Page - 42 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

42 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 affront the first rule of Christian religion.”95 Majer’s petition was finally pre- sented to the new governor of Galicia, Wacław Zalewski, and incorporated suggestions for new chairs, including for the history of Poland, Polish law, and the languages of eastern Europe. Some of these demands were fulfilled, especially the use of Polish, acknowledged on 11 October 1848 by the gover- nor: professors who did not know Polish could remain at the university, but Polish-speaking assistants would be appointed to support them.96 Several months earlier, Franz Stadion, the governor of Galicia and later minister of the interior, had already allowed the partial use of Polish in L’viv by Privatdozenten, but the main language of instruction was to re- main German, or possibly Ruthenian, which was apparently envisioned to slowly replace German as the language of instruction in Eastern Galicia.97 The partial privileges for Polish in this part of the province were abandoned shortly after a change in prime ministers at the end of 1848, with the ar- gument that the majority of the inhabitants of Eastern Galicia were more averse to Polish than to German.98 The issue of language use at secondary schools became one of the critical questions for the Prague Slavic Congress, where Polish and Ruthenian nationalist organizations each envisaged their respective language as a leader in cultural matters in L’viv and achieved no binding agreement. The issue of cultural equity was also at stake in Prague. The students who prepared the petition, which the faculty accepted and supported, placed freedom of religion and teaching at the forefront of their demands but in- cluded university autonomy in legal questions, inclusion of the technical schools as part of the university (as the fifth faculty), and freedom of as- sembly according to the laws of the University of Munich.99 The petition, forwarded to the government in late March 1848, was answered on 2 April: as in L’viv, Privatdozenten100 were allowed to teach in Czech, German, “or any other language”;101 freedom of teaching and religion was approved; and students were allowed to study at foreign universities. While the equality of languages was widely discussed at the provincial universities, and was seen as part of the liberalization of academia, in Vienna the political reorganization and structural liberalization of the educational system were central. This restructuring also, however, included multilin- gual instruction as a means of stabilizing loyalty. Between the beginning of the revolution in 1848 and June 1849, the minister of education changed several times, depending on political alliances: first, Franz Freiherr von Sommaruga, then Ernst von Feuchtersleben (de jure Unterstaatssekretär,