapest decreased by 50.0%. 32In 1921, the repatriation of the exiled universities to Szeged and Pécsaltered the distribution of students of Transylvanian origins. Still, thenumber of those who preferred Budapest to the “provincial” universitiesremained quite large throughout the twenties. Thus, in the 1923-1924 academicyear, Hungarian universities comprised 1,483 students originatingfrom territories ceded to Romania. 33 Of these, 1,083 were registered inBudapest. In 1926-1927, out of the 570 students listed as Romanian citizens,130 attended “provincial” universities. 34 The balance changed in1927-1928 (the last academic year for which official statistics found it relevantto provide separate sets of data for students coming from therespective successor states). 35 Out of the 474 students of Romanian citizenship,262 attended Budapest universities. Nevertheless, the sizeabledifference between the capital and the other university centers is largelya result of the fact that the only Technical University of the country was inBudapest. If one considers the “classical” universities separately, the distributionof Transylvanian students is fairly even between the capital andthe other centers, with an evident preference for Szeged. 36The statistics of the period regarding higher education witnessedanother phenomenon. Throughout the twenties, there was a gradualdecrease in the number of students coming to Hungary from the lost territories.Related to the total number of university students, this shrank from40.0% (in 1920-1921) to an overall 7.3% (this is the share of students whoseparents lived in the successor states) in 1929-1930. In 1930, Budapest universitieshad 4.3% of Transylvanians, Szeged had 8.9%, while Pécs andDebrecen had an average of 2.8%. As to what these figures amounted inabsolute numbers, one can look at the number of students who joined Hungarianuniversities on the basis of school certificates acquired in foreigncountries. In 1928-1929, there were 105 such students from Romania, while,in the following year, only 85 (in 1929-1930, the total number of studentsenrolled in the above-mentioned five universities was 11,886). 37It is illustrative for the ethno-political division of the academic marketin the interwar period that, between 1922 and 1929, out of the 200members of the various colleges that were founded in Hungary for Transylvanianstudents, only 30 managed to receive employment in Romania.Furthermore, diplomas issued in Hungary were seldom, if ever, acceptedby Romanian authorities; what is more, students going home for the holidayswere often harassed. Thus, fewer and fewer ethnic Hungarians191