Page - 43 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Chapter 1 ♦  43 that is, undersecretary of state), followed by several interregna during which the ministry was subordinated to or joined with other departments, and, finally, Leo Thun-Hohenstein, who arrived in office in July 1849, directly after his rather unfortunate time in Bohemia. Before appointing Thun-Hohenstein, the government considered the ministry as a possible concession to the Slavic subjects of the empire. Among possible candidates for the office, František Palacký attracted the most interest. Palacký, a re- nowned historian and an acknowledged Bohemian patriot, was (in)famous for his refusal of an invitation to the Frankfurt Parliament and was a critic of Habsburg alignments with the German Confederation; he was also a signee of the Slavic Congress in Prague and a Lutheran.102 Franz Pillersdorf, the minister of state from May to June 1848, was willing, however, to include Palacký in his government, probably as a symbolic recognition of the po- litical influence of the loyal Slavic spokesman. The German conservatives as well as the Catholic press regarded this as “insane” and a “mockery of sanity and reason”; in their view, Pillersdorf’s government had offered the position to “the most impossible of impossibles, the man . . . who is responsi- ble for the lion’s share of the current Bohemian tumults.”103 It was, for them, a symbol of the “assassination of our great German fatherland,”104 which was threatened by such appointments, which were turning Austria into “a Slav state.”105 Palacký, however, rejected the nomination, stating that he could serve the fatherland better on other fronts. Even though the project of including Palacký in the government failed, Habsburg politicians awarded several educational concessions to the Slavs to promote loyalty in the direct aftermath of the upheavals. These included appointments of Slavic scholars and permission to use Slavic languages in teaching. Among state officials, the idea of university reform went through several stages during the revolution and its aftermath. The initial step was political advancement in the freedom of teaching and learning in late March 1848,106 followed in June by the announcement of plans to reform the education system, formulated by Feuchtersleben and Franz Exner, a Prague professor of philosophy and pedagogy who had been responsible since April 1848 for the preparation of educational reforms in the Ministry of Education. They envisioned universities as part of the cultural but not the political arena, thus breaking with the pre-1848 withdrawal of academia from public life. Feuchtersleben also supported corporate ideals of the university as a unity of professors and academics. In his eyes, the “caste-like enclosure” of pro- fessorships should especially be avoided: “the necessity of a connection with