Page - 19 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

19 cHApter 1 Centralizing Science for the Empire There is no freedom of discussion and of thought; for each science there is one compulsory . . . textbook, from which nowhere and never, not even in oral commentaries, one is allowed to drift. A student’s memory is strengthened at the cost of his intelligence; his head is filled with an abundance of unbeneficial, unpractical things, so that there is no room left for thinking, —his character, his moral education are totally neglected. . . . That is why one finds few or no students at the Austrian schools who were called there by the love of science, or an interest in the things one can learn. Almost all attendees see their studies as a nec­ essary evil, as an unavoidable means to arrive some day at an official function, or rather at the remuneration that all of them envision in the distance as the only aim of their golden dreams. —Viktor AndriAn Werburg, ÖSterreicH und deSSen Zukunft1 Austrian Universities were created by the sovereign as autonomous corporations, endowed with constitutional privileges and laws of prop­ erty. With time, they largely lost their autonomous positions and are organized now as state institutions, although their position as juridical persons has not been rescinded by legal means. —MiniStry of religion And educAtion, 18972 The assessment of Cisleithanian universities published anonymously by the liberal politician Viktor Andrian Werburg (see epigraph) introduces the topic of the structure of the scholarly landscape before 1848. During the nine- teenth century, questions of what “science and scholarship” meant, what