Page - 34 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

34 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 police department.65 Moreover, because of his paranoia toward liberalism, Metternich banned universities from corresponding with foreign schools.66 The development of Galician universities was more complicated. The Cracow Academy (Akademia Krakowska, later renamed the Jagiellonian University) was the provincial university (Landesuniversität) for Galicia in 1805–17, while during the same period the University of L’viv was closed, and only a lyceum operated in that city. After 1817, when Cracow became a free city, L’viv’s lyceum was given the status of a university under the name Francis I University; it was structured along the lines of other Habsburg universities, with German as the language of instruction. A chair of Polish language was created in 1817 but filled only in 1827 by Mikołaj Michalewicz, neither a good scholar nor a gifted teacher.67 The Cracow Academy was at that time a semi-autonomous body controlled by protector states (Habsburg, Prussia, and Russia), with extended rights that included the possibility of accepting students from other regions of the pre-partition Commonwealth. This privilege was revoked in the aftermath of the November Uprising, because the university was regarded as an important place for forging revolutionary nationalist ideas and contacts.68 At this time, the academy was still a small provincial institution, with some two hundred students, compared with the fourteen hundred at L’viv. The curriculum was based on that of Habsburg universities, with a preparatory philosophical faculty. Only the law faculty worked according to a slightly altered curriculum from the University of Berlin. After the Cracow Uprising in 1846, the Habsburg Empire incorporated Cracow, and the Cracow Academy began to be restruc- tured on the Austrian model. While initially there were plans to close it, the government decided to retain it, thanks to the goodwill of the government’s minister plenipotentiary Stephan Ladislaus Endlicher, a Viennese botanist. Its restructuring was completed during the reforms of 1849, which unified education across the monarchy.69 The language of instruction was the most important binding element in the pre-1848 empire: Latin in all subjects in the secular faculties and German in the philosophical faculties. Even lectures on vernacular literatures were held in Latin in L’viv and Prague. The only exception was the practical teaching of foreign languages (readerships) and the first year of education for midwives and surgeons, which took place in the local language. Since civil servants and physicians dealt with the local population, which in many cases knew neither German nor Latin, inclusion of the vernacular in the university system was necessary to enable interprovincial transfer of staff. Some knowledge of the local language was also required to obtain teaching