Page - 36 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

36 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 While scholarly quality was not the main priority at the universities, the government still pursued academic professionalization. From 1811, universi- ties included Pflanzschulen zur Bildung künftiger Professoren (“nurseries for the education of future professors”), which consisted of assistants, adjuncts, prosectors, and so on. In the medical faculty, the Pflanzschule consisted of, more or less, all scientific personnel assigned to professors, both at the university and at the hospital, including assistants and secondary physicians. The other faculties had a limited number of young academics: the theological and philosophical faculties each had two, and the law faculty had one.77 The main aim of the Pflanzschule was to prepare scholars for a professorship, and professors were officially forbidden to treat their younger colleagues as servants (Handlanger), which could impede their academic progress.78 While they did not serve as a meeting place for international scholars, Habsburg Vormärz universities were an interesting mixture of social and cultural backgrounds. At the Viennese medical faculty, for example, imme- diately before the revolution, most professors were the offspring of lower state officials and members of the bourgeoisie. Aristocrats were rare; simi- larly underrepresented were peasants, although one can find sons of millers and village judges.79 However, even more impressive examples of social mobility were possible: Antoni Bryk was officially a serf until 1848; he illegally obtained a university education in Vienna and ignored repeated requests by his lord to return to Galicia as a military physician. After the revolution, already a free man, he was appointed a professor of forensic medicine at Cracow.80 Given their educational and practical orientation, pre-1848 universities and intellectuals played an important role in discussions on the ideology of the state and/or nation, as their position was certainly privileged in compari- son with that of private scholars. Simply through elaborations on linguistics, several university scholars gained respect within national groups, although they were rarely in the first ranks of patriots or nationalists. The brothers Jan Svatopluk Presl and Karl Bořiwog Presl, professors of zoology and mineral- ogy and of natural history and technology in Prague, respectively, who were also active Czech nationalists, can be regarded here as rare exceptions to the rule. To a large extent, however, universities effectively remained tertiary institutions intended to forge patriotism among state officials, producing subjects loyal to the empire and the throne. It must also be noted that many professors indeed participated in the 1848 revolution and that their ideas on the role of the university were not in direct conflict with those of the