Page - 14 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

14 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 and a specialist on the “Polish” Middle Ages, as well as Eduard Suess, a geol- ogist and politician who before becoming president of the imperial academy in Vienna opposed the existence of the University of L’viv.56 On the other hand, the imperial academy in Vienna organized pan-Habsburg projects and commissions, aiming to include scholars representing all of the Cisleithanian provinces. In contrast, provincial organizations that had previously been transcultural mostly became battlefields of conflicting interests and slowly turned into monolingual organizations; for them, an exchange with scholars with different cultural allegiances was itself a form of internationalism. Overview of the Chapters To do justice to the differing spatial projects in the empire, this book takes the perspective of academic institutions and their governing body, namely, the Ministry of Religion and Education (Ministerium für Cultus und Unterricht). I follow a biographical perspective, looking at the gestation, birth, maturation, and demise of the academic system in the monarchy. The story does not end with the dissolution of the monarchy, though, since the successor states drew not only their academic cadres but also their models for a university system from their shared past. I begin my narrative with a description of the Habsburg scientific land- scape of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, showing how certain seeds of cultural differentiation were planted (but did not bloom) under Metternich’s regime. After the revolution in 1848, the immediate changes in university policy implemented many liberal measures within Habsburg scholarship. These were systematized and put into practice under the minister of education Leo Thun-Hohenstein,57 with whom chapter 2 is concerned. Both in theory and in practice, this period was instrumental in not only producing a common Habsburg academic space but also filling it with a particular ideologically laden approach to knowledge; the scholarly appointments made during this time meant that this approach remained in- fluential throughout the century. This policy also introduced institutions that became instrumental in promoting the disintegration of the common space; in particular, the philosophical faculties changed universities from producers of civil servants to producers of culture, which made that faculty an easy object of nationalist agitation. The linguistic disintegration that began in