University education and national minorities in South Tyrol

Abstract

For a long time, university education for national minorities has been a blind spot in minority research. The situation of university education in South Tyrol seems to be an exception, because in South Tyrol the question of higher education, for many years, has been the subject of intensive political and academic discussion. This discussion may be seen as paradigmatic since it includes both the concept of ethnic segregation and the concept of universality. In this paper, we focus on the legal basis and the praxis of university education in South Tyrol which is a compromise between ethnic segregation and multicultural universality. In recent years, the Free University of Bozen has become a symbol for overcoming segregation and it opened a new perspective to the members of the two major language groups in South Tyrol.